Menin Gate

[Mcthecat]

A few shots of a trip to Ypres. These pics mean a lot to me as my grandfather served (and survived) the western front. On the wall behind the first pic, behind the poppy is the names of those who fell around Ypres in WW1 from my local Battalion, The Durham Light Infantry who lost 13,000 men in ww1 and served in all major battles including the Somme Ypres, Passendale and Messine. Just local lads from the fields, shipyards and coal mines. Not my usual stuff but very sad and very honoured all the same.

Mick

[popnfresh]

The second one works best for me. It conveys the sense of one small solitary remembrance on a memorial with a vast list of the names of the fallen. It's an effective shot.

[Jim Pascoe]

They are a great set, and the second one is my favourite too.  For anyone not familiar with the Menin gate it is a very poignant place to visit, as are many of the other battlefield memorials in the area.  One only has to look at a map to see how many dozens of cemeteries are nearby - mostly in locations where the men actually died.  I visited in 2002 and seem to remember that they play the Last Post by bugle every night at sunset next to the Menin Gate.  The names listed are of the 60,000 soldiers whose bodies were never found and have no burial place.  What makes it very creepy is that it's not hard to find your own name listed - mine is J Pascoe, as shown in the attached picture.

Jim

[Tony Jay]

As a species though we don't learn well from history, do we?
Memorials like those should turn us away from conflict but they seem to have accelerated over the last 100 years as each tin-pot dictator around the world has tried to stake his claim for immortality and the real dictators (powers) have aimed to protect their interests.

Interestingly the second image seems much more poignant to me than the others.
Thank you for sharing.

Regards

Tony Jay

[Jim Pascoe]

As a species though we don't learn well from history, do we?
Memorials like those should turn us away from conflict but they seem to have accelerated over the last 100 years as each tin-pot dictator around the world has tried to stake his claim for immortality and the real dictators (powers) have aimed to protect their interests.

Interestingly the second image seems much more poignant to me than the others.
Thank you for sharing.

Regards

Tony Jay

I quite agree Tony.  It seems to me that at the time all sorts of reasons are given for fighting a war.  But many years later in hindsight they all seem to kick off for the same underlying reasons - Greed, Money, Power.  The common man get's led by the nose to go and get slaughtered for what?
After reading a great deal of military history, a visit to the battlefields of Belgium and northern France is a salutory lesson.  In one place near Albert on the Somme, I climbed over a gate into a small wood which, in WW1 was in the middle of the Front Line.  Of course at the time the trees would have all been destroyed, but the wood has regenerated.  The wood was deserted and I soon realised that the ground was not flat anywhere, in fact it was like dimpled egg-carton.  It was completely covered in vegetation between the trees, but it was obvious that the whole area was cratered.  What surprised me most was the amount of munitions still lying around after over 90 years.  The pictures attached are just a couple of the items I saw.  The map shows the size of these rounds.  After a few days in this area I returned home - but could not shake off the low feeling I was left with for about a week.

Jim

[Tony Jay]

I quite agree Tony...  What surprised me most was the amount of munitions still lying around after over 90 years...

I wouldn't go too near to those shells, they may be duds, but then again, maybe not!

Regards

Tony Jay

[Mcthecat]

Thanks everyone. I'm printing them this afternoon and i just couldnt decide my best shot, No2 it is.
Strange but when i first visited the gate, i looked up and the first names i saw were those of my local regiment.

Mick

[RSL]

As a species though we don't learn well from history, do we?
Memorials like those should turn us away from conflict but they seem to have accelerated over the last 100 years as each tin-pot dictator around the world has tried to stake his claim for immortality and the real dictators (powers) have aimed to protect their interests.

Have we ever learned from history? Memorials don't teach. Mick remembers things he should remember, but most of today's kids think WW I took place in the seventeenth century or somewhere back there. As far as they're concerned, Hastings is just as real as, say, the Battle of the Bulge. WW I, WW II, Korea, and, increasingly, Vietnam, and their memorials, are just stories out of a history book.

It might help if the world were to show more movies like "Saving Private Ryan." But Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Kim, al-Assad, Castro, and others like them would look at the body parts flying and the blood flowing and laugh.

We never learn. It's not just about wars. Tinpot dictators like Hugo Chávez keep popping up and capturing their people with populist propaganda because people simply don't know any better. Only a tiny portion of the world's population have even the foggiest idea what war really is like. But it's not just wars. We never learn anything. We also keep doing stupid things like trying J.M. Keyes's economic theories in spite of all the demonstrations of their catastrophic results. Go figure. . . It's a duh! world.

Love #2 by the way Mick.

[Tony Jay]

Have we ever learned from history?

Absolutely Russ.
Thanks for enlarging on my comment.
It is awfully sad isn't it.

Regards

Tony Jay

[popnfresh]

It is awfully sad isn't it.

It's human nature. Frankly I'm amazed we've made it this far.

[WalterEG]

Russ,

I am with you 100% on all the points you have made.

I feel that at the core of the issue, however, is our curiosity with the hurt of others.  In our saner moments we express compassion and empathy for the guy copping a clobbering in a bar room brawl.  But it does not impede one iota our impulse to watch.  Could the same apply to contact sports like boxing, wrestling and football?  Even motor racing where a gamble with pain and even death is the unseen player at the table.

The fact that we use emotive terminology to war and warriors shows that there is considerable universality to the notion of the game of war having a glorious aspect.  And it poses the question, is our humanity totally universal or do we see the fallen of the foe as NOT having paid the ultimate sacrifice but as having died in conflict (irrespective of who threw the double six to start)?

As an Australian I have been brain-washed since early childhood by the myth of ANZAC — a military defeat which is seen as the moment that forged our nationality.  At ANZAC Cove there is a moinument with an inscription written by the leader of the Turkish Fifth Army who led the Turkish campaign at Gallipoli which shows that it does not always have to be thus:

"Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives…
You are now living in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours…
You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace, after having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well."

Ataturk, 1934

[/i]

W

[Tony Jay]

"Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives…
You are now living in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours…
You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace, after having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well."

Ataturk, 1934

[/i]

No one who has ever fought a war will want to willingly do so again...

Regards

Tony Jay

[popnfresh]

No one who has ever fought a war will want to willingly do so again...

True for most people. Then there's people like Hitler. Fought in the trenches in WW1 and yet couldn't wait to start another one.

[RSL]

The fact that we use emotive terminology to war and warriors shows that there is considerable universality to the notion of the game of war having a glorious aspect.  And it poses the question, is our humanity totally universal or do we see the fallen of the foe as NOT having paid the ultimate sacrifice but as having died in conflict (irrespective of who threw the double six to start)?

Hi Walter,

The universality of the idea of war as a game grows as we see more and more people in high political places who've never been in the military or anywhere near an actual war. It scares the hell out of me to think how few members of the U.S. Congress and administration have had military service, and of those few how few have been in or near combat. Fiascoes like Gallipoli should be seen as warnings about the uncertainties of war, but they never seem to be seen as such in the minds of politicians who are far away from a place like ANZAC beach, and see military results as tables of numbers.

Don't misunderstand what I'm saying. I spent 26 years in the Air Force and went to war three times, and I certainly understand that there are wars that have to be fought. But it seems to me that since WW II we've fought too many questionable wars, often with military leaders who were more politician than soldier. To me Vietnam is the classic example. The bizarre idea that you can measure military success in body counts would never occur to a real soldier like Eisenhower or Patton, but it was Westmoreland's measure of relative victory.

With as much combat as we've had lately it wouldn't surprise me to see our government bulk up again with ex-soldiers, and that's a comforting thought. But in the meantime we need to pray there isn't another ANZAC beach.

Mustafa Kemel Ataturk was a great leader, and I think Turkey is going to miss him more and more and they continue on their current course.

And, Pop, unless I misread history I think Hitler always was more politician than solider. Certainly the decisions he made on his Eastern front show that he wasn't much of a strategist or tactician.

[popnfresh]

Pop, unless I misread history I think Hitler always was more politician than solider. Certainly the decisions he made on his Eastern front show that he wasn't much of a strategist or tactician.

The Austrian Corporal was both. He was decorated with the Iron Cross for his deeds in the Wehrmacht during WW1. As Fuhrer he was the supreme commander of Germany's armed forces, as well as everything else. And of course he loved to strut around in his brown uniform.

But yes, at the end of the day Hitler was a lousy strategist. Europe was his oyster after Dunkirk in 1940. But after that it all fell apart. He failed to carry out Operation Sea Lion when he had the chance. He let himself get distracted by the bombing of Berlin by the British in August 1940 and lost the Battle of Britain. And he refused to believe reports from the Abwehr that Stalin had moved his tank factories east of the Urals and was producing armaments in vast quantities. Mere Slavs were incapable of doing such a thing according to Nazi dogma. The rest is history. Simply being a soldier doesn't automatically make you a good one. He had, as Laurence J. Peter would say, risen to his level of incompetence.

[jule]

Absolutely Russ.
Thanks for enlarging on my comment.
It is awfully sad isn't it.

Regards

Tony Jay

If I may so indulge in my own expression though a poem I wrote a few years ago;of the sadness I feel that as a species we keep indulging in wars to kill each other.

Dialect     
By     Julie Stephenson


I listen to the breeze for answers
to this incessant vengeance from backyard to border -
anger that festers with ferocity
against attempts to annihilate the Spirit;
attempts that lay bloody and strewn across the centuries,
enshrouded in promises
- of Peace, and atrocities never to be repeated.

Yet, as memories fade,
the graves insidiously multiply,
those words buried to rot in the earth with generations passed.

Those words of Peace –
doomed as they were formed
from the interpretation of texts bound with indoctrination,
-   religious dyslexia.

Those words of Peace -
dipped into wells of black,
stick on the tongues of those
whose foreheads and palms perspire
with revenge, fear and the anticipation of expanding power.

Those words of peace composing sentences of death;
dialects from ignorance and arrogance,
rejected by those who listen to the breeze
and hear the mournful cries from the graves
of those who had no words,
only tears.