As the Stars are Known to the Night

The canal outside the Menin Gate Memorial. It is after sunset. The sky is indigo blue-black and the earth's feature darker. Lights reflect off the canal in a row towards a vanishing point.
Waiting for the stars above Flanders. The Kasteelgracht near to the Menin Gate Memorial.
P. Ferguson image, September 2006.

Remembrance

I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.
Augustine Mandino II (Author and WWII USAAF B-24 Bombardier)

This one night, seemingly so long ago, I lie awake looking from the window of our Brandhoek stay. The view is the stillness of the indigo blue-black night, the quiet beckoning of the stars. There are shapes to see and mist around the forms. It is the end of the day. Nearby, soldiers rest at Brandhoek’s cemeteries. That evening vision has remained with me, that night between Ypres and Poperinghe…so often I wish, perchance, to have this night…to show it here…it is not to be.

A light blue-green rosary is draped over the top of a Commonwealth War Graves Commission marker. W. Allen's name can be see with details above the insignia of the Royal Field Artillery emblazoned on a christian cross.
The Rosary.
Shoeing Smith W. Allen. “B” Battery, 177th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery.
Killed 27 July 1917, Age 31.
Brandhoek New Military Cemetery.
P. Ferguson image, September 2009.

Brandhoek is a small hamlet once used as a Casualty Clearing Station and Field Ambulance during the war that consumed this region from 1914 – 1918. Here we find Brandhoek Military Cemetery (601 burials), Brandhoek New Military Cemetery (514 burials) and Brandhoek New Military Cemetery No. 3 (849 burials).

And here all the light we cannot see…as the stars are known to the night. Stories of lives lived…if we can only find the keys, like the rosary hanging from one marker…there is story here. At light…at darkness, beneath the indigo blue-black night where stars shine above the mist and forms that is Flanders remembered.

Previously published Pipes of War website, 11 November 2019