Before I begin divulging into this post, I want to say that I am so thankful to all the soldiers who have, do and will serve. A special thank you to my friend Brent. You are missed and I am more grateful than I can ever express.
So yesterday my class took a day trip to the Somme. It was a little challenging for me at first because the night before I had been out until 3:30 am at a club, and so the prospect of getting up at 7 am to catch a bus and then spend all day in the cold didn't not sound appealing. But upon seeing the winter wonderland of it all, my pessimistic attitude disappeared and I became excited! We first walked through the WWI museum, which is in this old castle. The museum had the uniforms and equipment of soldier spread out on the floor, like they were in a shallow grave. This was so fitting. The trench served the purpose as a home, defense, bed, etc. for the soldiers, but it could also just as easily become their grave. One of the things I found most striking was that a majority of the soldiers had music of some sort on them, whether it be a flute, accordian, record player, music was not just entertainment but a way to keep sane. It reminded me of the scene in Shawshank Redemption when he sneaks into the office and plays opera over the intercome. Music is good for the soul.
While the museum was impacting, nothing could have prepared me for the cemetery, memorial and trenches we visited. The snow in the cemetery had been untouched, and there were black crosses for gravestones all in a row. It was tragically beautiful. I felt horrible walking on the snow and creating foot prints, it was as though we were disturbing the peace. There were four mass graves, making over 17,000 people buried on that one small plot of land. What was most striking was that the Jewish-Germans who had served in the war had their own grave marker that wasn't a cross, but rather was a headstone with the Jewish star on it. One would have thought that during WWII the German soldiers would have decimated those grave stones, but there they were, intact. In fact, Hitler had visited that cemetery. This shows the profound amount of respect that the soldiers of WWI had, no matter what religion they belonged to.
The trenches gave an entirely different aspect. While the memorial and cemetery gave a visual for the amount of people lost, the trenches told the story of the battle itself. We stood on the front line, and as our tour guide told the tale of how the soldiers were ploughed down by the German machine gun, I could imagine the men climbing from the trenches, knowing that they were on a suicide mission. The machine gun took these men down like flies, and there was nothing that they could do about it. Imagine 800 Newfoundlanders coming from the trenches, and only a handful lived to see the next day. It's just so inhumane and horrific. But at the same time, I feel like weapons such as the machine gun take away the personal aspect of war so the soldiers don't feel so guilty about killing another human being. If you are simply swinging a gun around and it is shooting then there really is no target, whereas if you fire a gun you are aiming at someone. Same with bombs, you don't feel the guilt of connection if you drop a bomb on a town because you don't actually see the person who is dying because of what you are doing. Haunting isn't it?
I found the weather to be very fitting for our visit. The sky was white, and snow was everywhere. It was freezing and we were all cold, but while we were suffering one had to think of the soldier who lived in the trench during the winter. They didn't have a nice warm coach bus to go to, they didn't have the mittens, big puffy jackets, and the other materials that we have access to. No, they lived in the ground. They were always cold, always suffering. So even if they weren't being shot at, they were living an entirely different form of hell. And while I enjoyed the beautiful landscape of my winter wonderland, the soldiers wouldn't have seen white beauty, but most likely probably a blank canvas just waiting to be painted with the blood of soldiers and the black of bombs.
I want to visit more war sites. It puts things into perspective in a way that nothing else in the world can. And with that I say goodnight.
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