Near Flanders Field

Near Flanders Field

Stu at the Entrance Museum

Today we took at happy trip to Ypres, Belgium, home of the In Flanders Field Museum.  Of course, there are countless exhibits dedicated to atrocities of war but there is also a surreal dark comedy of WTF?

Great for Machine Gun Protection

By the end of the 19^th Century, Belgium was becoming a prosperous agricultural and growing industrial society.  Years of peace and stability, along with being a non-aligned "neutral nation" serve up just what the nation needed to thrive. 

French Target Practice

A year before The War, Belgium decided, hey since we are starting to be a real nation in power and wealth, maybe we should have a professional modest military as well!  What timing you say?  Well, non/néé.  By the time the war started, the locals were a rag-tag group of volunteers wearing stuff they owned that made them, um feel, professional?  There were no uniforms and training or weapons whereas the other world powers each had well-disciplined and trained fighting machines.  The Brits owned the water and the Germans the land.  Inversely, the Brits hadn't flexed their nautical might on land and the Germans the sea. The French and Russians also had their strengths be it manpower or Brie.

This thing was going to be over by Christmas.  Everyone agreed.  I know, you heard this before.  But really, everyone was going to party like it was 1865 by Christmas!  Walking around the exhibits, the uniforms and equipment really didn't reflect reality.  The French wore dashing light blue uniforms—the better to line them up in your sights.  Eventually the French decided on something less dapper as the body counts rose.  The Scottish, meanwhile, came in kilts, of course.  Imagine the scene.  Icy, frozen, sloshy mud and rocks grinding against your bare legs in the rain.  We were told the ice and mud sliced the back's of soldiers legs. Now let's add some hungry rats.  Listening to a biography of the kilt years ago, the men thought the pageantry immediately regretful.  Other troops didn't necessarily fare much better. many men wore breastplates, chainmail, and damsel-in-distress chivalry wear.  Many had helmet adorned with eagle and flourishes. At the onset of the war, people were dressed like peasants from different eras in a play and equipped with wares probably at home during an anachronistic recreation from the American Civil War---that other war that was over in less than six months.

If the soldiers were not dressed for success, advancements in weapons had made progress.  WMD's baby.  You now had weapons that could mow down men in numbers in the bloodiest ways ever seen.  And it was up close.  Many of the new and efficient weapons worked best at close range.  All that gore in 4K hi-def and smellovision. No one ever imagined war could look like this.   I can't imagine anyone went home normal.  In a BBC documentary, a relative was told his great-grandfather stood up when they said duck and was killed.  Turns out it was likely true.  His job had an extremely high casualty rate which required him to visually identify enemy positions.  He was not only a target but got the see the gore up close and in-person. In all likelihood, he probably just decided that day that if he didn’t duck, it could all go away. Some gave all but certainly all gave more than any ever imagined.

New Weapons

Part of a band or the Infantry?

 At the start of the war, blimps were used but were not very effective.  Eventually someone figured out that Morse code could be used to identify positions.  Being easy targets for the enemy, the pilots were held in high regard.  Another new addition to war was chemical weapons.  Contrary to popular thought, they were not particularly effective at killing people, but they did serve another purpose, terror.  Imagine you are in a muddy ditch with all levels of humanity from the limbless to the lifeless being eaten by rats and you start to see and smell gas wafting over the battlefield like death seeking souls.  I'm quite sure it would be easy to die from fear.  You lose your nerve, make noise, or move in the wrong direction.  There was also an indignation about using gas.  How dare they gas us like animals!  The lack of decency—until the allies started using mustard gas and then it was all ok and better.

Get out your map boys and girls and find Belgium.  It is the funny-shaped country North of France. Notice how it sits between Germany and France.  Before Germany became unified, The part of Germany containing Berlin, was part of the kingdom of Prussia.  The wars and weddings of European nations and leaders led to strange bedfellows that all exploded when the war started.  Belgium and all its chocolate, lace, and vrites, sits between Northern Germany and France. What could possibly go wrong with two superpowers between ya?  The worst of it played out in this part of Flanders.  It is wide-open farmland very close to Great Britain and France.  All I can imagine is mud, bodies, shrapnel, and trees lacking any and all branches.  And some stacked rocks that look like buildings if you squint enough.  Battles were victorious at high costs only to lose ground the next day.  The land was a sea of disturbed earth—the perfect environment for a sea of red poppies to grow in the fields.  These fields, however, were not undeveloped tracts of land.  Imagine you come back to about where your family farm had stood for generations and find nothing—no family, no houses, nor villages.  The fields are a disturbing muddy garden of corpses and bombs.  The land could not be worked for 10 years while bombs were cleared and to this day, bodies are still uncovered when tilled.  One memorial shop said they would continue to find them throughout our lifetime.

 

Early Gas Mark Ironically Influenced by a Plague Mask

Our host matter-of-factly mentioned that Ypres has a ceremony every night at 8pm to remember the Great War.  Since we were close, we drove back to the village. It wasn't quite what we expected.  I love being slammed by the unexpected. There were several hundred people there including hundreds of children for the laying of wreaths to the 100's of thousands of dead. It looks like this every night. Every. Night.  The tribute in perpetuity is covered in the names of dead from various regiments.  I started to notice a sick pattern to the names.  These names are all Sikh.  These names are all from New Zealand.  Clusters of humanity neatly arranged in memoriam. 

I clutched the poppy I had taken off my jacket and tried to take it all in.  All this for what? Even the soldiers didn't want to fight.  Regiments were rotated to prevent the enemy from making friends with enemies meters away.  A truce of multilingual Christmas carols on Christmas Night lead to an impromptu football match in the middle of hell. Within days, troops were rotated to end the fraternization.

After the laying of the wreathes, the speaker said, "Go forth and tell everyone we gave our future so you could have your present!"

Have we learned anything?