The ‘100 Silences’ Pilgrimage - 1918-2018

In 2018, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armistice that ended World War One, I made a pilgrimage along the Old Way, from Southampton to Dover.

I carried with me three bags of soil, from Arras, Ypres and the Somme. My plan was to stop at 100 War Memorials, to record a minute’s silence, and offer soil from these three battles.

In WW1, almost none of the dead bodies were returned to England and home. They were all buried in France and Belgium, close to where they fell. Yet after the War, memorials sprang up in every town and village for the lads who never returned. 100 years later, I wanted to bring home a little of their actual bodies, these lads who left home singing and never returned, and whose loss has never really been properly grieved.

The dust of the battlefields carries the actual matter of their blood and bodies, all mingled between nationalities. I like that the German lads and British lads, as well as all the other soldiers involved, share this rest, for to my mind, beyond the orders they were forced to follow, they were never truly enemies.

So my journey began at Southampton, where most of the soldiers in WW1 departed. Southampton was ‘Port No 1’ in this war. And I ended my walking in Dover, where the one symbolic dead British soldier was brought back to - The Unknown Warrior..

I followed the Unknown Warrior’s journey by train to London, via Rochester, to Victoria station where his body lay overnight, and on to his grave in Westminster Abbey.

This was the hardest walk I have ever made, with the heaviest burden. By the end, my throat closed up, and I fell ill.

But I concluded in the great service of Remembrance at Westminster Abbey, sat a few metres from the Royal Family (I don’t know how this happened).

Actually, my ultimate finish was in Brixton the next day, where I was invited to the opening of a new memorial, for African and Caribbean WW1 soldiers. Children spread the soil of their great grandfathers on the flowerbeds.

You can see some of the 100 Silences videos I made during this pilgrimage below:

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