Where Have All the Graveyards Gone?: The War That Didn’t End War and Its Unending Successors

[marmar]

from TomDispatch:



Where Have All the Graveyards Gone?
The War That Didn’t End War and Its Unending Successors

By Adam Hochschild


What if, from the beginning, everyone killed in the Iraq and Afghan wars had been buried in a single large cemetery easily accessible to the American public? Would it bring the fighting to a halt more quickly if we could see hundreds of thousands of tombstones, military and civilian, spreading hill after hill, field after field, across our landscape?

I found myself thinking about this recently while visiting the narrow strip of northern France and Belgium that has the densest concentration of young men’s graves in the world. This is the old Western Front of the First World War. Today, it is the final resting place for several million soldiers. Nearly half their bodies, blown into unrecognizable fragments by some 700 million artillery and mortar shells fired here between 1914 and 1918, lie in unmarked graves; the remainder are in hundreds upon hundreds of military cemeteries, still carefully groomed and weeded, the orderly rows of headstones or crosses covering hillsides and meadows.

Stand on a hilltop in one of the sites of greatest slaughter -- Ypres, the Somme, Verdun -- and you can see up to half-a-dozen cemeteries, large and small, surrounding you. In just one, Tyn Cot in Belgium, there are nearly 12,000 British, Canadian, South African, Australian, New Zealander, and West Indian graves.

Every year, millions of people visit the Western Front’s cemeteries and memorials, leaving behind flowers and photographs of long-dead relatives. The plaques and monuments are often subdued and remarkably unmartial. At least two of those memorials celebrate soldiers from both sides who emerged from the trenches and, without the permission of their top commanders, took part in the famous informal Christmas Truce of 1914, marked by soccer games in no-man’s-land. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175387/tomgram%3A_adam_hochschild%2C_war_redux/ (the story follows an intro titled 'War Redux')

[Uncle Joe]

1. I always thought this part was a surreal piece of history,

many of these men would go on to kill each other later and this was never done again for the remainder of the war.

I guess the war killed their humanity along with everything else.

Every year, millions of people visit the Western Front’s cemeteries and memorials, leaving behind flowers and photographs of long-dead relatives. The plaques and monuments are often subdued and remarkably unmartial. At least two of those memorials celebrate soldiers from both sides who emerged from the trenches and, without the permission of their top commanders, took part in the famous informal Christmas Truce of 1914, marked by soccer games in no-man’s-land.

There is also a direct connection between World War I aka; The Great War and the war with Vietnam.

After the war and during the treaty negotiations a young Ho Chi Min; supposedly an admirer of American Democracy at the time, wanted to meet with President Wilson and have him lobby France for Vietnam's independence.

France was adamant about not letting its' colony go and Wilson desperately wanting the Treaty of Versailles to be accepted in order for the League of Nations to be created as a deterrent against war conceded to France's desires, Ho Chi Min was rebuffed and the rest as they say is history.

Thanks for the thread, TomDisPatch.