living the war

I heard a story of some young Australians who visited the Tyne Cot memorial, near the Belgian towns for Ieper and Passendale.
Apparently, the museum there offers visitors the opportunity to try to take on the personality of one of the soldiers by putting on some of the load they would have carried, and march a few kilometres in the countryside near the battlefield of Passchendaele. This is the battle where many of the soldiers died not from bullets or mustard gas, but by drowning in the bomb craters, which were flooded by torrential rain that started at the time of the battle.

It is probably a good antidote to the romanticising of the war to experience a little of what happened. One of the features of WWI was that the so-called "élan" of war was replaced by sordid, impersonal death, watching clouds of gas or being killed by bombs fired from miles away or torpedoes fired from an unseen submarine.

For Australians, the war is something that happened on the other side of the world. For Belgians, they are surrounded by old bunkers and the remains of trenches and forts. The war was fought on Belgian soil, but most were foreign soldiers destroying the countryside. The remains of the war are all around them, and the direct memory lives in their family stories.

Respect the sacrifice, but never think the reality was anything more than sordid.