"In Flanders' Fields ...."

It wasn't until I visited Ypres, Belgium, that I began to read a lot about World War I. Ypres was completely destroyed in not one, but three separate battles. In Ypres, Germany first used poison gas on the Western Front. In the third battle alone, approximately one half million men lost their lives. By war's end, Ypres was a wasteland of mud, trenches, filth, graves, standing water, and broken trees. However, the people almost immediately went to work and completely rebuilt the city, including the beautiful "Cloth Hall" that was its centerpiece. We arrived on the outskirts of Ypres on a beautiful summer evening. Sign after sign pointed us to cemeteries. These are not the grand and grandiose cemeteries of World War II, but small, intimate graveyards that are right on the farmyards of Belgians. Each is walled in and most have bright red roses growing among the white stones. As you read the markers, you are struck by the youth of those who died. The horrible suffering of the men who fought in World War I is conveyed in what is recognized by many as one of the best museums in the world, "The Flanders Field Museum" which is in the rebuilt Cloth Hall.

One of the most memorable books I have read about the men who returned from battle is "The Crimson Portrait" by Jody Shields. Shields tells the story of those men who returned to England and were ready to be a part of life again, but were not accepted by their friends and families due to their horrible facial wounds and deformities.There was no plastic surgery, as we know it, in those times. Having lived through unimaginable pain, these men who should have been hailed as heroes were instead forced by the society and times they lived in to hide as if they had done something shameful. "The Crimson Portrait" tells of one of the solutions that was tried; that of forming extremely thin masks of tin that were then painted, using pre-war photos of the men, to look as much as possible like their former faces.

British author Pat Barker has written an astounding trilogy about World War I. Although each book is a superb piece of literature on its own, I strongly recommend reading all three in order. They are "Regeneration", "The Eye in the Door", and "The Ghost Road". They raise questions about shell shock and its treatment, homosexuality and prejudice, the value of love as a brutal war is being waged, and duty to one's country when there is almost certain knowledge that following orders will lead to death. These books do not provide any satisfying conclusions, but introduce a series of conflicted men who are dealing with a new kind of war, where weapons are sophisticated, but leaders seem content to allow senseless slaughter. By the last scene of "The Ghost Road", the reader is sickened by what these men are ordered to endure. Why did these men suffer so? What did this war accomplish? Barker offers no explanations, other than the fact that war is waged by human beings, who make terrible mistakes.

Since 1928, there has been a ceremony every night at precisely 8:00 p.m. in Ypres. Under the beautiful pure white Menin Gate monument, people quietly begin to assemble. Traffic is stopped. The monument and ceremony honor those British troops who were lost in the three battles of Ypres and whose bodies were never found (some 90,000 of them). A lone bugler tries to call them home with "The Last Post". If you hear that lonely sound, or stand in any of the small, quiet graveyards around Ypres, you may feel your soul has been touched.