The day after news of the Brexit referendum breaks I'm rambling through the fields of Flanders with a Belgian historian and three English brothers.
We've started our Western Front battlefield tour in Ypres, a small, south-western Flanders town which looms large in the post World War I psyche. Between 1914 and 1918, five battles decimated the Ypres area, scarring countryside, destroying the medieval town and killing 600,000 people.
My tour has travelled south, past gentle hills dotted with cemeteries, to Hill 60. This cratered, pock-marked landscape bears the scars of tunnelling warfare and the 1917 Battle of Messines.
Miners of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company lost their lives here when 19 mines were detonated under German trench-lines on 7 June 1917. They are among the many Commonwealth victims the town will remember on Anzac Day, under the Menin Gate memorial to the missing, where 6191 Australian names are etched into the marble.
My English tour companions are here on a family battlefield pilgrimage and there's much I want to ask them: why does the story of an unknown relative mean so much to them today? What is their contemporary connection to Wipers, as the British in their humour dubbed the French-spelt Ypres and Flemish-spelt Ieper? Yet curiosity gets the better of me and I bring up the 'B' word.
'The politicians just weren't listening to us,' a gruff voice responds to my casual inquiry about Britain's EU exit. 'The immigrants, they're not our creed, you know?'
The theme of Europe's current refugee influx is close as we walk through manicured cemeteries where red roses flourish beside stark white headstones. October 1914 saw one and a half million Belgians flee their country, seeking refuge in the Netherlands, France and Great Britain. Ypres residents were forced to evacuate when the first German gas attack on the Allied frontline in April 1915 drifted toward them.
Those who returned post-war found a town decimated by shelling. From ghost-like ruins, cobbled streets, houses and civic buildings were eventually reconstructed in their former medieval style.
"If commemoration can be harnessed to promote the dangers of nationalism and to help people become more accepting of the plight of those who are not their 'creed', then it should always be relevant."
Ypres' human collateral damage and displacement of those forced to flee is investigated at Ypres' In Flanders Fields Museum. The museum handbook parallels Belgian's WWI refugee exodus with the plight of refugees today fleeing Syria,