From the Archives: Road Trip Through History-Driving the Ypres Salient
Normally I'd hesitate to describe something as a road trip that begins with a transatlantic flight. The driving tour of the Ypres Salient* is an exception.
The Belgian town of Ieper (Ypres in French, "Wipers" in British Tommy) was the center of a series of bloody battles in World War I. The kind of battles where 500,000 men die to gain eight kilometers of ground and a lush green landscape is reduced to black mud. By the end of the war, Ieper and the surrounding towns were no more than rubble. (Winston Churchill suggested that Ieper should be left in ruins as a war memorial. A local minister responded, "Belgium does not need to keep its ruins to remember its misfortunes." I wonder if Winnie remembered the exchange after German bombers destroyed large portions of London in WWII?)
Today thousands of visitors, most of them from the UK and the Commonwealth, drive through along a well-organized tour of Ypres Salient. For many it is an act of pilgrimage.
My Own True Love and I set off in the morning, planning to drive the north loop of the tour in one day and the south loop the next. We had a self-guided tour brochure, a battlefield map, two Belgian road maps, and a great deal of enthusiasm. We immediately overshot the first stop on the tour by 30 kilometers, thanks to a badly written tour brochure (honest!) and our own confusion about the scale of things in Belgium. (It's a really small country.)
Driving the Ypres Salient is very different from touring a Civil War battlefield in the United States. Instead of battlefields you see cemeteries, memorials, cemeteries, the occasional reconstructed trench, and more cemeteries. The British Commonwealth War Graves Commission does an amazing job. More than 160 small cemeteries are beautifully maintained. The largest of them include interpretive displays that use modern museum technologies to bring the war, the destruction, and the young men who were lost to life.
Highlights (if you can describe war memorials with such a jolly word) include:
- The Essex Farm Cemetery, located at the site of the medical dressing station where Canadian doctor John McCrae wrote the poem "In Flanders Field", which inspired the use of the poppy as the symbol for remembering those lost in foreign wars.
- TheTyne Cot cemetery, where a solemn female voice intoned the names of the dead as their pictures were displayed, life-sized, on a wall
- The Deutcher Soldatenfriedhof at Langemark, where 45,000 German soldiers are buried in a mass grave and we saw poppies growing wild against the memorial wall. (I was close to tears for much of the day. Those dang poppies did me in.)
- The Yorkshire Dugout Site, an archaeological site that made the misery of trench warfare more vivid than any trench reconstruction or war memoir ever could. The water was up to the edge of the dugout. Even with constant pumping, the trenches and dugouts were wet all the time. We knew this in our heads before; now we know if for real.
By day's end, we were heart-sore, overwhelmed, and very glad we'd made the trip. We abandoned the southern loop of the driving tour.
If you make it to Ieper, be sure to visit
- In Flanders Field Museum. Probably the best World War I museum I've ever visited. (And given our interests My Own True Love and I have been to a few.)
- The Last Post: Every night the volunteer fire brigade of Ieper plays the traditional bugle salute to the fallen soldier at the Menin Gate. The gate itself is an imposing memorial to soldiers whose gravesites are unknown. The nightly ceremony is moving. Bring a hanky.
* In military terms, a "salient" is a battlefield feature that is surrounded by the enemy on three sides, making the troops occupying the salient vulnerable.
From the Archives: The First Memorial Day
The Memorial Day weekend is peeking over our shoulders-- and deadlines are breathing down my neck. Instead of scrambling to produce new posts for today and next Tuesday, I've decided to re-run a couple of thematically appropriate posts from the archive. I hope you enjoy them. I'll be back with new content on June 6. I promise!
My Own True Love and I just got home from a Memorial Day service in Grant Park. It was held at the foot of a statue commemorating General John A.Logan. Before today, Logan on horseback was just another obscure Civil War statue. One I hadn't paid much attention to.
Never again.
Like most Memorial Day services, whether the day is cold and rainy like today or blazing with the first heat of summer, the ceremony was moving. A young Marine captain, veteran of the Iraq war, reminded us that Memorial Day is not Veteran's Day--that the purpose is not to thank the living* but to honor the dead. A woman who left Vietnam as a toddler at the end of the Vietnam War played an achingly beautiful version of Taps. I was not the only person who cried.
We always attend a Memorial Day service if we can. We chose the service in Grant Park by chance. It turns out that celebrating Memorial Day at General Logan's feet is particularly appropriate. Logan was a Civil War general, a congressman and senator from Illinois, and an unsuccessful candidate for Vice-President. In his role as Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, he was also one of the principal founders of Memorial Day.
On May 5, 1868, Logan issued GAR General Order 11, establishing the first Memorial Day:
I. The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land. In this observance no form or ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.
We are organized, comrades, as our regulations tell us, for the purpose, among other things, "of preserving and strengthening those kind and fraternal feelings which have bound together the soldiers, sailors, and marines who united to suppress the late rebellion." What can aid more to assure this result than by cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foe? Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains, and their death a tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms. We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance. All that the consecrated wealth and taste of the Nation can add to their adornment and security is but a fitting tribute to the memory of her slain defenders. Let no wanton foot tread rudely on such hallowed grounds. Let pleasant paths invite the coming and going of reverent visitors and found mourners. Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time, testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten, as a people, the cost of free and undivided republic.
If other eyes grow dull and other hands slack, and other hearts cold in the solemn trust, ours shall keep it well as long as the light and warmth of life remain in us.
Let us, then, at the time appointed, gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with choicest flowers of springtime; let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved from dishonor; let us in this solemn presence renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us as sacred charges upon the Nation's gratitude,--the soldier's and sailor's widow and orphan.
II. It is the purpose of the Commander-in-Chief to inaugurate this observance with the hope it will be kept up from year to year, while a survivor of the war remains to honor the memory of his departed comrades. He earnestly desires the public press to call attention to this Order, and lend its friendly aid in bringing it to the notice of comrades in all parts of the country in time for simultaneous compliance therewith.
I couldn't say it better myself.
Remember the fallen. Thank the living. Pray for peace.
* Though I urge you to thank, or hug, a veteran while you're thinking about it.
Last Hope Island
As those of you who hang out regularly here on the Margins have probably guessed, I love it when a book turns what I think I know upside down and shakes the change out of its pockets. Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe and the Brotherhood that Helped Turn the Tide of War is one of those books.
Historian Lynne Olson looks at the seldom-told stories of how European refugees—both governments-in-exile and individual patriots—continued to fight Nazi Germany from a (relatively) safe base of operations in London.
Taken individually, their stories are dramatic, and occasionally tragic. Queen Wilhemina of the Netherlands was outraged when the captain of the British destroyer on which she escaped Amsterdam refused to put her ashore at Zeeland: she had been determined to "be the last man to fall in the last ditch" in defense of her country. (She continued to be outraged throughout the war. Her grandchildren were not allowed to listen to her radio broadcasts because her language was so bad when she talked about the Nazis) A young French banker named Jacques Allier, traveling on a fake passport, smuggled the world's supply of heavy water from German-occupied Norway to Scotland under the nose of Abwehr operatives—hamstringing Germany's efforts to develop a nuclear bomb.
Told in combination, these stories challenge traditional accounts of the war. Olson reminds us that French forces guarded British troops during the heroic evacuation at Dunkirk. That Polish pilots played a critical role in the Battle of Britain and in defending London during the Blitz. That Britain's successes in breaking the Enigma codes rested on the work of the Polish underground, who were able to decipher a high percentage of Enigma intercepts by early 1938. That Churchill was a butthead as well as a great leader.*
In the English-speaking world, Britain and the United States are often portrayed as standing alone against the Nazis in World War II. Last Hope Island reminds us that was never true.
*Okay. She doesn't say that. But the stories she tells reinforce my growing dislike for the man.
Much of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.