On Passing The New Menin Gate
by Siegfried Sassoon (World War I Veteran and all around Bad Ass)
Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
the unheroic dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,-
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.
Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride
‘Their name liveth for ever’, the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
as these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulcher of crime.
Here’s the problem: When Siegfried says the Gate is world’s worst wound, he’s pretty much right, but no one really believes him or cares. This gate, the New Menin Gate which over looks a the WWI battlefield at Ypres Salient was supposed to have the names of 54,896 dead British guys who didn’t have graves because they were so badly blown up no one could recognize their bodies well enough to identify them –it is one of the reasons we have dog tags now. Anyway, in reality the gate only has 34,984 names because they ran out room and the rest are carved on tablets nearby. No one bothered to record the names of 70,000 missing German guys who died there.
In case you haven’t read all of the Great War and Modern Memory here’s the scoop. Between 1914 and 1917 the Germans fought a mixture of British and French troops for three miles of ground. It was classic trench warfare where tactics so badly lagged behind weapons technology that there were 600,000 casualties. To offer you some perspective total American casualties in Vietnam 1956-1975 were 213,959. To offer further perspective Ypres Salient was a minor battle in WWI not even holding a candle to The Somme or Verdun. But I digress….
There are no words that can encapsulate 100,000 men dead in a hour. You just read that and you’re probably not weeping. We can’t conceive of things like this and still function. We can’t internalize it or understand it.
Language is the best tool we have at communicating ideas and experience, but just because it’s the best, that doesn’t mean it’s any good. In fact it kind of sucks. And we forget that because it’s the best tool we have. But if language were any good at all, War doesn’t happen after Troy because we’d all understand what it means to see horror.