In between the cemetery and the abbey are the ruins of a 12th century castle:

Built to impress (5 meters thick walls), to defend against attacks, and to live in a time of perpetual warfare.

Are we still there?

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Thanks so much for this diary.  Just the kind of diary that I am hoping to find here-among all the other great diaries-to learn first hand of history and shared histories of all people.

I'll have to come back to this and comment more I think but I have to go do the mundane routines-like my laundry right now.

"People never do evil so throughly and happily as when they do it from moral conviction."-Blaise Pascal

This last Spring I was workshopping for a few days with some top Dutch cops, at an off-season De Panne on the Belgian coast just north of Dunkirke.

My grandfather died near Ypres in 1917, so when I wasn't needed for a day at the hotel in De Panne, I took off for a drive around the area.

It is fairly flat countryside with thick copses of trees in amongst the fields. It is rural - bucolic - the road dotted with small villages and a couple of small towns. There was nothing to remind me of the terrible carnage of those 80 odd years ago. Just piles of root crops and winding tree-lined country roads, and a few cows. Until Ypres - packed with cemeteries.

There is something so moving to walk along the rows of crosses reading the names and the regiments. To realise that it was a such an enormous waste of human life - to be repeated  just 21 years later. And yet here we are 60 years after that second European conflict, arguing only about budgets and constitutions.

The people of Europe are at peace. Still proudly nationalistic, still wary of the political elite, but essentially, at the people level, friends. I can visit any one of the 25 countries and find ordinary people that I like and respect. People who are interested in others, people who care, people who get on with their lives, people who look after strangers and want to know what they think.

Those cemeteries at Ypres are tragic. The families who visit those cemeteries still mourn, like myself. But their sacrifice was not in vain.

You can't be me, I'm taken

Because my grasp of French geography leaves something to be desired, I looked at MapQuest to see where Reims is in relation to the rest of the country. Reading that map is like reading the entire history of the Western Front.

I noticed the town of Charleville-Mezieres, about 50 miles northeast of Reims. It's quite near the Belgian border and Bastogne, site of the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944. My father was there, and I remember the stories about being stationed in Charleville, whether before or after the battle I'm not sure. And there is no one left alive that I can ask.

For all of a long life, he never talked about the war part of the war. We heard stories about interesting adventures, and meeting French and Belgian people, but not the war. Thank you, Jerome, for this thoughtful look at the aftermath of war and reminder of why we must put an end to it.

would be far less likely to elect war-mongering presidents if they had similar memories and monuments in every village, town, and city.

Europeans know that there is nothing good about war.

Pogo: We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Indeed, it was probably the lingering horror from a war that had been over for such a short time that allowed such large segments of the population in the democratic nations to favor appeasement in the face of threats of force -- anything, anything to avoid the terrors so recently experienced.  I suppose that one could argue that a significant element has survived in some form to this day.  There are certainly more in Europe than in America, it seems, who are reluctant to use force even when the cause appears justified.  Perhaps if the cemeteries of World Wars I and II were as widespread in the U.S., the thinking might be more similar.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Abraham Lincoln had had this to say some sixty years earlier:

Words expressed at (or in Lincoln's case, near) the conclusion of a conflict of unimaginable magnitude always seem to express the same general sentiment, from the Ancient Greeks to the present day.  There is rarely cause for gloating from the victor; rather there is relief that the death and destruction are at an end, and a hope that the world never witnesses its like again.

And yet we never learn.

A beautiful, mournful elegy.  It teaches me much of your continent's perspective, and depresses me more about mine.  Here in America our experience of the catastrophe of war has almost always been remote, with the single vast exception of our Civil War safely in the sentimentalized past.  

America still has the arrogant ignorance of youth, and more muscles than is good for it.  The tragic wisdom which has come to your land has not yet been visited on us.  I shudder to think what it will take to give us this lesson in humility and in peace which you so eloquently share today.

In America, there are Revolutionary and Civil War battlefields with their museums. Or you may, without realizing it, be walking or building upon an Indian graveyard -- and that's enough to have uneasy dreams about, and pump up to novel or movie status. But, by and large, the vast continent rolls unviolated, unscarred.

In large parts of Europe, you may be on a battlefield almost anywhere. So much ground has been fought on that it's hard to say: this is the site of such-and-such a battle, that is the site of another. As shown in Jérôme's photos, it's all green and peaceful today. Something has to reveal the truth to you. Something like the endless lines of crosses in a cemetery.

Or what those crosses represented. I once rented a small farmhouse in South-West France, (not on a particularly recent battlefield...) that had not been lived in for years. Surprisingly, it wasn't the standard minimal arrangement of stables, a kitchen, a bedroom or two, that speaks of the hard life of peasants in the past. Extensions had been added with large windows. All the doors had glass panes in them to let light into the house. There was an indoor toilet, and the kitchen floor was nicely tiled.  None of this was recent, and it was all, pretty much, left to rot.

It turned out (after the time needed to get people to talk) that this place, in the early years of the twentieth century, had belonged to a family that had enough menfolk to get a decent living from the land, and who preferred improving their living conditions to hiding their money in a crock. They had made the improvements to the house. Then came WWI. The men were all called up to fight. They went north. None of them came back. There were no more men available in the surrounding area to replace them. The women couldn't run the farm on their own. They sold up.

Much later in the century, their home improvements were there, gathering dust, speaking of optimism and energy that had been suddenly cut short. Ghosts walked that dust.

Of course, not everyone is interested in turning over stones to see what's underneath, and plenty of people live their lives without thinking much about the past. But few European families don't have their share of war dead and war suffering, and there are few places where ghosts can't be glimpsed.

I think this goes some way to explain why Europeans are not willing to die for their country, to march under a banner, to believe in the sacred nature of a flag.

Jerome,

I really wish people would stop using this language about military mobilization.
Soldiers fight because of the internal solidarity of the national community (the call for revenge: They sank the Lusitania! or They caused 9-11!) and of the psychologically-conditioned military unit (this is the key bit: soldiers really fight out of solidarity with each other, and loyalty to each other)

This idea that Americans or British etc. in either the First or Second World Wars "fought for freedom" is part of the mythologizing of American and British militarism as actually having something to do with democracy.

It doesn't and didn't:  Germany in World War I was a democracy; World War I, at least on its western front, was a war between imperial democracies; this was a war of material interests, a classic imperialist war, in which a lot of ordinary people were swept up.

We really need to start depriving the militarists of their ability to represent themselves as having anything to do with 'democracy'. And that starts with getting the history of conflicts like World War I straight.

Thanks Jérôme for your diary which is particularly meaningful to me for several reasons.  Part of my family is from Lorraine in the east of France and I visit there frequently.  The region is burdened with the memories of WW I and WW II.  Some areas were bombed so intensely that today, in spite of overgrowth and erosion, huge craters remain (Eparges).

As for Verdun :

« The battle of Verdun, 21 February 1916 - December 1916, 300 days and 300 nights of relentless, horrifying combat. 26,000,000 bombs dropped by the artilleries, which is 6 bombs per m², thousands of mutilated bodies, approximately 300,000 French and German missing soldiers. »  (quoted from : Douaumont Ossuary).

The magnitude of the atrocity is overwhelming.

Another place where I frequently vacation is a charming town in Normandy called Saint Aubin sur Mer, aka Juno Beach.  In this area, vestiges and memorials are abundant (Memorial de Caen is the site for the most recent and thorough memorial museum located near Caen).  The American cemetery in Colleville (of Private Ryan fame) with over nine thousand tomb stones is awe inspiring.  Every summer, increasingly old veterans visit Normandy, sometimes to share with their families but mostly to mourn slain friends.  There is no swagger in these men, and not merely because of their age.

So yes, wherever you are in France, the scars of war are never far.  I'd like to think that our will to wage useless wars is eroded to nothing, but far too many of my family members are veterans of the Algerian war for me to be convinced.  Nevertheless, since the end of WW II, the adamant will of European nations never again to engage in continental warfare has held and even grown through the common European project.  If only for this reason, when tempers flare and points of narrowly defined national interest are pushed to the forefront, we need to remind ourselves of how and when the European project began.

 I always laughed in the face of anyone who accused the French of being Anti-American.

 They love the American Ideal, as it was expressed in the valor of the soldiers who fell liberating France. They see it in graveyards all over that country. What they hate is the way that ideal has been broken in half and pissed on by the so-called 'patriots' running things and their joyboys.

....because I would rather see us reduce the consumption of imported oil than have to send American boys to fight in the Persian Gulf. - John B. Anderson