by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.
I had thought that Vietnam was my war. Or World War II, my parents’ war, the war of the movies and TV shows I watched in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But that, I now understand, was not the case. It turns out my war is an old war, one that has passed beyond living memory, a historical war. Such a war can decide to let you see it, can decide whether and how it will be found. It seems to be easier for soldiers to see an old war. Their military experience means that an old war has less to explain, there is less risk that it will be misunderstood. Soldiers already see ground differently.
In the course of finding a topic for a history paper in the 11th grade I found myself leafing through issues of The Illustrated London News from 1914 to 1918. The issues from late 1917 covered the Third Battle of Ypres (“Passchendaele”), fought in the Ypres Salient, in Belgian Flanders. The News’s coverage of the battle—a great, glorious, and decisive victory for the British against the Germans and all odds—offered dark drawings of the battlefield, of teams of exhausted men working enormous artillery pieces, of lines of courageous soldiers moving across difficult ground toward ultimate victory. Rich fodder for an easy essay.
A brief review of secondary sources revealed the News’s coverage to be, shall we say, incomplete. While to this day historians argue about the decisions made by the generals and politicians, the Battle of Passchendaele remains unimaginable and the poster child for the horrors of the Great War: waves of exhausted men advancing slowly uphill for weeks in relentless rain through waist-deep mud into artillery and machine gun fire in order to capture a few yards of strategically insignificant ground. There were roughly 500,000 German and allied casualties. Almost 90,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers who fought in the Ypres Salient vanished there and have no known grave. And this bit of ground was only a small segment of the Western Front.
These scenes felt shockingly familiar but unfathomable. Was this victory? Who could have called it that? What kind of officers would give such orders? What kind of men would follow them? What kind of courage enabled them to walk into mud, into walls of shellfire, into machine guns? For so far? For so long? In the rain? Who were these men? Where are they?
I finished my paper. I went to college. I did drugs. I protested the bombing of Cambodia, the Nixon Administration, the Vietnam War. I dropped out. I hitchhiked to Kathmandu. I lived in India and studied in Iran. I ran out of money and went to law school. I started a consulting firm. I got married. We home-schooled our kids at sea. Through it all this particular piece of the Great War kept showing up in what seemed like odd places.
One afternoon I came upon a copy of Philip Gibbs’s Realities of War in a used bookstore in Perth, Western Australia. Gibbs had been one of Britain’s five official war correspondents during the war, and in this book, published in 1920, he laid out every detail the military censors had forbidden him to publish at the time. One morning I went looking for art at the Auckland Museum, and it turned out to be the Auckland War Memorial Museum. On my way to Maori art I was waylaid by their photographic archives, and spent the day riveted by photographs of New Zealand soldiers at Gallipoli and at Broodseinde in Flanders. I began to hunt for books, starting with bound volumes of Gibbs’s official dispatches.
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It seems as if every historical war has a community of people who have chosen it, or who have been claimed by it. The first ones I met were booksellers who specialized in WWI books, like the gentleman who ran the now-defunct Shell-Hole in Ypres. When I asked a question, they or their customers, usually amateur or professional historians, pointed me to archives or guidebooks that focused on certain parts of the Passchendaele battlefield, to histories that covered different parts of the war in Flanders. Each individual had found his (or, rarely, her) own way in: a relative had served in theatre; a regimental history had been fuzzy and there were questions; a particular kind of plane or gun had been particularly entrancing; a general’s decisions had seemed brilliant or disastrous. These people are easy to find online, or among re-enactors.
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Finally, in 2001, I went looking for the war. I drove straight from the Brussels airport to the center of the village of Passchendaele (now Passendale), but I couldn’t find the war anywhere. Nothing was the way it was, had been, should have been. Everywhere was 2001 or 1913. There were sloping meadows dotted with glossy EU-subsidized cows. There were rows of small, neat, sturdy, but slightly dour houses along the well-maintained roads. There were fields of sugar beets, corn, leeks, cabbages, cauliflower, spinach. There was light industry, and a graceful white wind farm. There were families on bicycles gliding along designated bike paths. And every square and landmark—the Passchendaele Church, the Grote Markt, the Cloth Hall and Cathedral in the center of Ypres, the ramparts and moat of the city itself—had been rebuilt exactly as it had been before the war. I appreciated the precision and energy with which they had recreated the original.
There were the stations of the tourist bus trail: big cemeteries and mine craters; preserved trenches at Sanctuary Wood and Bayernwald; the bunker on the west side of the Ypres Canal in which John McCrae, a Canadian medical officer, wrote “In Flanders Fields” in May 1915, after the death of a friend during the Second Battle of Ypres. I was certain that none of these were the war. Where was the ground that swallowed over 900 shells per square meter in the course of four years? Where was the ground that was so gas-soaked and blasted to bits that the Belgian government, in 1919, designated it “The Devastated Region”?
I gave up. I had a week to kill. I drove to Paris to see clients. On the way back to Ypres I noticed that the exits off the A-1 toward Lille tracked the battles on the Somme: Bapaume, Albert, Péronne, Arras. Maybe the war was over there, but it wasn’t what I now thought of as my war. I left the A-1 and drove northwest, cross-country, toward Armentières. I saw the two slag heaps that towered over the Battle of Loos in late 1915 and still act as an aid to navigation. Somewhere by the side of the road that rose and fell over the low hills at the southern end of the Ypres Salient I saw one of the small green signs placed by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (the CWGC) to indicate the location of a nearby cemetery.
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There were two problems with the Great War dead: how to handle the bodies and how to handle the absence of bodies. The number of Great War dead was so enormous that a decision was made to bury them where they had fallen. Families were forbidden to bring the bodies of their soldiers home for burial. The CWGC, originally the Imperial War Grave Commission, was founded in 1917 to locate and record the last resting places of fallen soldiers. After the Armistice it designed and built hundreds of cemeteries and memorials. Some were large “concentration” cemeteries, holding the remains cleared from WWI battlefields after the war. Some were previously existing cemeteries, near field hospitals or Casualty Clearing Stations, left in place with a surrounding wall and carefully planted grass and flowers. Some were front line cemeteries, small clusters of graves that managed to survive subsequent artillery bombardments. Standing watch in each cemetery, looking down at the carefully aligned and numbered rows of headstones, is a Cross of Sacrifice, a tall cross in white stone with a bronze sword, point-down, embedded in it. Some headstones mark the resting place of a “Soldier Known Only to God.”
Hundreds of thousands of bodies were never found. It was decided to build Memorials to the Missing. The names of those with no known grave are inscribed on the walls of Tyne Cot Cemetery, on the Menin Gate, and at Thiepval on the Somme. The CWGC now manages hundreds of cemeteries all over the world, carefully maintaining these memorials to the dead of the British Commonwealth in all its wars. The location of every cemetery, the location of every grave, even single graves in the cemeteries of small French communes, is recorded, and is now available online. Enter the name of a cemetery and they can tell you who is buried there. Enter the name of your soldier, they can tell you where he served, where he died, and where you can find his name or gravestone. Wherever you are, you can find the specific fallen nearby.
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So on the way back to Ypres from Paris I saw the little CWGC sign. Why not visit this cemetery that seemed off the beaten track?
A small winding road led into more wooded country. There were no more signs. At the end of the road there was no cemetery, just a small farmhouse and barn in the green June haze. I parked in the space between the barn and the house and got out to ask directions. Out of the barn came a small girl, maybe eight years old, blonde, with a blue smock and rubber boots. She looked at me and pointed through the barn. I walked into the dark sweet-smelling barn and out the other side where there was an expanse of newly-turned field, its earth rich and clotted and dark, into which ran a tiny strip of perfectly manicured sod. In the center of the field this narrow sod strip made a 90-degree left turn, and ended further on, at a tiny cemetery surrounded by a low stone wall.
There were nine headstones, randomly arranged. They were blazingly white, meticulously kept, with freshly-tended flowers growing in front and between them. Each stone had a name. They were all from the same regiment, maybe a “Pals Battalion” of men from a single town who had enlisted together. They all knew each other. They had probably grown up together. They all died on the same day, 7 July 1917. This was after the end of the Battle of Messines and before the Battle of Passchendaele had begun. They had died in a lull. Maybe a single shell buried them in their dugout or trench. Maybe there was gas. Maybe this wasn’t all of them, maybe some had been taken out of the line, to an Advanced Dressing Station, by stretcher-bearers. Whatever the case, these nine men had been here ever since dusk fell on that July evening. These stones, in this arrangement, were a moment.
I retraced my steps back to the car. The girl was gone. I drove back to the main road and turned left, down into the shallow bowl formed by the circle of hills south and east of Ypres. I drove back to the village of Passchendaele and parked by the church.
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I knew about Crest Farm. It was never a farm, but it was labeled as such on British maps. It was simply rough structures on an elevated point of land along a modest ridge that stretched southwest from Passchendaele village. Through mud waist-high in places the 4th Canadian division assaulted uphill against a strategically placed network of entrenched machine gun positions. With catastrophic losses and unimaginable courage they finally pushed the Germans off the heights on October 30th, 1917. From there it took the 2nd Canadian Division a week to fight their way across the 750 yards of ground to take whatever was left of the village on November 6th. All of this cost the Canadians 16,000 casualties. The Victoria Cross is the highest honor for bravery issued by the British military. Canadians won nine of them in this fight. Only one has a known grave. The names of the others are carved on the Menin Gate.
I knew where Crest Farm had been in relation to the church. I would walk to where it would have been. It wasn’t there, but among the snug new houses there was a granite block in a circle of maple trees: a memorial to the Canadians who fought and fell in late October and early November. I walked to the edge of the maples and looked out and down at the gently sloping green fields below me and across the shallow valley to the steeper slopes of Bellevue Spur. The innocent gurgling thread of the Ravebeek ambled downhill to water the fields in the late afternoon sun. And suddenly I was in. I could see the war here, all of it. I could see 1917 and 2001, simultaneously, and by adjusting my vision I could see one or the other.
I drove back down to Ypres and parked at the hotel. I walked past St. George’s Church, past the Cathedral and Cloth Hall, and down Menenstraat to the city ramparts at the Menin Gate, where, to my surprise, I wept until dark.
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In the decades since, I’ve been back to the Salient many times. I exhale when I get there. It is familiar, it is a home. I feel among friends. Everything is where and as it was, and as it is. I have internalized the maps, as they shifted over the course of the war. I can find everything except the farmhouse, its barn, and the little cemetery. No CWGC database, no map or guidebook, no methodical exploration of that part of the ground suggests where it is or might have been.
Now this part of the war in Flanders is always close by, wherever I am. The men, I think, also. But wherever I am, here for example, is no longer as it was.
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Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. is a poet, translator, critic, and corporate consultant. Poetry collections include After the Operation (Four Way Books 2025), Salient (New Directions 2020) and Series | India (Four Way Books, 2015). Her translations from classical and contemporary Persian include Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, Poems of Forough Farrokhzad (New Directions 2022, Finalist for the PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation 2023) and The Green Sea of Heaven: Eighty Ghazals from the Diwan of Hafiz: 30th Anniversary Edition (Monkfish Publishing 2024). She serves on the Boards of Kimbilio Fiction, World Poetry, Flood Editions, Friends of Writers, The Beloit Poetry Journal Foundation, and Human Rights and Democracy in Iran. She holds a BA and JD from Harvard University and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She was the founding CEO of Conflict Management, Inc. and Alliance Management Partners, boutique corporate consulting firms. www.etgrayjr.com
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