In college I took an art history/appreciation course and learned how the Flemish painters were some of the first to use realistic lighting and how influential they were on Dutch masters such as Rembrandt. Never had any context for who the Flemish were, and it wasn't until I arrived in Belgium and learned of the two territories within the country, Flanders and Wallonia that I realized the Flemish painters were from Dutch-speaking Flanders.
At some point during the past few weeks, something clicked and I realized the poem referred to the fields of Flanders, not to a field owned by a "Mr. Flanders". So Saturday afternoon we took a drive to Ypres, the town leveled during the battles around the Ypres Salient. Hundreds of thousands of mostly Commonwealth troops (English, Irish, Scottish, Australians, New Zealanders, Indians, and Canadians) are buried in and around Ypres in over 160 graveyards scattered throughout the area: some in the midst of residential neighborhoods, others carved out in the corners of cornfields, most with only a few hundred headstones.
We wound our way to Hill 60, a heavily contested strategic high-point where a few decaying bunkers are the only clue that the undulating ground around the hill is the product of over 90 years of erosion slowly leveling the foxholes and trenches of the Great War.
Next stop was Essex Farm Cemetery where McCrae wrote the first draft of the poem before ending the day at Tyne Cot Cemetery, the largest British Commonwealth war cemetery in the world (12,000 graves with the names of an additional 35,000 whose bodies were never recovered).
As we walked through Tyne Cot, a lone bagpiper played "Amazing Grace" over the site where headstones are arranged around several German pillboxes left from the war. The gentle slope from the entrance at the bottom of the site to the exit at the top gives a clear view of the farmland framing the English memorial garden.
The photo above looks out at the countryside, with the German pillbox in the right foreground. We ended our day with a dinner at home, then juxtaposed the historical significance of the day with dessert in the main town square where a troupe of acrobats performed as part of a local festival.
We are not in Kansas anymore.
1 comment:
Thanks for all the history lessons.
I would have cried walking through that cemetery and hearing that bagpiper playing "Amazing Grace." I looked up the poem and found what you probably already know. A military doctor wrote it during the 17 days he spend treating injured soldiers there. He later wrote, "I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done."
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