The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month

It is now 84 years since the guns fell silent that morning on the Western Front. How many witnesses remain? They were my grandparents' generation, as real to me as my grandparents themselves. It is strange to think that the First World War will be as remote to my children as the American Civil War is to me.

When I was a boy we took a family trip through France. It was the summer of 1967. You travel around Europe nowadays and you still see seats on buses and trains reserved for the casualties of war, but back then those seats were really needed. Elderly amputees were as ubiquitous as the war memorials at the center of every village and town. We visited the Normandy beaches and the vast military cemeteries, the great ossuary of Verdun, the destroyed town of Fleury, where the woods were fenced off with signs warning of unexploded munitions beyond. In many cities there were still empty, rubble-strewn lots, 22 years on.

Pretty much everything in Europe has been rebuilt now, excepting the odd gutted monument left alone as a memorial (but even some of them are now being reconstructed, the time for remembrance apparently having run its course). In Flanders the land has been replanted and is once again under the plow; preservation of battlefields that were sacred soil a generation ago is now a rearguard action, fought largely by foreign veterans' groups.

I wonder what my grandmother would think. She lost her beloved brother on the Western Front, yet was never one to favor the dead over the living. Those of us who were born later need our reminders, however. When my children are a bit older, I too will take them to France, and to Flanders fields.

Posted by David on November 11, 2002 3:37 PM