I was still protected by layers of modern time and place when the minibus stopped at the crest of a hillock and I looked out over ploughed fields and brick farms. In the distance lay Ypres, a classic Flemish town, its high belfry tower the only vertical surface in sight. Though we were in summer, I saw a flat, damp landscape with not even a poppy to brighten the horizon.
- "The Ypres Salient," said the young guide, waving his arm over the unimpressive countryside. "During World War I, from 1914 to 1918, a million young men were killed or wounded here. Ninety thousand bodies are still missing."
- I tried to visualize the soldiers but all I could imagine were poppies. When I was young, living in New Zealand half a century ago, I never thought of poppies growing wild in fields where the soil has been freshly churned. They were only words in a poem we had to learn at school and then they became artificial, red flowers bought to wear in buttonholes on the eleventh of November. Every year, my classmates and I were given cloth poppies to sell to help the wounded veterans. Our history teacher told us they symbolized the loss of a generation.
- "During the Great War," she said, "thousands of our young men fought near the little market town of Ypres in Belgium, where they died, day after day, night after night, for four years. Soldiers from more than thirty countries died there."
- We children sat in silence. We could not comprehend the numbers; too many people, too many countries, too long ago. World War I was just as distant as the Roman battles we studied in Latin class. As a schoolgirl I found World War II much more present. My father had returned from it only a few years before and an aura of troubled mystery hung in his silences whenever my mother mentioned her years of lonely anguish. But even that war belonged to my parents' generation, not to mine. I was not really involved, I thought, surprised by a wave of remorse. The Belgian guide interrupted my daydreaming.
- "Remains of men are still being dug up. After formal identification, the family is notified. When no family is left, then the body is reburied in one of the military cemeteries with full honours."
- "But why are bodies still being found after ninety years?" I asked.
- "The soil is clay which preserves anything caught in it." The guide went on to explain. In 1914, when it became clear to the Western Allies that the front line, which ran in a straight line from the coast to the Swiss border, was going to be broken by the Germans at Ypres, they opened up the canal and river system control gates and the area was turned into a sea of mud. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. Glutinous tentacles captured the fallen soldiers, burdened by heavy backpacks, often drowning them before they got up again. The soldiers just disappeared into the ground and were covered by more mud thrown up by the continuous shelling and exploding mines.
- Oppressed and uneasy, I climbed back into the bus. This battlefield excursion was peeling away my protective camouflage.
- Our next stop was a farm, neat and new, with a duck pond out front. Our guide wanted to show us an open box by the front gate that held a rusty rifle and a shell the size of a baby in it.
- "Every home has one of these. This is where the farmers put the unearthed live ammunition until the Belgian bomb disposal unit collects it. Two tons were found here, including a big gun and several unexploded mines, when this pond was dug a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, Belgians are still being maimed or killed by a war long ended."
- The tidy landscape seemed so peaceful and prosperous. Once again I had trouble imagining the stench and smoke, the screeching and screaming of men and weapons, and the kilometres of mud, shell holes and a few stark stumps of trees. Every object I perceived was built or planted after 1918. The farms, villages, roads and even Ypres's medieval cathedral, houses and Cloth Hall, where merchants from all over Europe had bought and sold cloth, were elaborate reconstructions. The film industry, with its gigantic screen sets and heroic superstars, had blunted my sensibility and I felt I was part of an artificial theme park. Was that why I could not relate to the ordinary Belgians who had sought to rebuild their damaged lives?
- The bus pulled up at Hill 66, a mound of earth covered in a few trees. Rain was spattering the little park. I could see lumps of concrete and curved imprints of earth where bombs had exploded. My thumping heart told me I was getting closer to my own reality.
- My war was the Vietnam War. We were living in the United States at that time and both my brothers, carrying immigrant green cards, were called up. When my older brother refused to integrate his Marine Corps unit, my mother had nightmares about firing squads. Three times the US Army ordered my younger brother to report to camp. Each time his weak lungs protected him from conscription. Then Bob, the boy I loved as you can only love once, signed up and was shipped out to the battlefields beyond Saigon.
- "Bob was distracted by a little kid catching shrimp," I was told later by one of Bob's army buddies. Immediately, I recognized my sweetheart. He had often taken his four younger siblings to look for crayfish while his mother helped out at the family gas station. In Vietnam, Bob's legs had been blown off by a homemade mine and he bled to death on the edge of a rice paddy.
- "Forty years later I was stumbling around in the clammy mist on a slope called Hill 66, in Belgium, still trying to understand what war meant. My memory flared up like a distress signal and Bob returned to lead me through the relics of war. I visited trenches, concrete bunkers, pillboxes, Hellfire Corner, the Menin Gate, the Memorial called The Brooding Soldier, dedicated to the gassed Canadians and another to the New Zealand dead. 'De ['autre extremite du monde' were the words engraved in stone. In Mud Corner cemetery I read the' name of my great uncle, Tom McCahon, shot between the eyes on Armistice Day, the 11 November 1918. Then there were the graves of those who were 'known only unto God.' Below each white Portland headstone a cloth poppy, the colour of fresh blood, was tucked into the earth.
- I discovered that poisonous gas and flamethrowers were used for the first time by both sides and that the future dictator, Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler, had been a dedicated, capable soldier, twice wounded, almost fatally gassed and then decorated with the Iron Cross for bravery. His profound sense of destiny and delusions of grandeur were nurtured and consolidated during the four years he survived as a dispatch runner when the average lifespan for such men was three weeks.
- At the end of the day the minibus turned back to Bruges. A scream rose in my throat. What sort of answer had I hoped to find in Flanders? Even the war to end all wars had not stopped human beings from killing one another. Looking around at the others in the minibus I realized all we wanted was to return home peacefully. We were weary travellers, each of us carrying our dead, united for a moment in horrifying recollection with only artificial red poppies to uphold memories of our beloved. I turned my head forward.
- "Adieu Bob," I murmured, as we retreated from death's triumph.
