Front de Lumière and Some Light Big Questions

     On Friday, I was honored to participate in a Memorial stretching from Ploegsteert to the Belgian Coast, and it even attracted the attendance of the Belgian royalty.  The Front de Lumière was a memorial effort that invited representatives from every country that participated in the World Wars to help recreate what the Western Front would have looked like one hundred years ago.   (I'm going to give some biased information on what I did, and then I will dive off into pure opinion later down this entry.  Teenager with Big Questions of Humanity and History! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!)  I was honored to hold a torch, along with over 4,800 other participants, to recreate a moment of history from one hundred years ago.  I was stationed near the Ploegsteert Memorial, where the Belgian royal family came and twelve year old Princess Elisabeth delivered a speech in French, Dutch, and German. Thankfully the kind family who invited me to participate were able to get several fantastic photos that I can't post yet!  I will update this entry when I have copies.  For now, here are some links until I have permission to use photos taken by other people.
   The electricity was turned off for the region (aside from emergency places and show sites) in order to recreate the furthest light on the front lines from a century ago and was captured from an aerial perspective.  The entire event was televised nationally, and I (sort of) made tv!  My torch is one of the thousands of tiny pin-pricks in the darkening twilight, captured with the aid of a helicopter for the news special, held in silent tribute as a memory of the World Wars.  
   I cannot imagine the dedication and planning by the people who organized this event.  It was a truly touching feat of international cooperation and incredibly thought-provoking.  My duties as a torch-bearer were to remain silent and solemn during the memorial, holding my beacon along with thousands of other participants for an hour.  
   I'm delving into personal reflection here. I can't vouch for every other participant, but I did spend that hour in reflection of a world being ripped apart by warring nations almost a century ago, and the lasting ramifications.  I wrote the essays for APUSH, memorized the information for assignments, studiously studied my textbook and even went through a phase in fifth grade after finishing the Diary of Anne Frank (and the encouragement of a beloved Vicki Hawkesworth) about the World Wars, reading every scrap of historical fiction I could find in the public library.  I know facts, I've read numerous memoirs, and on a cognitive level know it was horrendous, feeling uncertainty and suffering through  the words left behind.  Since staying in Belgium, I've seen the physical scars and the culture created.  Abstract concepts like trench warfare became concrete and all the more horrible when standing in a bunker and being able to trace the impact of shells with my own hands while speaking to people who lost relatives.  Comines was literally left in rubble and ruins after people were forced from their homes, yet it's considered in an area with 'light conflict' on the Western Front. 
   Before this massive ceremony, I went to to the Ploegstreet Memorial in September, while they were having a monthly commemoration for the soldiers buried, marked and unmarked, there called the Last Post.  While a youth orchestra band played, I recognized familiar faces from Rotary and politicians in the area.  The young musicians played anthems from several countries, and In Flanders Field was read in several languages.  Service people were in uniform from multiple countries.  Flags were present and soldiers in formation.  The audience observed quietly, solemnly, for people long since departed.  The sense of respect was prevalent, thick and solid in the air.
In short, there was a crowd of respectful people who cared.  
   I am living in community with lives directly changed by the World Wars.  Some still remember the second, or saw within their families the gaping hole from someone they were never able to know.  I walk in streets and between buildings rebuilt due to their previous destruction.  My eyes catch on the remnants of the battles, trenches, ponds formed by bombs forcibly shifting the soil, uneven ground, by the structures slowly being reclaimed by nature in the fields, every day.  I can't become desensitized to it, nor do I think I should.    
   The Town Crier is the non-profit newspaper I write a monthly column for in the United States.  My first article from Belgium, I wrote about the ability to sponsor graves and the culture of remembrance.  I want to admit here my knowledge of that spirit has greatly grown in depth.  There's one mental image, that I have no physical photograph of because it was very personal, but hasn't left my head when I ponder a spirit of remembrance.  For my articles in the newspaper, I horde memories, facts, and snatch snippets of my experiences, weaving them together until I can pick a positive theme to expand on it in the column.  I try not mix memories on the Internet and in the paper, but this one fits the tone here better.  
   At the end of the memorial service held annually on the first Friday of the Month, my host mother and I were about to brave the rows of cars to begin our trek back down the road.  After greeting several relatives of my host mother and Rotarians in the crowd, I saw a white-haired woman, indeterminable age aside from the obvious fact she was older than me, dressed in a smart outfit.  She walked precisely through the recently fertilized grass on the graves to a specific headstone, and faced it.  She tilted her head down, and spoke.  I couldn't hear her, even if I did I probably wouldn't understand her, but I could see no one around her.  She stooped down to alter the arrangements around the headstone of the deceased soldier, and added a flower to the pile.  
   There are so many questions about this experience.  What is her relation to this person? Is it a relative, or a sponsored grave?  How often does she make the pilgrimage to Ploegsteert to know the number of steps?  I don't know.  I'll never know. It leads me to the Big Questions of why fighting is ever necessary, and how after such destruction horrible despair, a second one followed.  Any time my thoughts travel down this path, it's almost a Pavlovian response to start outlining a five paragraph essay on Alliances, Nationalism, Colonialism, Imperialism, and Industrialism with a forward-pitching conclusion about post-war recovery efforts thanks to my AP United States History class, but even in class it always bothered me I was only writing about the pattern towards the war, recovery, but not why the pattern exists.  This was a reliable way for a decent essay on the AP Exam, no matter the actual war.  Blaming it on human nature to conquer or evil in the world seems like accepting a generalized answer and ignoring the actual cause. However, I don't claim to have all the answers, only a lot of broad questions.
   Jumping forward in time, after an hour holding a torch and a few more basking in the jovial sense of community emanating from who turned out to participate or see the Royalty of Belgium, I returned with the incredibly gracious Decroix family for pizza at their home.  Sitting at their kitchen table, taken in to their family for the evening, I thanked them effusively for the invitation to participate.  In his kitchen over a shared meal, (awesome former RYE Student) Pauline's father explained why it is important to get everyone to participate.  It is through the memory, every book read, every torch held, every red poppy worn, every person thinking about it is remembering the tragedies so it will never happen again.  This isn't a question of heritage or nationality, it's a part of the history of humanity, and owed to the millions who died in the conflict that such high tolls never occur again.  If history repeats itself, then continuing a new cycle of generational awareness is an effort to, at the very least, start writing a new chapter.