They Ran Out of Room

The Last Post in Ypres, Belgium

Tonight at 8:00 pm in Ieper (Ypres), Belgium, the “Last Post,” the traditional British salute to a fallen warrior, will be played for the 27,933^rd  time at the Menin Gate.  The Menin Gate is a war memorial to 54,896 missing soldiers of Britain and its Commonwealth killed in the area called the Ypres Salient during the Great War, from 1914 to August 15, 1917.

They ran out of room. 

34,984 more missing soldiers after that date are listed on a massive memorial at Tyne Cot cemetery a few miles away.  The Last Post ceremony is held every night at 8:00 pm, and is expected to last as far into the future as you can imagine.  The night I was there in September, there were over 1,500 people crammed into the memorial.   They were absolutely silent during the ceremony.

Over 9,000,000 people died in World War I.  One million of them are still missing, many buried in graves marked “A Soldier of the Great War Known But to God.”  Many have no grave.  The earth swallowed them.

There are Commonwealth cemeteries everywhere in this area of Belgium.  They are by roads, in towns, in the middle of sugar beet fields.  Every one a piece of England.  Every one carefully tended. 

There is a German cemetery with over 45,000 soldiers buried.  Thousands of them are unknown as well.

When the “Great War” ended, some doubted that the area around Ypres could ever be inhabited again.  Every city, farm, village, landmark, forest was leveled.  During the cleanup process, which took years, workers found as many as five unexploded shells per square meter on some of the battlefields.  But today, except for the cemeteries and a few carefully preserved areas of trench lines, the towns are rebuilt, the farms restored, the forests have grown, and you would never know that the first massive war of the 20^th Century was fought there.

No one expected this war in 1914.  No one wanted it.  No one knew how to avoid it.  And no one knew how to stop it.  Most wars are senseless.  This one was truly awesome in its stupidity.  It cost Europe a generation of young men.  It ruined the economy of the world.  It laid the foundations for World War II, in which at least 40 million people, and some estimates say 60 million people, died.

Which laid the foundations for the Cold War, including the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and arguably the wars we now fight in the Middle East.

Politicians who pay no mind to the welfare of the humans on the planet, or the planet itself, get us into wars.  Politicians who often never experienced the horror of battle themselves.  Politicians who think that young men and women are simply another tool of diplomacy and statesmanship.  Who give no thought to the lives lost, and the countless additional lives ruined by their failure to solve world problems with diplomacy instead of battle.

Ponder for a moment on Wednesday, our Veteran’s Day, the sacrifice over the centuries of young men, and now young women as well, who have died for the “glory” of nations.  Of those whose lives were changed completely by their battle experiences.  Who live without their legs, or arms, or minds because some politician wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to avoid a war.

There is no glory in war – only hardship, pain, loss and ruin.  So when you run into a politician who says there was no choice but to go to war, vote for someone else.  And if you run into a veteran in the next few days or weeks, thank them for their sacrifice and their service.  They didn’t send themselves to war, but they sure as hell suffered the consequences.

Heroism in Normandy

Window honoring the 101st Airborne soldiers who liberated the village

Angoville-Au-Plain

In a thousand year old church in Angoville-au-Plain, a tiny village in Normandy just a few miles inland from D-Day’s Utah Beach, there is a stark reminder of the cost of war.  In that church, on June 6, 1944, paratrooper medics Robert Wright (then 20) and Kenneth Moore set up a field hospital.  They treated both American and German wounded as the battle raged around them.  They used the pews as makeshift beds for their patients.

62 years later, the blood of the young fighting men still stains the pews.

A stunning stained glass window commemorates the parachutists of the 101^st Airborne Division who rescued their village from Nazi tyranny in the early hours of D-Day.

The church at Angoville-au-Plain was just one of the Normandy invasion sites I visited on a pilgrimage last week to this seminal battlefield of World War Two.  I walked the beach at Omaha, where thousands died under heavy fire; and at Utah, where they had an easier time of it – “only” 400 died there.  I visited the gun emplacements at Point du Hoc, where Rangers scaled 200 foot high cliffs to silence German artillery batteries.  And I visited the American War Cemetery near Omaha Beach, where nearly 10,000 young American fighting men, just a portion of those killed in the battle for Normandy, lie buried.

It was a sobering trip.  A trip that brought up conflicting feelings.  Even though I am a veteran, I am basically against war.  And yet, if there was ever a war that was justified, it was the fight against Fascism in Europe.  And so I am proud of those young fighting men who gave their lives so that we could have our freedom intact.

Another conflicting thought:  Why do young men and women have to die, when old men make mistakes that lead to war?  The men and women who fought the wars of the 20^th century were young – their average age was in the late teens to young 20s.  What makes our leaders think that they can so easily spend one of our most valuable resources – our youth?

It makes me furious that men who weren’t brave enough to fight when we were at war in Vietnam so easily send our young people into a useless and unnecessary war in Iraq, where the lack of any plan continues to murder our innocent young soldiers.

And it makes me furious that they then wrap themselves in our flag, and question the patriotism of those who question their stupidity.  And that their supporters think they are sacrificing when they spend a buck for a magnetic “I Support Our Troops” sign for their car.

If we truly supported our troops, we wouldn’t have sent them to Iraq in the first place.  Nor would we leave them there another day.

Our soldiers have been there for us when we needed them.  They were there for us at Angoville-au-Plain in 1944.  They were in Normandy to save our freedom.  And for many, all they have for us to remember them are the blood-stained pews in a 1000 year old church in Normandy, a white marble cross in the cemetery at Omaha Beach, and our undying gratitude.

Veterans’ Day is next week.  Spend a few minutes between now and then pondering the sacrifice in blood that our young soldiers have made and are making, and the venality of those who demean their sacrifice by sending them to die for no good reason.