Belgium Brandhoek Military Cemetery (#0300)

“You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you’ll never know The hell where youth and laughter go.” ― Siegfried Sassoon

I first became interested in WWI when a member of my gay family used Siegfried Sassoon’s poetry in a discussion he was leading for a course I was teaching on masculinity and gender in the early 1980’s. Questions of the legitimacy of military action had first become salient to me when I had to make decisions about my own military service during the Vietnam war, but it wasn’t until a few years after that service that I began to gain the skills to understand how those in power use cultural tactics to legitimize their use of other young men (except their sons) in the war machine; a machine that all too often was used to further the status of civilian power-holders. The sentiments expressed by Sassoon were an important part of starting me down the road of questioning both the use of military power, and how we sell such use. It is this questioning of how the population is convinced to accept the use of their children and partners as fuel for the military that brought me to close observation of how we use memorials as a way to wrap up the justification for a war and the actions of that war.

My specific interest in WWI dates back to Sassoon having played an important part in my awakening to these issues, was furthered by the extent that WWI was the first large scale ‘industrial’ war with the associated horrors, and was aided by the extent that the justness of specific actions in WWI was much less clear than was the justness of WWII.

I should note at this point that I’m not strictly anti-war. I do acknowledge that there can be wars that are clearly ‘just’ (e.g., WWII), but even within those there are actions where the use of troops seems to be mostly for furthering the status of those with power, not resolving the issue. My cynicism is fed by the fact that as someone from a working-class background, I did not have the options of choosing college to avoid military service during the Vietnam war. If the war was ‘just’, then why was it fought more by the working-class, and much less so by the middle and upper class?

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What is shown here is the entrance to the Brandhoek Military Cemetery, one of three Commonwealth cemeteries in the small town of Brandhoek. My initial plans had been to view some of the very striking memorial sculptures across Flanders (parts of Belgium and northern France) that memorialize the war, but it quickly became apparent that time demands were going to require my putting off traveling to most of those until a future trip. I thus decided to put my focus into viewing some of the cemeteries around Ypres; an approach which I quickly realized was going to be far more moving than I expected.