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Nov 15 2009

A Century of November, by WD Wetherell

Posted by: Lydia in Books, Brussels, tags: , ,

Charles Marden makes a journey from Vancouver Island to Belgium, tracing a physical path that is similar to my own. His story, though, is one of looking backwards for answers, rather than forwards for adventure. It is 1918, and Marden has just received a letter telling him that his son was killed in Belgium. In order to try to make sense of this tragedy, he travels to Belgium to find the last place where his son stood alive.

Marden is numb and unable to comprehend the personal and global tragedies of the war, his loss so great it was impossible for me to grasp. What really shook me were the descriptions of Belgium after just after the war. I have visited these cities, now so carefully reconstructed, and it is so difficult for me to imagine them destroyed. For me, these are sunlit towns filled with happy memories, so to read of their annihilation was like learning of the abusive childhood of a dear friend.

It was like having heard of heaven and hell, and finding out, in one revelatory moment, that this is what they consisted of – not magic zones of fire, not fleecy zones of clouds, but a vaguely undulating series of muddy fields that looked like a lumpy pudding.
“Voila“, Conner said, smiling ironically. “The Western Front”.
…
Back on the island he had has a friend named Andre Slater who had a farm and grew potatoes. It wasn’t a particularly big farm, not by western standards, and yet the battlefield he stared at could have fit inside with room to spare. In the end, it was this comparison that defeated him – thinking how many boys had tried trying to cross Andre Slater’s farm.

Photo from JaaQ

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One Response to “A Century of November, by WD Wetherell”
  1. Cedric says: November 15th, 2009 at 2:32 pm

    I live in South West-Flanders, where some of the biggest battles in WWI were fought, and pretty much every village has huge war cemeteries. The allied ones received lots of attention last week on 11/11. But obviously there are a lot of German war cemeteries as well. A couple of weeks ago I visited one in Wevelgem, just outside of Kortrijk, less than 5 km from where I live, and yet I had never even heard of it, so many (48,000) germans are buried there that they wrote 10 to 20 names on a single grave stone.
    http://bit.ly/1nSnup

    I know you went to Ypres for the cat parade, I don’t know if you’ve visited the Flanders Fields museum there, but if you haven’t you should definitely go check it out once. I find it hard to imagine my whole region being destroyed, I especially remember these 2 pictures:

    The village of Passendale from the air, before and after the war. Before you see roads, houses fields, afterwards it’s just mud
    http://bit.ly/4r9Ec9

    The city center of Ypres, in 1919, a year after the war. The whole city destroyed exept for some ruins of the cloth hall. There was some discussion after the war wether to rebuild Ypres or to leave it in ruin as a permanent reminded of the war. I’m glad they rebuilt it though…
    http://bit.ly/28eqVy