Warning: blog is admittedly self-indulgent
This summer I had the opportunity to travel to the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. It has been 26 years since I last went to Europe. That same year, 1999, I was introduced to the writing of British novelist Pat Barker, winner of the Booker Prize, as a teaching assistant in a Western Civilization II class. It was Barker’s Regeneration that first introduced me to the horrors of the First World War and trench warfare. As a US History major I learned all about industrial mobilization, war bonds, and sedition acts. I studied the labor movement and the quota system that began to police our nation’s immigration process during the interwar years. Like most history majors, I understood a slice of the world in great detail and the rest in broad sweeping themes.
Each year since 1999 I have reread Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy. The titular first book in the series is a fictional account of soldiers’ 1917 and 1918 experiences at Edinburgh’s Craiglockhart Military Hospital based in part on the personal papers of Dr. WHR Rivers. Barker’s characters reference the horrors of war-time experience by simply identifying the town in which they were injured. The volume of injured, dead, and missing British soldiers from battles in French and Belgian towns meant that no further contextualization was needed. The names – Mons, the Somme, Reims – had deep meaning for Barker’s characters.
In my visit to western Europe this summer, therefore, I chose to spend a day – July 4th coincidentally – experiencing how Belgians commemorate World War I by visiting Ypres (Ieper), a city in the Flanders region of Belgium. For this week’s blog, I’ll share some of my observations and images from that experience.
As we walked towards the town center we were greeted by a metal sculpture depicting children offering thanks to soldiers (Figure One), which foreshadowed the themes of the day ahead. Arriving in the city center on foot we were immediately struck by the beauty and scope of the Menin Gate, a tribute to the more than fifty-thousand British and Commonwealth soldiers missing from the Battle of Ypres. (Figure Two) A visit to the In Flanders Field Museum documented the physical artifacts of the war in the region – the military history (uniforms, weapons, equipment) while writings about the war are interspersed among videos revealing the experiences of nurses and doctors. Pre and post-war images of Market Square and Cloth Hall, the location of the museum, provide visitors with evidence of the breathtaking scale of work required to reconstruct Ypres when the war ended.
Physical remains of the fighting that took place in Ypres can be explored at a number of locations around the city. For example, just 5k from town visitors can walk through an area of trenches discovered in an excavation during the 1990s (Figures Three and Four). For me, the boulder-lined trenches were the most vivid record of what had happened in Ypres more than a century ago. Walking along the trenches gave me chills – thinking about the lives lost in that location was overwhelming: a stark reminder of the physical space in which the war took place and the inconceivable loss that resulted. The visit to these trenches was a fitting end to my day.
I plan to share my experience in Ypres with my students this fall and hope to elicit discussion about the way in which we in the United States remember wars. For those like myself who teach in New England there are markers indicating battles from King Philip’s War and the American Revolution, and a couple well-known battlefields on which commemorative events are held. The centuries that separate our contemporary society from those long-ago conflicts, however, definitely holds them at a distance in our daily lives. I couldn’t help but wonder while exploring Ypres if students in the Flanders region of Belgium think more about the consequences of war because of the daily reminders they see in their communities.
Thoughts? Similar experiences? Recommendations of places to visit in the future? Please share.
