Battlefields
De-lurk. Hmm. Last summer I went to France and Belgium to visit the Western Front battlefields there - partly because I'm interested in history, and partly because I felt like making a pilgrimage of sorts... Anyway, to travel from Mons to Ypres to Passchendaele to the Somme takes only a few hours by car, but the scale of the slaughter that took place in this small space is staggering. But it didn't make me cry. The memorials (French, German, British, Canadian, and many more) are so dignified and wonderfully-kept that it's hard to feel any real, immediate emotion. And so it went, till I visited the Newfoundland Memorial, at Beaumont Hamel on the Somme. This was the site of some of the worst carnage of the Somme offensive, and takes the form of several acres of parkland, largely preserved as it was at the end of the War - all the trench lines, crates and so on are still there.

The park contains a number of small cemeteries, including Hawthorn Ridge (photo here), where the headstones are lined up touching each other, instead of the regulation spacing. I had a look at the CWGC register, which told me that the original battlefield grave had consisted of two trenches, with the bodies' arms linked as the men were all from the same battalion and were killed on the same day.

THAT made me cry. That little bit of solicitude and humanity shown by men burying their comrades made me weep for the millions of lonely, terrified, painful deaths died on this small patch of land. It made me weep for the thousands of men who disappeared, and for the anonymous bones buried under headstones reading "known unto God". Every one of the names on every memorial and grave register was a life, a person like you or me, with the same ambitions and hopes.

I have been back again this year, and I suspect I shall continue to visit. It's all over and forgotten now, but I feel it's still worth some tears.

Apology for the lack of a flippant cock-size-related apology.
(Lapsed Pacifist, Fri 15 Apr 2005, 15:19, Reply)