The German War Cemetary
Looking at history from a graveyard perspective
It was that year. A year, as we say in Dutch, pregnant with anticipation, hope and fear of the end of days. A solar eclipse in summer seemed like such a good fit for the last year of a millennium. Like so many other Dutch, we set out for the north of France, that August. The eclipse would be best visible in its totality there. We had booked a chambre d’hôte in a castle. Nobody knew what Airbnb was back then, because it did not exist. Booking your own travel was still a bit tricky, but we were the generation that would change all that.
And so, almost in a caravan of hope, we went.
The eclipse, I didn’t see. We were trapped in the part of Normandy from which it is very hard to get out of on short notice, and as the moon was about halfway to cover the sun, the clouds came in between the people watching and the phenomenon. That did not take away the magic of the moment. I was there. Stood in a sort of field-cum-parking and watched the sky with many strangers, knowing that in the eclipse-viewing zone, the dark ribbon stretched over this part of Europe, many more were doing the same. I felt connected to these people.
The Ignored Cemetery
Later those days, we went for a drive to take in a bit of Normandy. Somehow, I was drawn to a cemetery. This being the region of the D-Day landings, there are many war cemeteries here. Well tended to, shining, bright memorials to those allied soldiers who died fighting for our freedom. Americans, Brits, Canadians. One even better kept than the other. Not this one. This one was a bit, well, ignored in a way. I wanted to know more, so we stopped and got out. The headstones were not as neatly brushed and white as the headstones on the other cemeteries. Time had left her mark here, and I wondered why we had let her.
Growing up as a kid in The Netherlands of the 1970s and ’80s meant growing up with an aversion for the Germans. The wounds of the Second World War were still too fresh to be forgotten. Like after every war in human history, the victors were celebrated as the good guys, and the losers as the bad guys. Don’t get me wrong, WWII was initiated by the Germans, and the final solution the leaders had in mind was one of the, if not the, worst things ever conjured up and executed in the history of mankind. What I’m saying is, that despite that, not all Germans were bad people. And on that cemetery, looking at the ages of the fallen German soldiers, it was all too obvious. On all sides, lives were lost. Young boys sent to the frontline, probably without much of a choice, to die in the name of their leaders. In war, there are no winners.
Maybe I missed one of those rare phenomena, an event of a generation, when clouds shrouded that eclipse. But other clouds in my mind were blown away. There are no victors in war. There are only losers.
