Hallowed Ground

This must be the very definition of hallowed ground. These were fathers and sons, husbands and lovers, you and me born in the wrong time and place. Now they’re at best a memorial, at least a tourist attraction. But if anyone comes here to pass some time, or as a voyeur, then the silent grandeur of this place will shame you into awe.

The land here is pockmarked from endless shelling, and memorials are everywhere. The architecture is monumental but appropriate. The whole place, by which I mean a landscape that once housed 9 villages erased by war, is a testament to events over a century ago that still resonate and shock today: it’s big but it commemorates something of a scale we cannot imagine. The ossuary itself is shocking. The dead don’t even have the dignity of being whole. Discarded fragments of people, French and German, swept up and hoarded to remind us of what it means when we mechanise death.

I’m glad I went. And I wish I hadn’t seen it at all.