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We shall not sleep, though poppies grow...
By Sharon Williams
In Flanders fields where Poppies blow….It’s not the season for poppies at the moment but we did see a few planted blooms. On Graves. Miles and miles of white marble, all standing to attention in correct and rigid columns.
Pat and I have visited military remembrance sites before, yet I have never felt the devastating sadness which overwhelmed me in Ypres, in Flanders. We stood on a hill in the glorious afternoon sunshine, admiring the green meadows, well tended fields and quirky Belgian farmhouses. Yet from every angle we spied Commonwealth burial grounds. Green dotted with white, jolting the traditional farming community with the regimented conformity of a military graveyard. It looked so beautiful and felt so desperately heartbreaking.
Our first visit was to the “Essex Farm” memorial, where John McCrae wrote the now famous “In Flanders’ Fields”. Such a beautiful place, well they’re all beautiful, now.
John McCrae’s dug out, the medic post where he attempted to give succour to the wounded and make the last moments of the terminally injured bearable, is now just a concrete bunker. Inside the bunkers people had placed wreaths and poppies. Leaning in rows, the poppy red a sharp bright bloodstain against the dank and dark interior. Outside, above the entrances to the structure, a shockingly violent spatter of bullet holes still visible and a bizarre contrast to the now decades peaceful site.
Pat had decided to place a poppy on the first Royal Welch Fusilier grave he found, as a mark of respect to his regiment’s fallen. Watching him from the corner of my trembling eye, I saw him stop at a grave, bend down, place the poppy and say a small word.
As we walked in between the ranks of soldiers, we silently apologized for treading on their graves. Boys as young as 18 lay alongside their mates and between them lay much older comrades. As though they were being watched over and cared for by "older blokes". My throat became tight and I felt the serious threat of many more tears behind my already wet eyes. Feeling a little embarrassed by my, once again, brittle emotion I looked up to find Pat.
He was brushing gravestones free of leaves and dust. Talking to himself and busily cleaning up, curiously I walked closer to hear “Come on now Jones 60, your grave’s a disgrace, clean it up man” and similar sentiments as he brushed up from grave to grave. Pat had found rows and rows of Royal Welchmen and in his own special way, was paying his respects to his comrades.
We drove by some of the sites, the overwhelming emotion too great to visit each one. There are so many it’s too, too difficult to take it in. The scale of loss of life and the sheer enormity of the frontline is surreal, especially when we’ve never experienced war. It weighs heavily on your heart.
We carried on to Hill 62. Hill 62 is now a museum. A former farm slap in the middle of the front line. The farmer’s son decided not to restore his farmlands and keep the damaged land as a piece of history. To show people how it was and that it should not happen again.
They rely on donations and entrance fees for the survival of the site.
He also has a herd of really stinky cats…but we won’t go there, yet!
Cases of (for want of a better word) memorabilia. Artefacts found on the destroyed site include helmets, cap badges, mortar shells, backpacks, guns, uniforms...a tremendous amount of war-detritus and personal items left abandoned by the poor soldiers who gave their lives at that bleak place. Again, walking into the open-air part of this museum, the contrast between the surrounding fields and the ravaged land of Hill 62, is incomprehensible. Rusty corrugated iron lines, flooded rathole trenches, vast and deep mortar holes pepper the ground.
Nearly a hundred years on and these scars of war are still clearly visible. Wear and tear and nature’s progression have only made a slight impact on the man-made destruction. I can’t begin to imagine how it must have been, how deeply the mortar bombing penetrated the earth and the unavoidable fate of those caught in its path.
So this was Hill 62, sixty-two? The same scene would have stretched for miles and miles. How many hills were there? How long must it have taken to nurture the land back to the fertile fields and valleys that is now the norm in Ypres. So many visitors stop here to pay their respects, we even met a group of English schoolchildren on a school history trip. Learning about the consequences of this monumental war. Fancifully I imagined that some may even have been great-grandchildren of the men who lay under the soil.
As we passed through the last cemetery, the wind whipped up and the trees began to whisper. I whimsically wondered if that was laughter I heard on the breeze.
Does the spirit of Tommy Atkins lounge under the Oak Tree planted in his memory and laughingly shake his head at the hordes of people placing flowers at his grave.
Does he casually stroll along, having a bit of a flirt with the pretty young girls who stop and say thank you for his sacrifice?
I like to think he does.
"We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields."
John McCrae.
# 33655865
by Luc Amkreutz
I must have been fifteen or sixteen when I first heard of the possibility of adopting a grave at the American War cemetery in Margraten (South-Limburg). Born out of a, then declining, general interest boys have in war, soldiers and heroism and a more serious feeling of awareness of the past, and a freedom that was not self-evident and had cost many young lives, I decided to apply and filled in the form. Several weeks later a solemn white envelope with typed address fell on the doormat. Upon opening it did not contain that much information, more or less only stating that I had adopted the grave of one:
Smith, Mart, Pvt
Virginia
505 Prcht Inf 82 ABN Div
Fallen: September 19th 1944
Grave: Plot F, Row 13, Grave 26
Ser. #: 33655865
Armed with this information and some flowers from the garden wrapped in tinfoil my parents and I went to the cemetery. I had visited it before since it was near to where I lived, but never with the idea of actually searching for someone. In some way the 8301 white crosses and stars, the rigid outline with its ever-present linearity and the solemn angular tower, at odds with the rolling green Limburg countryside this time seemed more imposing and impressive than before. Finding private Smith took some time, but finally I stood there, in front of a bright white marble cross marked with the meagre information above. The experience was and still is rather special. One of the many for whom Margraten became the final resting place was lifted out of anonymity, albeit only a little.
In the past years I have often re-visited the grave and over time pieced together small bits of information. Mart Smith was born in 1925 in Harlan county Kentucky. He had finished Grammar school and worked as an Automobile Serviceman possibly in Hawaii (or he was sent there after he was drafted). In August 1943, single and without dependents, he enlisted in the army from Abingdon in Virginia. He went on to become a soldier in the famous 82nd Airborne Division (‘All American’) and was assigned to the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Fox company.
Barely a year later, on September 19th, he died, aged 19, during operation Market Garden. He and his company were involved in a fearsome close-combat battle for the Waalbridge in Nijmegen. Mart Smith was fatally wounded in the approach of the Waalbridge and received a purple heart posthumously.
Although I wish I had more information, contact with relatives or a photograph I am glad to have found out a bit more about Mart Smith and will continue to seek out more. The information adds an extra, valuable and personal dimension to the idea of adopting a grave. When I go there now I have the idea of at least partly knowing who he was. What I also found valuable were the many nice and warm comments I received during my quest for information from WWII and more recent veterans within and outside of the 82nd. Apparently the idea of the adoption of a grave and the more personal level of contact involved in this is a very appropriate and appreciated way of commemorating.
 Personally I think it is especially the idea of lifting someone out of anonymity and developing a personal bond that adds an extra value to this way of commemorating and sets it apart from ceremonies at graves, parades or being silent for two minutes. For me Mart Smith represents all of his comrades in arms at Margraten and elsewhere. He stands for what they died for, the freedom in which I and many others now live and which has been paid for with enormous sacrifices. His marble edifice is one of the many monuments and markers that help us remember this and symbolize the efforts that this freedom, democracy and ‘our way of life’ have cost. At the same time however his grave for me also represents something else, something less abstract and honourable as war effort, sacrifice and general commemoration. Mart Smith is also a person to me, an individual who had a life, friends and family for 19 years. Who signed up, with or without a specific idea of why he did it. Someone who came over here, found his closest buddies in Fox company and jumped out of planes, a tough guy, a fighter, ‘All American’. At the same time though someone who was probably frightened, homesick and someone who died in pain in a bulletridden environment far away from Kentucky. In this sense Mart Smith embodies a very human aspect which enables me to identify with him. I think this is also an essential aspect of the reason why I wanted to adopt a grave. The fact that the life I live is linked to the fact he couldn’t. It makes me very much aware of the fact that it could have been me…
Photograph of Mart Smith’s grave taken from the 82nd roll of honour database at http://www.marketgarden.com/2010/UK/frames.html, an excellent online resource about operation Market Garden and various other aspects related to the Second World War.
From ‘Screaming Eagles’ to marauding vultures:
The 101st Airborne Division falls from grace
by Alistair Bright
It was almost “just” another horrific war story, like we have come to expect from the frontlines of battlefields across the world these days. Five American soldiers had been arrested for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the murder of three of her family members in the town of Mahmudiyah. I was about to click away from this webpage to the next story on http://news.bbc.co.uk when my eyes were drawn by the sentence “Private Green and the other soldiers were serving in the 502nd Infantry Regiment, which belongs to the 101st Airborne Division”.
This division, as you all know, was one of the divisions that parachuted into The Netherlands during Operation Market Garden in September 1944, and subsequently liberated the south (including Eindhoven) from German occupation. But its heroics didn’t stop there, as the division later played an important role in the Battle of the Bulge, was deployed in Vietnam and then Iraq decades later, supported humanitarian efforts in Rwanda and Somalia and supplied peacekeepers to Haiti and Bosnia. And now, in 2006, an entire division has been put to shame by the incomprehensible and revolting deeds committed by Private Steven Green and four other soldiers.
Upon the activation of the division, the following words were uttered:
“Let me call your attention to the fact that our badge is the great American eagle. This is a fitting emblem for a division that will crush its enemies by falling upon them like a thunderbolt from the skies. The history we shall make, the record of high achievement we hope to write in the annals of the American Army and the American people, depends wholly and completely on the men of this division”.
Lofty ideals that were apparently upheld for over sixty years (although one could question the excessively aggressive overtones in which these ideals were couched). Now consider the words of Private Green, who, speaking to a reporter a few months before his infamous deeds, declared:
“I came over here because I wanted to kill people”.
And:
“Over here, killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody and it's like ‘All right, let’s go get some pizza’”.
The ideals have disappeared; all that remains is aggression and apathy.
It is sad that the next time I pass the memorial to the 101st Airborne Division just off the Kennedylaan here in Eindhoven, it will be Private Steven Green that first comes to my mind, before all those honourable soldiers whose names I don’t know, that so bravely liberated Eindhoven in 1944.
Sources:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101st_Airborne_Division
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2006/07/28/AR2006072801492_pf.html |
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