Typo of *the year*
This, from the Radio Netherlands site:
All sniggering to one side, this comes from a tale that puts our Dutch friends in a very good light, as it refers to US military graves in the Netherlands:
"An answer can be found at Margraten, where ordinary citizens have forged personal bonds with the graves. All 8,301 graves in Margraten and the 1,700 names of the missing have been ‘adopted', a tradition that began shortly after the end of the war. As of 2009 interest in adopting a grave is greater than ever. There is even a waiting list of people who want to feel responsible for maintaining the remembrance".
All sniggering to one side, this comes from a tale that puts our Dutch friends in a very good light, as it refers to US military graves in the Netherlands:"An answer can be found at Margraten, where ordinary citizens have forged personal bonds with the graves. All 8,301 graves in Margraten and the 1,700 names of the missing have been ‘adopted', a tradition that began shortly after the end of the war. As of 2009 interest in adopting a grave is greater than ever. There is even a waiting list of people who want to feel responsible for maintaining the remembrance".
Labels: arms and the man, Netherlands
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A Bride Too Far? Try forcing that mantra on Silvio Berlusconi.
Indeed. Shades of the old joke about the maximum penalty for bigamy being having more than one wife....
Lets concentrate on the real story for a moment. 70 years after the event, the good people of Magraten, most of whom weren't even alive at the time, still honour the dead. In Britian, in the small seaside town of Sandgate-on-Sea, Kent, drunken yobs use a war memorial as a target for a football. I might just emigrate.
GOM - You and me both.
GOM - your disgust is shared here, too. Every year I take off for parts European on my motorbike and for reasons of geography tend to take the ferry to Zeebrugge. It's a privilege and a delight, though a sombre one, to follow my grandfather's footsteps between 1915 and 1918 around Belgium and the north-east of France - a bit traced each year.
A visit to Ypres and the Menin Gate, as well as CWGC graveyards and memorials is an annual pilgrimage; the respect shown by the Europeans for soldiers from foreign lands who died defending them is humbling, compared with the complete lack of any concern or sense of history in this miserable, enfeebled country.
That the respect is also shown to German memorials and military cemeteries maybe gives more hope. Imagine the state of German memorials were there any in this country.
Something like the vandalised (Greek Orthodox) cemeteries in Northern Cyprus, I imagine.
We live in dark and terrible times.
However, while our Continental neighbours generally do these things rather better, one might note that one of the WW1 cemetries in Northern France was being used as a rendezvous for fans of al fresco fornication. 'fraid I cannot lay hands on the reference though.
Go to any French or Belgian war cemetry and see the same care and attention. I've never been to one that's been less than immaculate.
They really put us to shame.
I believe the Commonwealth war graves commission does a sterling job tho'.
The memorial abused was I seem to recall the Newfoundlander's Memorial at Beaumont Hamel. I think it was an amateur porn film being made.
Unfortunate when one considers the scale of the sacrifice the Newfoundlanders made - on 1 July 1916, 800 men advanced on the German lines. In 30 minutes 350 of them were dead, and another 350 injured. Survivors lay in the sun all day without water or medical supplies.
The memorial is magnificent, but maybe not magnificent enough. None of them are, really.
FT - that rings a bell.
Having grown up in a small village, I found the memorial there highly affecting as so many names tallied with those of living villagers. Equally, whenever I am on the other side of the channel, the numbers of names on memorials in tiny hamlets is hugely chastening.
Anyway, returning to the more immediate point - I am in wholehearted agreement about the levels of magnificence - or otherwise - of the memorials to our war dead.
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