FLANDERS HAUNTS THEM STILL.
‘Cries, shouting in the dark, machine guns’
The Canadalaan Road, so named for the Canadians who died here, winds past the brick houses of Passchendaele village, past the groomed gardens and fertile fields of Flanders. Soon the last of the sugar beets will be harvested and the rich earth that sweeps to a natural rise will be furrowed into uniform rows. Flanders is nothing if not tidy.
The Flanders that Will R. Bird encountered in November 1917 was anything but tidy. It was here that the young Nova Scotian soldier witnessed a harvest of sorts; a human harvest that consumed 15,654 Canadians and tens of thousands of other allied troops and Germans.
By the time Bird and the 100,000 other Canadian soldiers gathered to pry the defending Germans from the top of the slope, millions of artillery rounds had wiped the village from the face of the earth. The blood-soaked Flanders haunted Bird for the rest of his life.
“Cries, shouting in the dark, machine guns, shells, wild orders . ... Germans scant yards from us, shooting point-blank from the cover of a road,” wrote Bird, who became a writer after two horrific years serving on the Western Front with the Black Watch of Canada.
“Passchendaele means, to the soldier who fought there, more tragic memories than any other part of the line, pictures burned into his brain, never to be erased.”
Bird believed the spirit of his brother Stephen, who died in battle in France in 1915, protected him from those point-blank German bullets and bombs. In the Flanders of today you don’t have to look far to find Canadian spirits from the past.
There are 150 military cemeteries in eight square kilometres — so many that they now seem like natural outcroppings on the Flemish landscape.
The burial grounds and the battle sites have become a tourist draw for Brits, Australians and thousands of Canadians. It’s the business of war voyeurism. And these days business in booming.
“It’s the engine that runs the economy here,” says Steve Douglas, an expat from Kitchener, Ont., who owns the British Grenadier Bookshop in downtown Ypres and runs a battlefield tour company.
“There was a lot of Canadian action in this area. People come to follow in the footsteps of their grandfathers, uncles or relatives. The vast majority of Canadians we get are in their 50s, 60s or even 70s, and have recently realized they have a connection to this area, a relative that was killed here or fought over here,” says Douglas, who predicts an even greater rush of Canadians next year for the 100th anniversary of the Vimy Ridge battle.
Museums, like the graves, are scattered across Flanders. From faux German and Allied trenches, to the square where soldiers were executed for desertion, to a preserved mansion where troops relaxed between battles. None can compete with the isolated, haunting monuments to Canadian battles or the rows of maple leaf-impressed tombstones.
“It’s impossible to not feel the past here. It touches you,” says Raoul Saracen, a Belgian and battlefield guide for 35 years and one of more than 50 official guides in the YpresPasschendaele area.
Saracen sweeps his arm wide to illustrate the stunning pastoral vista from the high ground of Hill 62 monument. He points to where the Canadians boys worked their way up the exposed slope under direct artillery and machine-gun fire to capture the hill.
“So many of them just vanished when a powerful shell exploded near them,” says Saracen. “Blasted to bits in an instant.”
That explains why so many graves have tombstones with a maple leaf, but no name. “Known Unto God” is carved into stones, row upon row.
Will Bird lived through two years of slaughter during the war. He fought in Flanders and at Vimy Ridge in France, believing the whole time that his brother had his back. During a visit to the Passchendaele in 1932 — 52 years before his death at the age of 93 — Bird observed two Flemish boys picking cabbage and turnips in the former killing fields, called the Ypres Salient during the war.
“It seemed incredible, standing there, that such things had really happened, that the Salient was no more,” he wrote.
For Bird and thousands of other veterans, Passchendaele was more than a place on a map, it was a defining, almost unspeakable event, “more livid than any words can express, a horror as heavy and almost as visible as the blanketing, clammy, soul-searching mists that clung to every shell-tortured acre.”
By rights, Bird’s personal sacrifice to Canada should have been enough when the Great War came to an end in 1918. But that was not to be. His only son Steve was killed in battle in France in the Second World War, not far from where his brother and protector died in the First World War.