10 November 2003

In Flanders Fields

I listened fairly closely to the BBC this morning. It is Monday and it is time to get organized. Put the shake-out of the college football weekend behind. My Wolverines moved up as they got a "by" week. The teams ahead of them with one loss are choking. Now, we just need for Alabama to beat LSU, and UCLA to take out USC. We need to win the last two, against Northwestern and theBuckeyes. Then it will be interesting to see who plays Oklahoma on New Year's Day.

I do not want to go to work this morning, but I have no option. For the first time in my career, I am a private civilian. My Government customers are confronting a holiday in honor of our Veterans tomorrow, and many have stretched the holiday out by taking leave today. So it will be quiet in many of the cubicles. I wish I could join them, but I have not been working long enough to build a vacation account, and besides, I have won a little contract with the Department of Homeland Security to provide a 24 hour watch position for the Homeland Security Watch Center. I have some ideas on how to do it and need to hire a couple kids with some of the right experience to start sitting there, answering the phone.

I'm afraid they are going to call me, since I am the project manager on this. I was notified Friday and I'm sure they expect someone to be there today. We have the kickoff meeting this afternoon at Nebraska avenue, and with the holiday tomorrow I imagine I will get to work in my own office tomorrow.

It is the anniversary of Martin Luther's birth. I would hope that the Muslim who will reform his great faith has been born. They are overdue for their own reformation.

The Iraq business is unsettling. I am a believer in finishing what you start out to do, even if it is brutish and unpleasant. That is why Vietnam sat so uneasily on us, attempting to balance humanitarian concerns in an awful equation. We should have blown the dykes on the Red River and mined the harbors at the beginning, if what we wanted was victory. But we couldn't quite figure out what we wanted and we killed nearly 60,000 of our uniformed forces and hundreds of thousands of them, men women and children.

I am the furthest thing from a pacifist. But I am happy that I don't have to go to Baghdad. But I am more than a little apprehensive. They are talking about reinstating the Draft. My kids are 19 and 21, in the heart of the envelope. I hope they don't get sucked into the machine. If the draft comes back I am not sure what I will tell them to do. In my time some of my classmates opted to go to Canada to avoid Vietnam service. The Canadians are in interesting lot, and they have not always been the nation of pacifists we know now.

Eighty-four years ago a web of trenches snaked from the English Channel south through Belgium and France to the Swiss Border. They were all connected and there were men living in some of them for nearly four years. It was the most appalling episode in the history of warfare, hands down, case closed, no contest.

In the flat marshy territory of Belgium, the constant artillery exchanges destroyed the drainage schemes that kept the fields productive and me lived in the mud, ate mud, were buried in it, and began to rot while they still lived.

We don't even know how to say the words anymore. The kids who came to this featureless lunar landscape called it the Ypres Salient. In French it would go something like "ee-pres," with the emphasis on the first part of the squeak. The troops didn't know that and they called it "Wipers." The Flemish who live there now call it Ieper. Plus ca change, I always say.

Dan Damon highlighted it in the dance-off segment of the Morning Update from the BBC. It was a great story and a sad one. The Belgians are going to drive a motorway through a large meadow in the district of Flanders that once featured a village known as Passchendaele. What happened here is this place is officially known as the Third Battle of Ypres, but it was composed of multiple sequential between late  July and November 12, 1917. Participants on the Allied side include the British, the Australian-New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) and the Canadians, who arrived on the field on October 26.

Allied Headquartes felt that if Passchendale could be taken the allies could break out the Wipers Salient and clear the coast of Belgium for a left hook around the Kaiser's forces. After an unprecedented artillery barrage that rolled across the German lines, front to back, and feeding the youth of the Empire into the mud, the attack settled into the mud in four days. It always did in the Salient, and the Headquarters, where it was dry, never seemed to figure that out, calculated that additional tons of munitions would change the topology. General Haig, Commander of the British Expeditionary Forces (BEF) would not give up and continued the offensive.

The original grand objective was quickly abandoned, but the high command was resolute in the notion that some sort of victory had to be achieved before the end of the year. In order to do so, the forces on Flanders Fields contributed close to 250,000 casualties each. 42,000 of them are still in the Flanders mud where they are about to construct the motorway. The Canadians suffered 15,654 casualties, over 2600 KIA and 1,000 still in the mud near Passchendaele Ridge.

When the Canadians arrived they confronted a landscape that had been subject to three years of intense shelling. This is the front that Cabadian John McCrae described in the single best-known poem from the war, back when verse had meter and a scheme and a point:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The fields they saw were a desolate landscape of stagnant water-filled craters, ragged tree stumps and deep mud that sucked off the boots and leggings of the troops. There were no roads on this muddy moon. It took the infantry eight hours to stagger six kilometers from the depot at Wipers to the front. The wreckage of the current fight and the two major engagements which preceded it. It stunk of death, dead horses and dead men. Of all the battlefields in which yong men were sent to fight, this might have been the worst.

The Canadian 3rd and 4th Divisions entered the battle on the 26th of October and fought for six days without sleep or sustenance. One of their battalions lost  70% of its Table of Organization and another 75%. The Canadians were awarded a total of 9 Victoria Crosses for their conduct.

The VC is the British equivalent of the American Congressional Medal.

There was an operational pause for a week that started on the last day of October, and reinforcements arrived. The fresh troops took positions southwest of the chalky mound that had been the village of Passchendaele on Nov. 5th and assaulted the village of Mosselmarkt. All but one officer in the attack but the Canadians maintained good order, with Non-Commissioned Officer taking up the slack. By the 7th of November most of the Canadians were back just outside of Wipers, just where they started. On November 10th, eighty-four years ago, the Battle of Paaschendaele was over and the Canadians were ordered to pull back to the vicinity of Vimy Ridge.

The BBC told me this morning the A19 motorway extension is going to drive right through the midst of it all. They are doing the right thing. There is a survey in progress to document what will be destroyed. Archeologists are making some interesting discoveries before the bulldozers come through. There was real life in those trenches, life and death. By November, when Third Wipers ended, the British had managed to advance only five miles, to the obliterated village of Passchendaele.

Historians estimate that over the course of the three Wipers catastrophes more than 300,000 Commonwealth soldiers died, along with 200,000 Germans. One hundred thousand of them are still out there, unmarked by crosses, only by wild poppies. Later this year they will be under concrete, and the motorway is planned to be open to traffic by 2005 at the latest. I read that it is a little like paving over Waterloo, or putting an off-ramp from the Shirley Highway into Arlington National Cemetery..

I haven't heard much from the Canadians about this, but live and let live. But it wasn't that long ago. My Grandfather arrived in France with the American Expeditionary Force six months after this happened.

If they bring back the draft I don't know what to tell the kids. Telling them to go to Canada is a pretty strong step.

Maybe I can convince them to the Navy, where it is safe.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra