Today we have completed our final day of touring Canadian battlefields, before we move on to Amsterdam and our flight home. We have visited five European countries, and dozens of Commonwealth War Grave cemeteries, battlefields, and museums. We have consciously sought out most of these sights, plotting them on the map and judiciously following the GPS’s instructions. On this trip I was struck by the way that reminders of the First and Second World Wars were integrated into the landscape in every country we visited. If you began to look, visitors could see monument and plaques to the Canadians and other combatants, and landscapes and cities shaped by the battles fought in this part of Europe. The cities in Canada where most of us live do contain memorials to these conflicts, and the men who fought in them, but the landscape here was affected in a deeper way.

We have visited several memorials—Thiepval, Vimy Ridge, the Menin Gate—that were intended to draw people’s attention and be lasting reminders of the men who died in the World Wars. These sites attract thousands of visitors from many countries, and continue to focus student’s attention on the battles and sacrifices commemorated in these memorials. As we build the myth and memory of the wars, these international monuments serve as representations.

Other sites are more integrated into the towns and countryside, such as the cemeteries for the commonwealth soldiers, and the smaller plaques and memorials recognizing local battles. These sites are not as prominent in most narratives of the war, but they are places that Canadians, family members of the soldiers, and students like us to come and remember, mourn, and recognize those men who gave their lives during the World Wars. I was shocked by the sheer number of cemeteries, especially in the Somme region of the France where many of the dead were buried in the local trenches where they died, rather than being brought to a larger, more centralized location. There were many places in France where, as we stood on a ridge, we could see in the distance two, or even three CWGC cemeteries, which stand out from the scenery through their uniform swath of rounded, white headstones. We often hear of the number of men who died in the wars, but actually seeing so many individual graves, and individual names on monuments for those with no known grave, vividly demonstrated the huge loss of life during these wars.

The European countries we have been through also show remnants of war in more subtle ways. This area of Europe was a battlefield, and experienced the carnage and destruction of modern, mechanized warfare. The trench warfare of WWI in France created a pockmarked landscape that, where preserved at Beaumont Hamel or Vimy Ridge, shows the destruction of flat farmers’ fields into a series of craters. Initially, these would have been filled with mud, barbed wire, and the other detritus of war, but now they have been covered in soft green grass and tiny spring flowers, which creates a peaceful landscape at odds with the destruction it is evidence of. Similarly, today we visited Westerbork transit camp, where Dutch Jews were sent before they were shipped to concentration camps to the east. While the buildings of the site from the 1940s are no longer standing, there remain purposeful memorials to the Jews who departed from Westerbork, and grass-covered ridges mark where the building used to stand. The fields of France show similar unintentional signs of war, as the soil of farmers’ fields becomes gray and chalky in areas that used to contain the bunkers and trenches of WWI. Finally, many of the new building we have passed by and lived in, in cities that are centuries old, show where buildings were destroyed by the fighting, and have been entirely rebuilt within the last century.

These and other signs of the World Wars still dot the countryside and cities of France, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands, and those like us who seek them out see how the wars and their consequences can be remembered through the landscape of Europe.

Cindel White

Since my last post on Thursday, May 12^th in which I wrote about my experience in France, our group has visited three other countries: Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Being that these three countries each represented and played distinct roles in the two world wars, I have found it difficult to select a single topic or theme to write on at the exclusion of others. Therefore, I would like to share a takeaway or lingering perception from each of these three countries.

After leaving France, the first country our group travelled to was Belgium. In our exchange of the countryside for the city, I was able to experience something very special. In Ypres, I was fortunate enough to be one of the three students from the tour to lay a wreath at the Menin Gate during the Last Post Ceremony. The Menin Gate was erected in 1927 to commemorate the commonwealth soldiers killed in the Ypres Salient during the First World War with no known graves, and the ceremony has occurred every night since July 2, 1928 (save for the period in which Belgium was under German Occupation during the Second World War.) Although a nightly event, the ceremony was attended by approximately 1,500 people, including a variety of military personnel from Belgium, Germany, Canada and other nations. I was extremely honoured to commemorate those soldiers lost throughout the Ypres salient, and humbled to share the experience with so many locals who demonstrate their willingness to brave the cold night after night in order to pay their respects to those who fought for their freedom. I was positively surprised to see the crowds of people from the very young to the very elderly, all go quiet at 8 p.m. for the duration of the ceremony. It was quite the sight.

After our time in Belgium we moved onto the Netherlands. As a student of the Holocaust and the Nazi Regime, I was most interested to witness firsthand how the Dutch people have memorialized the Holocaust and learn what aspects of the Dutch experience have been included in the popular narrative. After visiting the Netherlands Freedom Museum, it is quite obvious to see that the Dutch have capitalized on the Anne Frank story without sharing the whole story of Dutch collaboration in the Final Solution. This is something that we will be exploring further during our studies of the liberation of the Netherlands, and especially the Westerbork transit camp.

Finally, we were able to visit Germany, quite unexpectedly, for a few hours today. What struck me most about my time in Germany was the state of the commonwealth cemeteries we visited, where soldiers of the Allied forces are buried. The scene at the Reichswald Forest Cemetery is perfectly kept and the landscape is beautiful. Like many of the commonwealth cemeteries our group has visited over the course of the tour there seemed to be a calming atmosphere within the cemetery that invoked a positive emotional response. The greenery was perfectly manicured and the cemetery appeared to attract sunlight even on the rainiest of days. When analyzing the landscape, however, I could not help but compare the state of this cemetery to that of Langemark, the German war cemetery in Belgium that we visited earlier this week. After leaving, I remember discussing with my colleagues how dark and depressing the atmosphere of Langemark was. The gravestones laid flat towards the ground and often 6 or 7 names were crowded on a single stone. The cemetery itself did not seem to be as well kept, nor did it appear to intend to invoke feelings of commemoration, remembrance or thanks. It was as if a dark shadow was fixed over the cemetery. Such a comparison inevitably lead me to draw observations about how the narrative of two world wars is represented. Although Langemark commemorates German soldiers from the First World War while those that we visited in Germany contain the bodies of Allied soldiers from the Second World War, the difference between Allied commemoration of German soldiers and German commemoration of Allied soldiers is quite obvious. One then wonders how much room, if any, there is to respect the sacrifice of individual soldiers, even if they came out on the losing side.