Posts Tagged ‘ World War I ’

  Report from the Western Front Lunch is delicious: venison in a root vegetable sauce, rosettes of garlicky whipped potato, fruit sorbet topped with a swirl of chocolate. The wine flows, as do the Belgian beers.  The point of this river cruise, however, is not a gastronomic extravaganza, but a commemorative tour of the Western Front, the main theater of war during World War I. In the next few days, we’ll see cemeteries—lots of cemeteries—and spectacular memorial structures. …Read More

The cemeteries of the Western Front tell a brutal truth: the sheer scale of the killing in World War I.  You wander down row upon row upon row of identical white headstones or crosses, gaze up at commemorative walls listing name after name after name. Huge monuments in honor of the dead went up in Belgium and France in the 1920s and 1930s, and stonemasons were still carving names on them when the second world war broke out in …Read More

One of the stops on our recent tour of World War I battlefields was the “Advanced Dressing Station” at Essex Farm, near Ypres, Belgium. It was here that Canadian military doctor Lieutenant-Colonel John MacCrae wrote the iconic poem “In Flanders Fields.” I mentioned this visit to a friend the other day and she instantly started reciting, “In Flanders Fields the poppies blow, between the crosses, row on row…”  The Great War still has its stamp on us. Since I’m …Read More

Verdun. For many Frenchmen, the ten-month battle that took place here from February to December, 1916, symbolized the whole Great War. Verdun was where the Germans aimed to “bleed the French white” and where the French vowed, “they shall not pass.” Like much of the Western Front, the area of Verdun is consecrated to teaching about and memorializing the first World War. Here, our group stopped at an information board telling about the “Voie Sacrée”–the “Sacred Way” that …Read More

A few more photos from my recent trip to the Western Front. After World War I, sculptors memorialized the people who had been swept up in the cataclysm. Those who fought: And those who grieved: The “iron harvest” of shells provides materials for newer yet still anguished work. Photos Betsy Woodman Note: to enlarge, click on the photo and then again on the second one that comes up.  

What a beautiful September afternoon! All too well-fed from lunch, we set out to explore the Trench of Death in Diksmuide, Belgium. The view is deceptive. How could anything violent have happened here? In the distance rises the church spire of the town. The sun plays on the orange-red tile roofs. The Yser Canal flows peacefully by. But this was a site where Belgian troops held back the German advance in World War I. Only by a concerted …Read More

It’s Veteran’s Day. Ninety-seven years ago, shortly after 5:00 AM, Paris time, French, British, and German delegations signed an agreement to have the shooting of the Great War stop at 11:00 AM. On this day of the year,  I experience a sense of time warp, a feeling of being transported back to a moment in history. The savage noise of the guns is–for a little while, anyway–replaced by an enormous sacred silence. The two world wars form a big …Read More

Everyone gets assigned a different war. My dad, Ev Woodman, served in the United States Navy in World War II and took part in the invasion of Normandy. Deafening noise, shells bursting on the beach, the ocean running pink with blood—he got the whole infernal nightmare. His dad, in contrast, didn’t get to France until shortly after the Armistice in World War I. James B. Woodman, M.D., was quickly put to work doing “reconstructive surgery” on the wounded, …Read More

We’ve just had the umpteenth snowfall of the season, and I hear the scrape of my neighbor’s shovel and the rumble of snow plows going by. On Facebook, there are dozens of pictures of snow banks, snow plows, snow forts, snow angels made by little kids. Sifting through old family photographs, I come across similar photographs taken in January, 1919, in Franklin, NH. New-fallen snow there, too, and children in snowsuits. Like this pic of my dad shortly …Read More