...it's not Canada, eh...

We've been here a while now, and I've gotten so used to the way things are here that I forget sometimes that things are so different in Canada.

The culture is a strange mix of different things. I would say the biggest influence here is French culture, and the strong hedonistic streak that runs through the French is embraced heartily by the Belgians. The strong emphasis that they place on aesthetics, cuisine, fashion, wine, exercise, art, music, leisure and socializing - not just on special occasions, but every day - makes that clear.

Still, this isn't France by a long shot: it's important to recognize that the Flemish half to this country - less obvious to me living here in 95% francophone Brussels - is a strong and equivalent force in shaping the National culture. Then there is the German influence; it's the third "official language". It's quite a mélange... Belgium is unique.

They have a good sense of humour, too, and along with that built-in aesthetic sense, don't seem to have any obvious hang-ups about beauty, pleasure or sex, for example. The women take great care to present themselves with fancy hairstyles, makeup, jewelry, and wear elegant ensembles even when going grocery shopping that I rarely see in Toronto, except I suppose in very posh stores (which I couldn't afford to shop in). Some of the advertising posters that I see everywhere, on bus shelters and near supermarket entrances would likely cause an uproar in Canada, but they don't seem to generate a raised eyebrow here.

This one here, for example, is for a new comedy by a Belgian actor/director named Michaël Dufour entitled Faites l'amour avec un Belge (or "Make love with a Belgian), about a French woman and a Belgian man who form an unusual couple. He's my translation of the premise:

Elle aime le foot, la bière, le sexe et ne gifle pas le premier soir. Lui il aime la tendresse et le shopping, mais ce n’est pas le pire, il fait aussi l’amour!
"She likes football, beer, sex (even on a first date), and he likes tenderness and shopping; but this doesn't make a disaster, it also makes love!"


Now that's what I call Belgian multitasking. All he's missing is a Westmalle and some mayonnaise...

Ok, I'll stop right there. Somehow I'm hungry for frites all of a sudden...

Duncan to the hospital...

... but it was only for a pre-operative visit.

Sorry if I scared you! He's getting his tonsils and adenoids out in two weeks, so we had a visit to the hospital today. Amazingly hospitals all seem to smell the same, regardless of country: that sour-sweet disinfectant odor, and they all seem to be as confusing to navigate, with buildings bizarrely joined together at haphazard angles and elevators tucked away in all sorts of different corners. After a few minutes it's easier to get your bearings, but the first time is tricky.

Duncan was a trooper, sitting still in the waiting room and reading his Picsou magazine (translation: "Scrooge McDuck") while we waited to be seen. The lab technician took blood; Duncan was cool as a cucumber, watching him insert the needle and collect the samples without a peep; he actually laughed a bit at the process, and said, "cool". Then we talked to the anasthesiologist, who asked him what he understood about the operation. Duncan explained that he'd get a needle, maybe a mask to breathe into; he'd go to sleep for a bit and they'd go in and clear out his ears and nose to help him hear better, and then he'd wake up a little bit later. Pas grave, he said (translation: "no big deal"). I can only hope that he's as cool as this in two weeks' time when we get up early for his trip to the hospital.

I know I won't be; cool, that is. This was his first visit to a hospital, ever, and I was reflecting on hospitals in general, you know, all the sick people. Not exactly a place one wants to spend time in, especially when one is as justifiably zealous about keeping healthy and avoiding infectious illness as I am. The good news is that he'll only be in for about six hours or so before coming home to be fêted like a king for the week. Malcolm is away at Nettine, and so he's going to have the run of the place, and nothing but ice cream to dine upon, for the first day or so anyway, and of course, strict direction to lie still and recuperate, so that means lots of movies and B.D. (translation "comic books") for sure. It will likely spoil him for weeks.

Now I've got to convince him that tomorrow morning, unlike today, he's got to get up at the regular time and go to school...

Remembrance

I should say at the outset that this post is going to be a very serious one, as it describes our trip to the first world war battlefields around Ypres...

This trip was deceptively easy to begin; just hop into the car, and have a nice tour of southwestern Belgium on a clear cool Saturday afternoon, take a look at some historical first world war era sites. Sounds simple, right? We all know what happened in the first world war, we've seen the pictures, and watched the films....

It was a very emotional day, and it has taken some time to be able to write about them.

Our first stop was Ypres, at the town square, where we stopped after our 90-minute drive for some food, a brief trip planning session, and a look at the cathedral and town hall. All of Ypres was razed by the fighting but has since been meticulously re-created, as it was before.

We walked up to the Menin Gate, a huge memorial to the almost 55,000 commonwealth soldiers who died in the battles of Ypres, and whose bodies were never recovered.


It was pretty staggering. The Canadian panels alone were huge, not to mention the many lists of Australian, New Zealander, Indian, Newfoundlander, Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English soldiers who never came home. Rob searched for and found the name of a great-uncle of his who had fought and fallen in battle there.


Maggie also found the names of several Roses from Canada who fell in Ypres, and she noted them down for future investigation.

We drove next to the John McRae site, just on the edge of a canal, when he penned the famous "In Flanders Fields" poem in May of 1915. I remember writing out copies of this poem as a schoolboy for penmanship class (does this even exist anymore?) and the words are still clear in my mind. Malcolm read it out from the plaque that has been placed there by a branch of the Canadian Government; I think it was his first time reading this poem. I was surprised to discover that this poem is known world-wide, not just in Canada, as a reflection on war.


We stopped next at the Yorkshire Trench site, a restoration of an actual trench/dugout complex located near the village of Boezinge, that is now in the midst of a large industrial park. The trenches are small and narrow, and we saw the floor plan of the dugout rooms that were used as command centres... they were no larger than the surface of our kitchen table, and must have seemed unbelievably claustrophobic to the soldiers who spent years there.


St. Julien was very affecting also. This was the site where in April 1915, 18,000 Canadian troops withstood the first chlorine gas attacks of the war, attacks which left 2,000 dead. The monument here rises in a granite column almost eleven metres high, and is visible from a good distance away, an illustration of how flat these battle plains are. It must have made it terribly easy to choose "targets" with a rifle.

We moved on to the Paschendaele monument, which sits atop a ridge in the midst of the town of the same name. Seeing "Canadalaan" as the street name was in some way strangely more emotional than the monument itself. (I must try to get Paul Gross's new film, which recreates the battle from the point of view of one soldier, based on Paul's own grandfather; the film has just been released on DVD). The second battle of Paschendaele cost the Canadian corps almost 16,000 casualties, leaving over 4,000 dead.

When you look at the cost in blood and lives paid for every square mile of empty, muddy ground, gained only to lose it again in the next battle...


We signed the guest book which rests in a dry place behind the monument, surveyed the landscape, talked a bit with three friendly Flemish teenagers who were hanging around in the park, and then it was time to go to the Tyne Cot cemetery.

Tyne Cot is a memorial in two parts. First are the 11,952 graves of commonwealth soldiers, clean stone gravestones in perfect rows. It was here that the magnitude of the "Great War" really sank in, and we found ourselves walking through the row after row of white stones, neatly positioned and carefully tended. Most of the graves had no name, indicating that because of the nature of the battle, or the injuries, the soldier was not able to be precisely identified. Many simply read A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR, and underneath in smaller letters, KNOWN UNTO GOD.

More staggering than this is the wall of sacrifice that encircles the uphill edge of the cemetary: on it are inscribed another 35,000 names of the missing, who died between August 1917 and the end of the war... as large as the Menin Gate is, it wasn't big enough to hold all the names of commonwealth dead from the battles of Ypres.

There is something indescribably heartbreaking to walk there and to see the rows and rows of gravestones, and to think that for the 47,000 dead commemorated there (essentially the population of my hometown) there are the equivalent of twenty other cemetaries the same size, holding the rest of the almost ten million military dead, not to mention the almost 7 million civilians also killed in the course of the war.


It's important to remember that almost half of the dead were Germans, too. A few of them are also buried in Tyne Cot.

We were all very affected by the trip. Malcolm asked, "This is so stupid... I can't understand, why did this happen?"

I don't really have an answer for him, as I find myself asking the same questions. I can only re-emphasise the importance of diplomacy and lawfulness over violence... and to quote to him the words inscribed on the grave of Second Lieutenant Arthur Young 4th Bn attached 7th/8th Bn Royal Irish Fusiliers, who died here on the 16th of August 1917, aged 26:

Sacrificed to the fallacy
That war can end war