The Weight of History

On to Dun-sur-Meuse, a pretty, if scruffy, little town with an ancient church towering on the hill above.  Throughout this region, one is repeatedly drawn to its history through roadside memorials and signs to cemeteries.

In Dun, the river bridge is named after General John Pershing who led the US First Army here on the decisive Meuse-Argonne Offensive that led to the Armistice of 1918.  Quite an achievement but at such a price.  The offensive lasted 47 days and deployed 1.2 million US troops.  26,277 of them were killed.  It was the largest battle in US military history.

14,000 of them are buried at the nearby US cemetery.  It's a beautiful and moving place to visit and we spend a couple of hours in the exhibition and then wandering through the headstones.  It seemed particularly moving that these young men died in the few weeks leading up to the armistice.

The American Battle Monuments Commission does a first rate job of maintaining the cemetery and have done so since the 1920s when they first organised visits for widows and mothers.  The exhibition notes, with shame, that these visits were segregated with separate trips for black widows and mothers.  This was in contrast with the ethos of the graves where officers and men, black and white, jew and gentile are buried alongside each other.
It's a hundred years now and those visiting to find graves of relatives are doing so from a historic perspective.  I wonder what this cemetery will look like in another 50 years.  I hope it can remain a place of peaceful reflection on the madness we get ourselves into.

28,000 German soldiers lost their lives too and we stopped at a German cemetery just down the road.  They're packed in tighter and the grass isn't so neatly trimmed.  But these graves are treated with respect too.  There were plenty of 'Stars of David' commemorating German Jews who fought for their country.  How soon that was forgotten.

At a French cemetery alongside the canal a few days later, we found large numbers of headstones for Muslim soldiers who fought for their (French) country too.  Let's not allow ourselves to forget that.

Incidentally, there are wild poppies everywhere but no ancient trees.  I can readily see how the poppy appeared after the battles and became our symbol of remembrance.

Back to the here and now, we were leaving the boat for a few days again to cheer ourselves up at our grandson's 1st birthday party in Brussels.  That's getting to be a long drive as we head south.  We were summonsed early to babysit and needed dinner in a hurry.  In a travesty of French cuisine, we headed to the Pizza machine just by the harbour.  Madness but really rather good pizza!