Every now and again I get annoyed when someone tells me we are lucky…lucky to be retired….no, we worked for 45 years and I figure we earned our retirement. Lucky to be on this trip….well perhaps, but we also planned and saved for years to get here….lucky to have (well, have had) good jobs….well maybe but we went to University, worked our way up, paid our dues.
There’s a bit of a theme here. I read a quote once that said “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” I can’t remember who said it, wish I could claim it, but I can’t.
But it’s true.
To a degree.
I have, however, come to the conclusion that luck must be involved in some parts of our lives. We were lucky to be born when and where we were, and into the families we came into.
We count ourselves lucky to be Canadians and we are proud Canadians. Even with the recent targeting of soldiers in first Quebec, then on Parliament Hill. And reading responses to those events from afar makes us even prouder Canadians.
We are part of a Canadian generation that did not have to go to war. We did not have to send a partner, a child, a sibling into a battle zone, although our son-in-law was part of a UN peace keeping mission nearly 20 years ago. So we don’t know war the way other generations do, the way people in other countries do.
Then suddenly, we are given an experience that hits us in the face with reality.
This has happened to us several times over our lives. But none more sharply than the two weeks we spent in World War I and II sites. Our visits became almost a pilgrimage and we found ourselves in war cemeteries with tears streaming down our faces looking at row after row of headstones, yet knowing no one buried there.
We were overwhelmed by what we saw, we know we didn’t see everything there was to see and writing about it or hesitating to write about it has haunted me for a couple of weeks.
Canada has seven WWI memorials, three in Belgium, four in France. Two Canadian memorials in Belgium stuck chords with us, both poignant in their stark simplicity.
The first, Canadian memorial marks the battles for Hill 62 in WWI. Records say “The first Canadian deliberately planned attack in any force had resulted in an unqualified success.” This success denied Germans a commanding view of Ypres and earned Canadian forces a reputation of fierceness. The memorial is at the height of land and its design demonstrates to anyone who climbs its steps how hard fought every conquered inch of Hill 62 was.
The memorial is made up of three terraced gardens leading to a granite block monument on a flagstone terrace. A small copse of trees nearby is called Sanctuary Woods because of the respite its cover provided.
Today the appropriate adjective for the surrounding countryside is beaucolic. Cows graze nearby, crops are in the fields. In fact our companions at lunch at a country road side inn near Hill 62 was a herd of dairy cows, with one very dominant boss cow who moved the herd around to her satisfaction.
The second memorial was Canada’s Brooding Soldier near the village of St. Julien. During the war, this bit of land was called Vancouver Corner. Here, Canadian troops held the line in the face of the release of 168 tons of chlorine gas — the first poison gas attack on the Western front. All around them other forces broke ranks, but the Canadians stayed and held the line along with some regrouped French forces digging in anywhere from 1000 to 3000 yards apart. They held on for 48 hours, preventing a German breakthrough.
The memorial is beautiful. It is an 11 metre tall block of granite with a soldier’s bowed head and shoulders carved, and a rifle, reversed. It sits in the midst of a garden with tall cedars cut to look like artillery shells and low cedars trimmed to look like shells exploding. Soil has been brought to the garden from all parts of Canada to represent all Canadians.
We visited several war cemeteries in the area and I spoke to an Australian in that country’s who was walking around as dazed by all the graves as I was. He said “and what have we learned?”. Outside the wall surrounding the Australian gravesite, trenches were still very visible, nature and 100 years couldn’t erase the signs of the battles that raged around the spot that became a cemetery.
The most compelling part of our Belgian pilgrimage was our visit to the Flanders museum in Ypres. It was an overwhelming experience. The building itself was an architectural stunner. Inside, we were given a poppy-shaped bracelet that activated several inter-active displays. The first one asked name, age, gender, nationality, and from there, all the interactive displays were tailored to the information provided. So Ken and I had slightly different experiences.
The museum was a maze of displays, all in one big room, each one leading you forward to the next. Some were as simple as displays of papers — enlistment papers, ration cards etc, others as complex as the personalized interactions.
The films were the most telling. One was a man, standing alone, telling the story of his family’s flight from Bruges. All he had left was his walking stick. But the family survived. Another was a medical station, nurses and doctors talking about saving people just to have them return to battle. Another was four soldiers, different ranks, different armies, telling the very famous Christmas story where songs and stories are exchanged across the battlefield and weapons laid down.
The last display, the saddest, was a series of banners listing the major conflicts since the “War to End All Wars” concluded. Heart breaking.
We did find Essex Farm cemetery (there are several “farm cemeteries” in Belgium) which is where John McRae wrote In Flanders Fields and cared for the wounded in desperate conditions. Given how medical practices have moved forward, I can’t imagine how anyone could be saved in a buried concrete box of a field hospital. Interestingly, the field hospital was still surrounded by sandbags which had calcified (or something) to a rock hard formation while still looking like the original sandbags.
The German cemetery was equally compelling and very different from the cemeteries of the Allied forces. German gravestones were flat markers, with a series of three (in WWI cemeteries) or five (in WWII cemeteries) crosses scattered through the graves. As many as 20 soldiers were buried in some graves. The WWI cemetery was known as the students’ cemetery: of the 24,916 soldiers buried here, 3,000 were student volunteers.
And so many unknown soldiers.
In Normandy most of the war cemeteries are just behind the beaches taken on D-Day.
I’m fascinated by numbers, so I had to look things up because I couldn’t imagine how much beach was taken in this assault. The numbers are staggering: 80 kilometres of beach (and the tide was out on D-Day and it is a long flat beach so the tide was WAY out and soldiers had a long way to go once they got off the landing craft before they reached any cover at all); approximately 160,000 men in the landing parties; approximately 7,000 ships and nearly 200,000 sailors operating them not counting the minesweepers operating the night before; and more than 2200 bombers from UK and US air forces.
We visited the beaches. On the surface, nothing of D-Day magnitude could possibly have happened on these beaches. The sun was shining, a gentle wind provided fuel for the kites, the wind surfers and the wind-driven carts with sails, whatever they are called.
Then you visit a place like Pointe du Hoc. A part of the American assignment, it is a 90 foot cliff that the Germans were sure no one could take. But the Americans did. The memorial there was more compelling than their big memorial at Omaha Beach. It was a small building with personal stories both of those who died taking the Pointe and those who survived. And then a walk to the cliff through an area heavily shelled during the battles.
The cliff itself is much as it was 70 years ago. And once again nature in all its power was unable to erase the scars of war. The area around the cliff is still pitted with craters left from the shelling.
We were there the day the storm remains of hurricane Gonzalo hit the coastline of Europe. The winds were fierce. It rained and then it didn’t and then it did again. The wind was so strong, we were almost unable to stand and certainly didn’t go near the cliff edge. (And the waves were such that the fishing fleet didn’t go out.) But in spite of wind, rain, snow, erosion, and ocean storms, the craters remain, as do the concrete bunkers and pill boxes which were part of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall.
This year is the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, and the 70th anniversary of D-Day. We weren’t in any of these sites on the actual anniversaries but it is plain to see that the people who live here still remember. Hand painted signs in store and home windows remember D-Day and thank “our liberators”.
Every grave in every cemetery is tended and cared for. Many have flowers and notes from family. One was a note to an unmet great-great grandfather. Another a note of gratitude to an unknown soldier. Someone painted fist-sized rocks white then painted poppies on them and placed them on graves.
And government spent some time too….Archival photos were blown up to bill board size and placed where the photo had been taken. These photos speak to the resilience of people who rebuilt churches, schools, homes, communities, towns, cities, their nations…..their lives.
Numbers in history books are one thing. Standing in a war cemetery and seeing unending rows of graves, looking at lives lost and families destroyed is heartbreaking.
We have stories from every memorial and every war cemetery, but this is already too long. In spite of that I have to add two statements from memorials, both from the German Cemetery at La Combe:
With its melancholy rigour, it is a graveyard for soldiers, not all of whom had chosen either the cause or the fight.
and
War graves are an admonition for peace.
