When I was a young child my aunt Martha used to take me out on
Sunday afternoons. She took me out to visit war cemeteries. In
Flanders, Belgium, where I grew up, there is always a war cemetery,
conveniently close to where you live.
When I was a young child my aunt Martha used to take me out on Sunday afternoons. She took me out to visit war cemeteries. In Flanders, Belgium, where I grew up, there is always a war cemetery, conveniently close to where you live.
I remember in particular, the Canadian, the Polish, the American and the German cemetery. They were all nicely landscaped, but basically they were all the same: an endless, surreal world of clean, neatly maintained tombstones of young people. While my aunt was sitting on a bench, sunken in memories, I used to walk the rows, reading the ages: “20, 27, 24, 19, 22, 27, …”. Some graves had no name, no age, but simply stated: “known only to God” Some tombstones said: “three people” or “five people” “known only to God.”
The war cemeteries of my youth weigh heavily on my mind now that we are sending young Americans to a foreign country, ready to destroy, to hurt and to kill and to be killed. In our name.
Our lives here seem to go on as usual, we go to work, complain about traffic, watch football, and try to lose weight as much as we did before. Location wise as well as psychologically, a war against Iraq is far from our bed, distant from our daily life. But that does not lessen our responsibility. If we approve or even just tolerate an American military action against Iraq, we are responsible for the creation of a new war cemetery, for tombstones with “24, 20, 27, 17” or “known only to God.”
Last December we visited Ypres in Belgium. Ypres is a beautiful, quiet little town. It was destroyed, bombed and gassed in the “first” or “great” war of 1914 – 1918, the “war to end all wars.” The beautiful Cloth Hall at the grand place formed the heart of Ypres from the 12th century on. The Cloth Hall together with the rest of the town, was razed to the ground as a result of German shelling. It was rebuilt afterwards, meticulously reconstructed to the original medieval designs.
In fact the whole town was reconstructed. We were there around Christmas and a Nativity Scene had been set up in front of the impressive Cloth Hall. It was a replica of the ruins of the town of Ypres in 1918 and it carried all the names of the wars from after that war that would end all wars. Chilling.
The rebuilt Cloth Hall houses a museum, named “In Flanders Fields.” It is a war museum with a strong message of peace. It shows a country made into a battlefield. It is an interactive museum, regional as well as universal with personal statements of “common men and women, soldiers and civilians, young and old, friend or foe.” Their message is clear to everybody, “In a war, no matter where or when, everybody loses.”
In the museum you relive the terror, the fear, the pain, the hurt, the suffering of helpless people in a war zone. The desperate eyes of exhausted, suffering men and women follow you. A name, a real person’s name is given to you at the entrance of the museum and you follow that person through the war. I followed Nellie Spindler. She was a young nurse and she died when the war hospital where she worked was bombed. If a Nellie Spindler dies in Iraq, I will be responsible.
War is not something from a movie. It is real misery for real human beings. War is hurting and wounding and killing and destroying what others have built and love. It is hell.
America might have very good reasons to be upset and angry, very good reasons to be suspicious and “sick and tired of deception.” America might have good reasons to show its power and to remind the forgetful UN that Iraq has to be watched. But does America really have a good enough reason to start a war? I do not believe so.
Rosette Van de Velde is a Morgan Hill resident and a retired psychologist. The Board of Contributors is comprised of local writers whose views appear on Tuesdays and Fridays.
