The fields of Flanders

Still on the theme of veterans this week, some pictures from a trip I took a while ago. I called it my “700 Years of Wine and War” tour—driving from Strasburg to Caen primarily visiting battlefields from Crécy to Normandy.

(But also making a pilgrimage to Rheims and Épernay, the fountainhead of Champagne.)

In retrospect, I don’t recommend doing that many battlefields and military cemeteries in that short a time, because there’s not enough wine to wash away the sense of loss, futility and anger that you feel. Seven hundred years, for heaven’s sake; and still at it. (At the time I went, the battles-du-jour were in Bosnia and Rwanda.)

I concentrated on conflicts of the 20^th Century, in particular on the Western Front battlefields of World War I. Which were legion. I won’t go into details of that trip, but here are a few of the many, many military graveyards I visited.

First, the Meuse-Argonne American military cemetery. It holds the largest number (more than 14,000) of our soldiers in Europe, most of them from the campaign of the same name in 1918. The crosses just go on forever.

The area around Ypres was fought over essentially from October 1914 to October 1918; historians talk about the Battles of Ypres—from the First up to the Fifth. After about the first 20 minutes of that time it was nothing but a roiling sea of mud; in all those years the lines couldn't have shifted more than a few hundred yards in either direction.

And Tyne Cot Commonwealth Graves cemetery near Passchendaele stands witness to the British losses.

  

I don't know how Tyne Cot stacks up in terms of size of Commonwealth War Graves, but it's just staggeringly huge, with more than 11,000 graves, surrounded by this enormous wall.

Then you come to find out that the wall is engraved with the names of those I refer to as "the lost but never found"--men whose remains were never found, or who didn't leave enough of their remains to be identified. It's stunning to walk past panel after panel--think the Vietnam Memorial that won't quit; tens of thousands of names. And then you learn that they actually ran out of wall before they ran out of names.

(I mentioned this on Facebook and was somewhat taken aback by this comment from a “FB friend”—you know the sort I mean: “I do wonder how many of those lost but never found were in fact successful deserters.” This is someone who lays claim to being cultured and educated, who takes umbrage at the expression of any views not fully aligned with his own and feels free to scatter his opinions authoritatively far and wide. But he doesn’t seem to read posts very thoroughly before bestowing his comments, so I’ve stopped paying attention to them. In this case, however, I did note in passing how gobsmackingly crass he was being. Well done, you!)

Tyne Cot is huge, but there are other, smaller, cemeteries in the vicinity. Here’s Polygon Wood—just a small graveyard in the midst of a cornfield.

One of the more moving memorials is at Vimy Ridge. Vimy was contested from 1914, when the Germans took it. Successive attempts by French and French colonial regiments just couldn’t dislodge the Germans. Finally, in April 1917, the Canadian Corps took and held the high ground.

When you go to Vimy, there’s the park, and a memorial sculpture and the engraved list of Canadians killed in France with no known grave.

Note that H.W. Parry served as H.W. Madden. The minimum age for enlisting as a volunteer was 17, but boys of 15 or 16 would take the name of an older man; so "served as" usually means someone not yet 17. There are right many of them listed on that memorial.

The French gave Vimy to the people of Canada, and Canadian students staff the memorial, take you on tours. You have to walk on designated paths because of unexploded ordnance. And they use sheep to keep the grass down, because even the weight of a mower could set that stuff off--96 years after the Canadians finally took the ridge from the Germans.

I was appalled to realize that the forward observation trenches from the two sides are about 50 meters apart. I just sat down and cried, right there.

Near the battlefield of Beaumont-Hamel is this stunning memorial to the Newfoundland regiment that fought there.

But there were others on the Western Front. My photos of the huge cemetery at Verdun—a six-month battle that was begun with the expectation by Falkenhayn that he would “bleed the French Army white”—aren’t particularly good. But there are plenty of other graveyards, especially in the Somme corridor.

The area around Albert has many. I was taken by this grave—one named soldier, three “inconnus”. Three unknowns.

Or these two stones—one for a Jewish soldier, one for a Muslim (probably from one of the colonial regiments. Both Britain and France pulled on their empires to feed the meat grinder of the Western Front.)

  

Both “died for France”.

There are German military cemeteries in the area, too—although not as many nor of the size of the Brits and French. Here’s one in the Albert region:

The Germans mark their graves with black metal crosses--except for the stone one, which was for a Jewish soldier. (I'm told that during the German occupation of 1940-44, the Jewish markers were destroyed, but they’ve been replaced since.)

It's a small cemetery, and you think, "So, not many died here." And then you realize that each side—front and back—of the crosspiece has either a name or an "unknown" on it.

See what I mean about not packing too much of this into a couple of weeks? After a while, there’s just not enough wine.