Pilgrimage of poems: Shovel them under

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.