At the going down of the sun

The sun is going down over the Menin Gate in Ypres, Belgium. People have already started to gather to pay tribute to those who died in the ‘War to End All Wars’, to remember those whose names have been carved into the walls of this triumphal arch, a memorial built in the 1920s. More than 54,000 names here, each belonging to someone whose remains were never found. As I wait in the crowd for the beginning of the evening Last Post Ceremony, I chat with three men who have journeyed here from Australia. “We are here for my great-uncle,” says one. “He was my great-grandfather,” says another. “We found his name on the walls this afternoon,” says the third. Now the crowd on this Tuesday evening grows silent; the space inside the arch reverberates with the rhythmic cadence of marching. Three buglers take their posts, United Kingdom legionnaires prepare to lay their wreaths. With the exception of the World War II Nazi occupation, this ceremony has played out every single night since November 11, 1928. It is a crucial rite of passage for anyone planning a First World War journey of remembrance. The town of Ypres itself is a perfect starting point for a pilgrimage to those many places that populate Canada’s history: Passchendaele, Zonnebeke, Arras, Vimy, Beaumont-Hamel. Seminal battlefield sites are a short drive from the town itself. One of the biggest Commonwealth Cemeteries holds court here. The Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917, replete with interactive displays, artifacts and recreated dugouts and trench systems, tells the tale of the Ypres Salient. The emotional impact of visiting the cemetery itself – Tyne Cot – is overwhelming. Farms and meadows surround the cemetery, stark contrast to the concrete German pillboxes that still squat inside the burial ground’s walls, foreground for a procession of headstones that seem to march into the distance as if in futile crusade. Nearly 12,000 graves here. The remains of nearly 9,000 are unidentified; their headstones are emblazoned: “Known to God.” “They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old.” Here at Tyne Cot we share those feelings with crowds who descend from a parade of buses. Having gotten a very early start on the morning after the Menin ceremony, our remembrance at St. Julian, a poignant Canadian memorial, is an exercise in solitude, a lonely moment of tribute. A granite statue 10-metres tall reaches skyward from a little grove of cedars imported from Canada. The defining feature of this memorial is a carved representation called the “Brooding Soldier”. It has been created in the “arms reversed” posture, the traditional military salute to the fallen. I make note of both that posture and the orientation of the memorial itself. When I align myself with the perspective of the “Brooding Soldier” I see a plowing tractor stirring up dust, orange-roofed barns. Not quite such an idyllic vista greeted Canadian soldiers who were stationed here on April 22, 1915. The orientation of the statue is significant. From the very direction this statue faces, the Germans attacked with chlorine gas, history’s first large-scale gas attack. The “reverse arms” pose is equally significant. By the 24th of April, 2000 Canadians had fallen here. Lest we forget. As we continue our journey over the next few days this sense of tragedy, of overwhelming loss, becomes almost too much to bear. For days we will ride a rollercoaster of emotions: pride, despair, hope, anger. Sometimes we feel all those things at the same place, almost at the same time. Before we achieve the city of Arras back in France itself a few hours’ drive from Ypres, we will stop and remember high atop a ridge whose name is capitalized in every Canadian history text. Here at Vimy we feel an emptiness, smitten by the sight of a sculpted woman borne down beyond hope, carved into a towering memorial surrounded by rounded depressions in the land that still mar the meadow – shell craters. But we also feel a great sense of pride. Here at Vimy, writ large, is part of Canada’s story. Lonelier, though no less powerful, is our visit next morning to a place equally central to our nation’s history, even though Newfoundland wasn’t part of Canada at the time. Just the same, the feelings I experience here at Beaumont-Hamel (particularly given my wife’s Newfoundland background) are overwhelmingly moving. That’s partly due to the sad story of one attack that took place on the morning of July 1, 1916. That morning roughly 800 Newfoundland troops scrambled out of the trenches and into No-Man’s Land. By end of day more than 700 were dead, wounded or missing. One reason emotions run rampant here at Beaumont-Hamel is because the battlefield here is little changed since the war. The trenches and shell craters here are almost intact – no other battlefield in France or Flanders is so close to its original wartime state. Rusted stakes still sprout from the ground here: strands of barbed wire once strung between them. In the distance across No-Man’s Land, I see a tree, crippled and skeletal. This is the Danger Tree. Advancing troops of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment would marshal there if they made it through the curtain of machine gun fire. Most didn’t. That evening my wife and I dine al fresco in a sprawling cobblestone piazza back in Arras, surrounded by Baroque and medieval buildings. In spite of the buzz of humanity populating the square on this summer evening, we are pensive and silent. Back in Ypres on that first night at Menin Gate, the crowd is equally silent. Now they lay the wreaths. The buglers blow, haunting brass intervals. Now the most powerful moment of silence I have ever experienced. The buglers raise horns to lips; they blow the “Rouse”. The announcer pronounces the exhortation as evening fades into night above the gate that straddles a roadway that so many marched along: into history, unto death. “At the going down of the sun and in the morning,” pronounces this disembodied voice, crackling, echoing. “We will remember them.”