Graves and memorials along the western front of World War I abound.
They range from the enormous Villers–Bretonneux Australian National Memorial (those are adults standing at the base of the stairs), to gravestones and markers to unknown soldiers.
There were many unknown soldiers in northeastern France 1916-1918.
Some were unknown because spates of machine gun bullets obliterated their bodies.
Bodies disappeared into the miserable quicksand mud that swallowed men, horses and cannon whole. Some soldiers, of course, were so disfigured by wounds as to be unrecognizable.
But most were loved by someone and those who lost men remembered them well with memorials and handsome gravestones. If it weren’t so very sad, it would be awe-inspiring.
National memorials
The Australian National Memorial towers above the countryside, a huge monument listing names and remembering battles fought.
It flies the flags of both France and Australia. Rows of white marble gravestones line up before it to the north.
A haunting view of the countryside from the east looks over the fields were so many died.
Walking among the graves
We walked among the gravestones in the High Woods Cemetery, pondering the people and their units. The carving was beautiful.
The Dragon signified a Welsh regiment soldier.
A gravestone marked with Poseidon and a trident was from a unit of sailors who were drafted to fight in the Somme. The Maple leaf signified a Canadian soldier.
The gravestone of a Jewish soldier included the star of David, with three pebbles on top.
We walked beside the graves and memorials along the western front in silent memory on a quiet drizzly afternoon.
The green of the countryside looked fresh and smelled clean.
The occasional bird flit past, but mostly it was a serene setting.
While the guide’s explanations were vivid, it was hard to put together his stories with what we saw.
All the vegetation is young
The Delville Wood South African memorial stood in a stately park of trees–none more than 99 years old–that once was the vicious battlefield.
Along with the memorial, which is now a museum, the former battlefield contains one tree, referred to as “the last tree,” the only tree that survived after the battle was done.
It, of course, is the larges tree in the battlefield forest.
We traveled to the Somme River area to see where the ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) troops fought because in the novel I’m writing, one of the heroes is a New Zealand soldier.
I chose a New Zealand soldier because ten years ago when my family traveled in New Zealand, each little village we drove through seemed to include a monument to a World War I soldier.
Often, a metal soldier stood high on a granite pedestal, glancing out over the roof tops toward the sea and thus the land where he died.
New Zealand lost, population-wise, more soldiers than any other Commonwealth land.
I wanted to remember them.
The day we visited the Somme, few others met us in the cemetery.
Some in our party sought a lost grandfather. The dead rest quietly in their graves and memorials along the western front.
It was a privilege to honor them.
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How to honor them, indeed?
perhaps the best way to start is to realize that we’re really putting up the monuments for ourselves. These men (and women) have gone to a place of honor that so exceeds what we can do! More to the point, they’re in a place of understanding.
We want to honor their sacrifice, but that’s not completely correct, is it? Few of these gave their lives willingly – their breath was torn from them, as they were caught in a tide that dashed them against a fatal shore.
War is not glorious, except in retrospect. It is not poetic, except from a distance. It is merely necessary, to stop evils that can’t be allowed to survive.
For me, there are two memorials which I have found the most moving. One is a small cement cross (which replaced a wooden one) in a forest near Bastogne. It says, “An Unknown American Savior”, and is placed at the head of a filled-in fighting position win which the remains presumably rest. The detritus of battle – old cartridge cases and M1 clips – still occasionally surface there.
The other is the Wall.
Good point that memorials are for the living, not the dead. I thought of the tours that were offered grieving families after the war, to see where their loved ones had fallen. In a sense, we were doing the same thing–trying to take in the enormity of what happened in those Somme River valley fields where so many died. We didn’t lose family members, but for those who did, some sense of them in time and place must have been important.
Vera Brittain’s book, Testament of Youth, like the poetry that came out of the war, testifies to war and memorials.
BTW, Oxford University is running a series on poetry from the Great War. Poetry was far more accessible to people 100 years ago: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/
Thanks for your insights, Andrew.
Just thought of this – another fitting memorial is written.
The Germans criticized the British for using ‘mercenary’ troops from their empire. A.E. Housman wrote a poem in rebuttal –
These in the day that Heaven was falling,
the hour when Earth’s foundations fled,
followed their mercenary calling
and took their wages, and are dead.
Their shoulders held the sky suspended,
they stood, and Earth’s foundations stay.
What God abandoned, these defended
and saved the sum of things for pay.
Did you go and see the Canadian National Vimy Memorial? It was built on the site of the Canadian Corps first major victory and commemorates the 60,000 Canadians killed in the war. The memorial is built on the ridge, rising over 70 ft above it, and is made up of a group of sculptures carved from limestone. The memorial grounds, granted in perpetuity by France to Canada, are still lined with trenches and several have been made safe for the public to visit.
We did not see the Canadian memorial. We were limited to the Somme and ANZAC memorials because that’s the type of tour we were on. It all feels like hallowed ground, and on a Monday morning in October, we saw few other people. Eerie.