Oh, my—here we are, already at the end of National Poetry
Month.
I’m going to leave you with a poem by Carl Sandburg, the American
poet who’s probably best known for his characterization of Chicago as
hog-butcher to the world. But I’m giving you his take on war, which I came
across in one of my anthologies of poetry from the First World War.
“The Grass”
Pile
the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel
them under and let me work—
I
am the grass; I cover all.
And
pile them high at Gettysburg
And
pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel
them under and let me work.
Two
years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What
place is this?
Where
are we now?
I
am the grass.
Let
me work.
Sandberg mentions two battlefields from the Napoleonic
wars, one from the War Between the States, and then two from the Western Front
of World War I. As it happens, I’ve been to both of the latter. To tell you the
truth, I don’t know how anyone can visit Verdun without sitting on the ground
and howling.
Now that I think of it—same goes for Ypres, where five
separate battles were fought, mostly in seas of mud and decomposing human and
animal body parts, between 1914 and 1918.
But when I first read this poem, the battlefield that
came to mind was Vimy Ridge, a deceptively peaceful stretch of land close to
Arras in France. The German army held that high ground from October 1914. They
were attacked successively by the French in 1915, and then the British in 1916.
The attacks were unsuccessful, but extremely costly.
Toward the end of 1916, the Brits were relieved by the
Canadian Corps, which mounted an attack the following April. After three days
of hard, hard fighting, they drove the Germans from the Ridge permanently.
For Canadians, Vimy Ridge has tremendous significance; to
some extent it marked the beginning of a sense of national unity, because the men
in the Corps came from all over the nation.
Following the war, the French government gave the high
ground of the Ridge to the people of Canada as a permanent memorial to the
sacrifices made there. It’s actually Canadian territory. Canadian students conduct
battlefield tours—they spend six months there to pass on the history to
visitors.
It’s very quiet there—grassy, rolling curves of hills and
valleys. There’s a big 1930s art deco-style statue at the top of the ridge, into
the base of which are carved the names of 11,285 Canadian soldiers killed in the
war whose bodies were never located or identified.
I took a photo of some of the names because of the notation
“served as”. The minimum age for volunteering for the Canadian forces was 17,
so many younger boys enlisted under the identities of older men. When you see “served
as” it typically means that the dead soldier was 15 or 16.
As I said, the site is grassy—so beautiful, you cannot
believe it. And it seems so soft—until you realize that the indentations are
craters from artillery shells. And that the forward observation trenches of the
two opposing sides are about 50 meters apart. And you recall that this ground
was fought over for three years.
One other thing about Vimy Ridge: the park attendants
make it very clear that you can only walk in distinctly marked areas of the
site. That’s because there are still unexploded artillery shells scattered
about. They use sheep to keep that lovely grass cropped, because mechanized
mowers could set off the ordnance.
The grass has so much work to do.
2 comments:
Oh, Christie. It's a measure of how awful that war was that we still view with awe what men endured there. (And that goes for Gettysburg too.) You have become my laureate on the subject.
I remember when I first started reading properly (some might say very late in life ) but being moved by Wilfred Owen, the WW1 poet who died on Amiantus day, and his skill in the style he invented "para rhyme" and capturing the unimaginable horror of his subject, where as poets like sosoon, his tried to capture the false glory of war,Owen told it as it was, as in the printer Otto Dix told it how it was from his point of view.
" lest we forget" all that means is lest we forget that PTSD was once called DeCosta Syndrome during the Crimea war and is the true baggage any young man or woman is left with.
Post a Comment