“Into the Deep” was one of the very few excep�ons, where I took exis�ng lyrics, the Wilfred Owen poem Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori, and built the music around them. The mo�va�on here was two-fold. I felt that something needed to be set straight about the band name because some people consider it fascist. Mussolini, not being very fluent in La�n, had indeed used Horace’s words for his own goals, completely misunderstanding what “Pro Patria” was all about. More importantly, I wanted to talk about war and the horror that only we humans are capable of. I was born and raised in Flanders, not in its infamous fields but close enough to have been touched by the heritage of World War One from a very tender age. The memory of the so-called Great War resides in the shadows of World War Two because the la�er was of course more recent, much be�er documented, on a much more global scale and there was of course the monstrous holocaust which must never be forgo�en. Regre�ably, this has made many people forget about the First World War, which was in all likelihood even worse. The small strip of land that goes fromWestern Flanders throughout Northern France was transformed into the biggest slaughterhouse in history where soldiers were sent off on useless bayonet charges against machine guns every day and when things got really bad, such as at the Somme or in Passendaele, they died in eighty thousand in one single a�ack. That’s a city like Bath being annihilated completely… in one or two hours, just in a failed a�empt to conquer a plot of land the width of a football field! The worst thing about it, however, was that the generals, who resided in luxurious castles and never saw the front lines nearby, didn’t learn or didn’t care. To them it was all about the greater honour and glory of the na�on and they simply dispatched the soldiers on yet another suicide a�ack the next morning. To give you an idea of the sheer madness, it is es�mated that in that small strip of land and during those four years of war about one and a half BILLION ar�llery shells were fired. One and a half billion! If you want to see all of that piled up, that’s twenty �mes the great pyramid of Giza! About twenty per cent of those didn’t even explode and got buried in the bo�omless mud, resurfacing many decades later. Even today, more than a century later, two hundred and fi�y tonnes of World War One bombs are s�ll being found each year in that small corner of �ny Flanders alone and people s�ll die when they accidentally run over one of them. I just had to write a song about it to confront humanity with what we’ve become. We are capable of greatness such as the work of Bach, Da Vinci or Maxwell, but those seem only insignificantly small dots of light compared to all the evil we’ve caused and are s�ll causing.
8 Publizr Home