Amsterdam Wrap Up

This course had a purpose. It was not simply research, it was an exercise in the impact and value of these historic and spiritual sites and memorials. Throughout, each of us have been completing a series of interviews at intervals during our trip. We did four in all, one before, and three during this trip. The interviews were to track our expectations, thoughts, and responses to what we were visiting and exposing ourselves to.

A good question raised by our interviews and experiences was this: Are these sites and memorials, these cemeteries and ceremonies, glorifying war?

No.

A resounding, deeply felt, no.

I would be shocked to hear that opinion from anyone who has ever been present at one of these ceremonies, or who has visited these places. Including the German cemeteries and memorials, they are the most solemn, respectful, and spiritual moments I have ever experienced, and everyone taking part, from child to elder, has been well versed in the meaning of the event, and just what it was that happened here.

It may be easy from a difference to wonder why people do this, or why these sites are still maintained. But here… In France, Holland, Belgium, so many other places we didn’t even get to see, where the land is still torn and gouged, bodies are still found every year, the horror and the fear and the feeling of being saved is still present through the generations that remember. Where bullet casings and barbed wire can be found in every field tilled a bit too deeply. Where two people were killed by an undetonated mine only six month ago. It’s here. It’s real. It changed the cultural and social landscape as well as the geography.

Would it be better if the war had never happened? Of course. No acres of dead young men would be littered across a continent. No generations would have gaps that left widows, children, destroyed families, and brought back bloody memories. No towns and villages and homes and populations would have been enslaved, burnt, raped, killed, or gassed. If any person in this world could wish it undone, done another way, any thing but the things that happened and that horrendous half a century of war, they would wish it so.

But it happened. And they remember. They remember because they can’t wish it undone, but by God they can wish it never happens again. And they can give their respect and their honour to those who were hurt and killed in trying to help and free them, though everyone would wish they never had to at all. This is not glorifying war. It is mourning. It is grieving. It is a process of honour and remembrance, that we might never take those steps again, and that by this horrible reality, if we at least take away that much then maybe the world can be changed for the better.

That is why they stand in silence, and prayer. Or in music, and song. Or bring candles and flowers and read poems to the dead and to the living.

We took away more than just academic knowledge for having done this tour. If there is something I would wish on anyone, it is to be able to experience these places, and to see how some places and people in the world see us, and why. It is a whole new dimension to being a Canadian, and a young person. They were children too. Teenagers, twenty year olds. But for an accident of birth and timing we aren’t them and they aren’t us.

Remember them.

After this trip, we will never forget.