Slouching Towards Bethlehem Farm – An Irishman’s Diary about Adolf Hitler and the Ireland Peace Park

The Ireland Peace Park in Belgium is a fascinating place in its own right, but not the least interesting thing there is the view out, across the countryside.

It was drawn to my attention last weekend by an excellent tour guide (and occasional Irishman's Diarist), Dermot Curran, who pointed off into the middle distance and, in particular, to a place called "Bethlehem Farm".

The curious name aside, this could be any other farm in Belgium now. But it has one indelible claim to history, because for several months around the turn of 1914/15, it was the billet of Adolf Hitler.

So of course, gazing over at it, I thought of Yeats's The Second Coming, with its ominous last line about the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

That was written in January 1919, after the war and the Russian revolution, which both contributed to the meaning (whatever it is).

But even the ill-fated Treaty of Versailles had yet to be concluded then. So Yeats can hardly have foreseen the rise of Naziism, although that’s one of the many interpretations you could retrospectively impose on his most quoted poem.

Was the 25-year-old Corporal Hitler a rough beast? Well, he was still painting at the time, which might have been some grounds for hope.

True, he had been rejected (twice) by the Vienna fine arts academy, and the architecture career to which he was deemed more suited had been barred by poor school results.

But he was still enjoying art enough to bring his brushes to the war, where he continued to favour buildings, rather than people, as a subject. Among other things, he painted the church at Messines, the village that hosts the Ireland Park.

Clearly, with hindsight, the world would now arrange to have had him invalided home that Christmas. Then dealers would have bought all his paintings, and after that he would have been given a long-term commission –perhaps improving the Sistine Chapel ceiling by replacing Michelangelo’s cherubs with houses.

Or maybe, more realistically, posterity would just make the post-war settlement less of a “Carthaginian Peace” than it turned out. That probably wouldn’t have saved Hitler’s art career. But it might have made his eventual choice of vocation less likely.

Oh well, back in the world that actually happened, the Ireland Peace Park is ageing well. It was opened in 1998, as a stone version of the Belfast Agreement. And with all its creative fudging, that deal does now look like lasting longer than the Treaty of Versailles, at least.

Thanks to an apolitical centre-piece – a round tower – the park’s compromises are mostly linguistic. The names of the provinces, for example, include “Connaught”, which I suppose is a nod to British regimental spelling.

Then there’s a stone block on which the 32 counties are listed in a continuous word grid, without spacing, so that some names are spread over two lines. This has the effect, accidentally or otherwise, of separating “London” from “Derry”. So if you’re a diehard objector to the prefix, you could always choose to believe that the counties listed are those competing in the All-Ireland Football Championship (although you’ll also have to convince yourself that, in an egregious typo, they left Kilkenny in at the expense of New York).

Speaking of typos, if the Orange Order is reading this, I suggest that before July's Somme Centenary, somebody might make a small but important adjustment to a plaque near the Ulster Tower in Thiepval.

At the moment, the plaque is dedicated by the Order “to it’s fallen brethren”. And I know the redundant apostrophe is a minor offence in this context; in fact, everything is minor compared with the horrors that the various war memorials commemorate.

Still, as Con Houlihan used to say, a man who would misuse an apostrophe is capable of anything. I'm sure, given their respect for the Queen's English, the Order will want to correct the record.

As it stands, the inscription contrasts with a grammatically impeccable Celtic Cross beside the cathedral in Ypres. That one commemorates the "Men of Munster". But as if to outflank the 36th Ulster Division, the inscription adds that the monument was erected by the people of the province "and Cork its capital city".

We’ll ignore the political claim there (Cork’s provincial overlordship was not formally recognised at Versailles). As for the grammar, I can’t help suspecting that the authors went out of their way to include a possessive “its”, just to show they knew the rule.