Fallen heroes deserve better
FROM the monumental Arc de Triomphe in Paris to simple roadside plaques dotted throughout the country, France and Belgium memorialise their war dead over the centuries.
France’s Arc de Triomphe is being readied for massive commemorations next week to mark 100 years since the 1918 Armistice.
Its towering limestone columns commemorate Napoleon’s many campaigns and victories and lists his many generals.
There lies France’s Unknown Soldier from World War I below an eternal flame, among plaques marking contemporary campaigns.
In ancient cathedrals and village squares, lists of local soldiers, “enfants mort de la patrie”, remind successive generations and visitors the costs their communities paid defending France and Belgium.
This week and next both countries are focused on 1918 and the armistice signed in a railway carriage at Compiegne in the Somme valley, ending just over four years of constant conflict.
The human cost was horrendous for France and Belgium, their allies, including Australia, and for the Germans.
On November 11, Paris will host a massive military parade down the Champs Elysee to the Arc de Triomphe where the French President Emmanuel Macron and other world leaders will gather to remember the sacrifice.
Australian commemorations will focus on the village of Villers- Bretonneux, whose citizens believe they are forever in debt to the Diggers who recaptured it from the Germans.
In Ypres, Belgium on Monday night huge crowds gathered at dusk, waiting for the unveiling of replicas for the two stone lions which once guarded that ancient city’s Menin Road gates.
The originals, damaged by German bombardment in World War I have, since early last century, greeted visitors to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
Braving the bitter European autumn cold, spectators waited for the Last Post ceremony which has been performed nightly for over 90 years.
It is a moving occasion, a nightly tribute by Ypres citizens to honour the thousands of allied soldiers who, unlike their fellow dead, have no known graves.
Except on Tuesday the ceremony was altered to allow three coffins to lie in state as the ritual was conducted.
Each contained the remains of an unknown World War I dead, one from Britain’s Royal Warwick Regiment, one un- known Australian and one totally unknown.
The men have lain unmolested in their lonely graves for a century, until their recent discovery and exhumation.
The plan was to rebury them on Tuesday in World War I’s Tyne Cot cemetery, the Commonwealth’s largest.
However someone decided they should be publicly paraded beforehand. As with all funerals, it was a spectacle for the living, not the dead.
An all- male Warwick Regiment’s bearer party carried their own into the vast interior of vaulted columns of the Menin Gate memorial, commanded by their battalion RSM.
The two Australian coffins were escorted by a politically, sexually and socially correct mix of male and female ADF personnel, including a major general, a brace of mixed rank senior officers and NCO, elements of the Federation Guard and an RAAF band.
It smacked of Canberra’s PR Defence Dysfuncionettes PC agenda. Our dead deserve better. Lest we forget.