Walking with the Dead

Langemarck War Cemetery

I have a great deal of sympathy for the German troops of the Great War. I don’t blame Germany for the war any more than I blame anyone else. I blame the system of politics that was supposed to prevent a war. To lighten the mood a little, let me show you a youtube video from the British sitcom, Blackadder. It pretty much sums up what happened exactly, as well as various attitudes of the troops (Privates who had no idea what was going on, officers who thought they knew what was going on…):

One dead arch duke later and the powder keg was well and truly lit. The two super alliances where at each other faster than a Mac and PC user.

What we did to the German dead after the war though was all but unforgivable. Commonwealth graves are on land which has been given pretty much indefinitely, but the Germans where only given a few areas and a limited amount of time to keep their dead interred. Eventually the Germans had to exhume their dead, and many of them where placed in a mass crypt at Langemarck. Many where never given a true gravestone, but where instead recorded in the German equivalent of the Menin gate, the Kameraden Grab, which can also be found at Langemarck.

German war cemeteries are very different from Commonwealth ones. The Germans are buried eight to each plot, with a single flat basalt marker for all of them. German cemeteries use dark colours rather than the whites of the commonwealth. As a memorial, four statues stand watch over the cemetery, one representing each element of the armed forces: the air force, the army, the navy and one for the civilians who worked to supply the army. The sculpture was created by Emil Krieger.

In Closing

My time among the dead opened my eyes a great deal to the events of the Great War. It’s one thing to learn in a school about how many millions died here, and how many millions died there. Even looking at demographic charts, you can’t truly appreciate what happened in Europe between 1914 and 1918. If your country is a member of the commonwealth, then it’s more than likely at least one person in your family fought in the Great War. And they almost certainly went through Ypres.

The most terrifying realization about my journey though with this: The Great War was overshadowed by an even bloodier conflict less than thirty years after it had closed. The “war to end all wars” they called it. And still the second world war raged on after it. And after that we had the cold war, the Serbian war, the IRA. Sometimes it scares me that this continent may never actually know peace. And it scares me even more when I think there may be a third world war less than a decade away from us. To those who would commit us to war, I say this:

Walk through Flanders’s fields. Walk through Tyne Cot Cemetery. Read the names on the Menin gate. Every one of those people was a human being. They had families. They had lives. They had a job. They may have had children. They had a story, a story cut brutally short by the hands of incompetent leaders and bungling officers, they where People. They where not statistics. 57,000 causalities in one day at the Somme, and I think many of you regard that the same way you regard the £ 35,334,012,000, Britain alone spent on the Great War. People’s lives are not resources to be used. They are not money to be spent. They are living, breathing, thinking people!

They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn,
At the going down of the sun
And in the morning
We will remember them.
– Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)

Thank you for letting me share my experiences with you.