I have been home for over a month and have not really
finished the commentary on my trip. I
did not mean for that to happen – it just sort of did. I also needed a little time and distance to
really process the trip, how it affected me at the time, and how, with hindsight,
I have been changed by the whole experience.
So let me catch you up on the last part of the trip and I will also
share with you a couple of my experiences that I didn’t have a chance to share
with you while they happened.
My last entry was on the 22nd of July when I shared
my breakthrough around the difference between feeling the grief of those sacred
places and stealing the grief – making the experience about me and not the
dead. Not cool and not healthy. I also shared what I had learned about the
lessons the cemeteries teach and how not all of those cemeteries are soaked in sadness;
how some of them are peaceful and really lovely.
The 22nd was a very busy day. We had, as usual, a jam-packed day of
cemetery visits but on this day, there were a series of experiences which
brought me to those moments of clarity.
I actually started the day really early so I could get into Ypres
(not the modern spelling but I just can’t use Iepres) and take pics of the city
without all of the other tourists milling around.
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| St. Mathew's Cathedral, Ypres |
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| The Ypres cloth hall |
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| The Menin Gate road |
The morning was beautiful and, as you can
see, I got some really wonderful images.
What I see now, from this distance, is that the day was all
about the massive scale of loss in this part of the Western Front during those
four years of destruction. The columns
and columns of names on the Menin Gate made an impression on me the day before
when we did our town tour with Norm but I didn’t really have the time to soak
it all in.
That morning when I was alone
with those names, the weight of it really hit me. It really felt like the names went on forever
– the Canadian names – from a country that really did not have much of a
population to begin with yet.
[I know my tenses get all funky
but I find myself going back to the moment and experiencing it in a “present
tense” kinda feel. Please exercise
patience with my “tense jumping.” Thank
you.]
I really felt the weight of the emptiness. Perhaps that was the beginning of the lesson
I wrote about that night after returning to my room: the duty to put stories to those letters in
the marble so the lives of those missing men rematerialize – flesh out the
holograph of who they were. Make them
real again and, in so doing, give them all chances at immortality…not for any
great heroic propagandistic bullshit (as I learned since from Louis Barthas,
barrel maker, in the memoir Poilus,
many of those “common soldiers” were there because they had no choice – no heroism
for them…just muddy, bloody death)…but because they had no other choice but to
die when told to do so. To me that is a
pretty good reason to have someone, 100 years on, give your death some meaning somehow;
to give the life meaning, too.
And this was just the first half-hour of that day, in a day
filled with moments just like that one.
When I got to the top of the stairs (the Menin Gate has
stairs to the left and right around the centre section) and stepped into the
garden, one of my tour buddies was there – Elaine. She was of a similar mind and, clearly had
the same idea to get a moment alone with the names on the gate. I asked her if she wanted to be alone but she
said she had her moment. We wandered
around Ypres together – her following me and I have no sense of direction – eventually
ending up back at the hotel for breakfast, albeit a little later than she wanted. I grabbed some more pics of the buildings of
Ypres and got myself psyched for the rest of the day
This day had several stand out moments and seem to have the
theme established by my morning at the Gate.
This day we visited: Langemark
Cemetery, St. Julien (The Brooding Soldier Memorial), Canada’s Road, Tyne Cot
Cemetery, and a couple of really beautiful
cemeteries in the middle of a forest (Woods Cemetery and The Bluff
Cemetery). Of course there were more but
these were the moments that really stood out for me, especially Langemark, Tyne
Cot, and Woods/The Bluff Cemeteries.
Langemark.
Anyone who has visited feels a visceral “catch” at the
name. The thick, black basalt crosses imprint
on you – that weight of emptiness again…like those names in the marble.
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| Langemark Cemetery |
All I could think about was Kathe Kollwitz's sculptures The Grieving Parents, and the same ache
returned from earlier in the day at the Gate.
Here, though, unlike the Gate, there was another layer of
pain. Langemark is a German cemetery for
recovered bodies and for the missing in the Ypres salient. The names of their dead, the dead, young
student soldiers who died “...like children…” (in the words of Eric Maria
Remarque from All Quiet on the Western
Front) are carved in oak in a small room at the front of the cemetery.
Imagine being an “enemy” buried in the land you and your
comrades “lost” to. Such a heavy burden
for a truly proud people. The complexity
of feeling is so palpable there, especially as a German. My father’s people were Prussian, immigrating
to Canada in the 1880s. My mother’s
father was also of German heritage…so much blood of “the Hun” in my viens.
Some subterranean, subtle shame lingers there – coats the
soil with its oily layer, never really dispelled. Hitler’s visit there during the Third Reich
doesn’t really help the situation, either.
Shame after shame after shame.
Now that I think about it, I felt that same feeling at
Neuville-St. Vaast, and Caix German Cemetery, two other German cemeteries
filled with those black iron crosses. How
must it have been for families of those men/boys? Your sons lie in the fields of those who
cursed you and wished all manner of ill will upon you even though your “boys”
were only doing the same duty as the others.
How would those souls ever find peace with such anger directed at them?
To add insult to injury, Langemark was being “cleaned up” by
moderns. This made me really angry. What kind of arrogance to think that we can
improve on what was created to show respect to those who rested there immediately
after the conflict? Those basalt crosses
were being moved and the other pieces of Art placed there were missing (the
Grieving Comrades iron sculpture was missing, for example). This issue is best left for another post
altogether…I have lots of ire for those who think they know better than the originators
of these sacred places.
After Langemark we headed over to the Brooding Soldier
Monument at St. Julien. This is a
powerful monument but it somehow lacks connection. Norm explained that the monument site was
chosen for maximum visibility, not for historical reasons. The actual location of the battles for which
the monument was built is several miles ahead and over, in the middle of a
farmer’s field. The Canadian government
decided to place it on a street corner rather than connect it to the actual
location of importance. Not really that
surprising because…government. The lack
of connection I felt now made sense.
Nice sculpture, no soul. Kinda
defeats the purpose.
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| The Brooding Soldier Monument |
Norm took us to the place where the Brooding Soldier should have
been: the location where the Canadians
held the bulge/the break in the lines at Passchendaele.
Passchendaele. The name,
like so many others in this place, is steeped with so much…anguish, pride, I
dunno…confusion, betrayal. This cocktail
of emotion reminds me now, in hind-sight, of Beaumont-Hamel: the charnel house that was one of the Somme
Battlefields. The main difference is
that those who lived in the mud of Passchendaele, at least came out “victorious”
in more battles than they did on the Somme.
There was, at least a sense of justification in the loss in some ways…that
pride I spoke of. Like at Vimy, the Canadians
held on there when no one else could.
At the end of a street, aptly titled “Canada’s Road,” is a
very small park bracketed by houses on the one side and massive corn and wheat
fields on the other. In the center of
the park is a stone block to mark the place the Canadians held. As a monument it totally lacks any imagination
and heart (another topic for another time).
The Brooding Soldier would have been a perfect marker for this
spot. Standing “…on guard…” for those
enriching the fields all around that site.
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| Canada's Road |
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| The Passchendaele monument |
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| The fields surrounding the park in Passchendaele |
Like Beaumont-Hamel, this little park at the end of Canada’s
Road, made me uneasy. Like there was unfinished
business there, somehow…a frenetic energy waiting for release. Maybe that’s what was so unsettling about those
sites: not the grief but the longing, the waiting, the wish to be free from the
burden of that soil, that sarcophagus of mud.
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| Tyne Cot Cemetery |
Tyne Cot Cemetery was the next stop; another note in the
theme begun in the early morning in Ypres at the Menin Gate.
Tyne Cot is massive.
Easily the largest cemetery we visited on this trip. Facts:
it is the largest Commonwealth Cemetery in the world, holding 11, 871
Commonwealth graves – 966 Canadians (554 are unidentified). In addition to the graves, there are names of
an additional 34,000 British, 1179 New Zealanders, and 1 Newfoundlander with no
known graves carved into the marble slabs at the back of the cemetery…nearly
50,000 souls memorialised here. There
are so many burials that the Cross of Sacrifice sits atop ten layers of marble slabs (the height and size of the CoS
indicates the number of dead found in the cemetery). To give you an idea of the impact of this in
relation to other sites: the Cross of
Sacrifice of smaller cemeteries sits atop one or two marble slabs, depending
upon the number of dead in the cemetery.
This place gave me one of my three “break down” moments of
the trip. The “break down” I wanted
could not take place and needed to be much more subtle because the cemetery was
very busy. I perched myself atop the
marble slabs, under the Cross of Sacrifice, and tried to capture the size of the
cemetery with its nearly literal sea of headstones. I couldn’t.
There were too many to fit into one panorama shot (in my camera, as I am
sure in others, a panorama shot is made from three regular sized pictures). I needed nearly three.
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| The ocean of headstones at Tyne Cot Cemetery |
Sitting up there it hit me, just as hard as it did earlier
that morning, all of those stones were people – someone’s son, father, brother,
husband, fiancée, boyfriend, student, friend…someone’s beloved. And they died far, far away from home.
The volume, the sheer numbers can numb you when you read
them but when you sit among “…the millions of mouthless dead…” as Charles
Sorley called them, you feel it…the weight of emptiness, as I called it earlier…a
white noise of feelings, voices, souls.
Every current of energy there that day was reaching out: the
longing to connect; the desire to remember and be remembered; the desperation
to fill the void of time and death, to touch the dead, to heal the living now
and then.
It was both fascinating and exhausting to be there. So much going on.
After a few more stops, our official day was over and Norm
drove back to the hotel to give people the option to go see more of Ypres and
have the opportunity to get supper before the nightly Last Post ceremony at the
Menin Gate. Anyone else who wanted to see
some more cemeteries could stay in the van and head out with Norm and
Scott. I came on this trip to see
cemeteries, not shop, so I stayed behind with Norm and Scott and one other tour
member and off we went.
On this impromptu trip is where I got my best
education. We visited several hidden
gems: Woods Cemetery, The Bluff, and Hedgerow Cemeteries – several of the most
peaceful cemeteries I had visited since Bedford House Cemetery on our first day
in Belgium. The last two were hidden in
a forest off of a side road off of a side road.
To reach The Bluff and Hedgerow, you had to walk through a field into a
forest and follow a labyrinth of dirt foot paths. The cemeteries appeared out of the middle of
the forest like fairy rings: green,
lush, and surrounded by the beautiful flowers: blue hydrangeas, lavender, corn
flowers.
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| Hedgerow Cemetery |
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| One of the packs at Hedgerow Cemetery |
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| Contents of one of the packs at Hedgerow Cemetery |
Hedgerow even had three or four
kit packs on marble slabs outside of the cemetery. The packs had been preserved in a resin of
some kind and the contents of the kits had been preserved in a block of
yellowing epoxy - the DNA in the amber holding the secrets of yesterday. The packs gave the cemetery weight, a
presence, making the place personal – those straps touched someone who maybe
rests here. Seeing it now, I feel like those
packs comforted me somehow…the weight was no longer empty…there was body there –
the fleshed out hologram.
I think, too, that the feeling of substance I experienced at
Hedgerow came out of the lesson I learned from Norm at Woods Cemetery. My post on the 22nd was dominated
by that lesson: the “you can’t go there”
lesson. The lesson of not making the
sadness about me. The lesson of not putting
myself in a place of grief that I could not possibly understand. The lesson of not borrowing the sorrow of
others. It was almost like Norm helped
me find my place in this whole process – the process of processing the history
of this place…an appropriate connection to the emotions of the history without
making it about me. I’ve already written
about this so I won’t go into it any further than that.
I will, however say that it was a perfect way to end that
day. Everything seemed to come full
circle: from the heaviness of emptiness
and separation to the healing power of connection; finding a way to honour those
names, whether carved in marble or oak, with peace rather than sorrow; and from
the white noise of the restless dead to the places where they have found peace.
The day was complete.
Perfect. The best way to prepare
for those final days in this epicentre of sacred places.
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