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JASON FARAGO
NYT Syndicate
Late in The Beauty and the Sorrow, Swedish historian Peter Englund's biographical tapestry of 20 lives upended by World War I, we meet an American surgeon called Harvey Cushing, who sails to Belgium in the summer of 1917. In a damp tent west of this ancient market town, he operates on hundreds of Allied soldiers, borne to the field hospital in ambulances caked with mud. He has experience with military surgery, but these casualties are the worst he has ever seen. Each night, after an exhausting day of operations, he scrubs blood and brains from his hands.
He has little information from the front, only the daily stream of the maimed and shell-shocked. But in late October a colleague drives him through Ypres, whose medieval Cloth Hall is in ruins, and out to the forward line near the village of Passchendaele. What he sees stupefies him. The landscape has rotted into a moonscape of greys, gashed by trenches and pockmarked by craters. Mines vomit soil to the sky, and horses and aeroplane parts lie tangled in the mud, among mutilated men.
Ypres and Passchendaele, Cushing writes in his diary, are where earlier ideals of military glory die for good. The war in Flanders has shown the debility of civilisation, and divulged the"barbarian behind your starched and studded shirt front."
Today this northwest corner of Belgium, known as the Westhoek, is a region of small-scale industry, broad fields, tidy houses. A hundred years ago, during the Battle of Passchendaele (also known as the Third Battle of Ypres), it was the netherworld. Half a million men or more died or were wounded here between July 31 and November 10, 1917 ” 100 years ago ” when Canadian forces finally took the ruined village, having advanced the Allied line by just 5 miles.
This centenary of the most horrific episode along the Western Front has had the release of several books, including Nick Lloyd's Passchendaele: A New History, and brought a host of British, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian delegations to remembrance ceremonies on these scarred fields. It has also occasioned a suite of exhibitions, under the umbrella title '1917: Total War in Flanders', that explore how the Great War intensified 100 years ago into an unprecedented catastrophe.
These shows, in museums and at battle sites, examine a wide range of topics: the use of photography in the war effort, the provision of medical care, the participation of colonial forces and the ecological impact of the fighting. All of them complement the region's already substantial collection of museums and heritage sites, including large Commonwealth, German and Belgian cemeteries and monuments at almost every intersection. Free of the nationalism that can divert military anniversaries ” consider Blood Swept Land and Seas of Red, the jingoistic installation of ceramic poppies that festered around the Tower of London in 2014 ” these Belgian exhibitions are models of sincerity and sobriety.
I travelled here to see them in part to consider whether museums can make sense of war, and in part because I felt I knew too little about World War I. Passchendaele may be a byword for suffering in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but in the United States it is hardly known, and the larger war ” which killed more Americans than Korea and Vietnam combined ” has long been overshadowed by subsequent conflicts.
Washington still has no World War I memorial; if it ever gets one, it will not be on the National Mall. New exhibitions and displays at several Smithsonian museums have elicited almost no media coverage. Even the commission set up by Congress in 2013 to commemorate this year's centenary calls World War I America's"most forgotten war." But there are Flemish answers for some urgent American questions ” not least, how to memorialise the dead of a conflict with no nobility.
The In Flanders Fields Museum, the region's most important, is housed in the rebuilt Cloth Hall that sits on Ypres' pleasant town square. (Ypres is the French name for this city of 35,000; these days it goes by the Dutch name Ieper, though Commonwealth soldiers, struggling with the French monosyllable, pronounced it"Wipers.")
The museum's permanent exhibition, which opened in 2012, tells a harrowing story of the war in Flanders from 1914 onward, and mixes archival materials with some uncommonly sensitive multimedia features. Shovels and water pumps evoke the trenches, and gas masks recall that earlier battles around Ypres, in 1915, saw the first use of chemical weapons in warfare.
The museum's contribution to '1917: Total War in Flanders' is an exhibition of photography by Frank Hurley, a captain appointed by the Australian army to document the cratered landscape around Ypres. Hurley was a daredevil ” he'd earlier travelled to Antarctica on the ill-fated voyage of George Shackleton ” and he risked his life alongside Australian soldiers when they went over the top.
Photographs from the summer and early fall of 1917 include grim soldiers tiptoeing across mud-spanning duck boards or marching past destroyed trees, as well as images of the crumbled Cloth Hall, the building where they're on display. Yet Hurley felt his photographs didn't adequately capture the intensity of Passchendaele, so he combined multiple negatives into single images of hellish drama.
A stunning large photograph of men charging out of the trenches is made up from 12 images; the planes above the soldiers' heads were, however, photographed in the Middle East. Such trickery was commonplace in early war photography, and indeed many of the most famous war photographs ” Mathew Brady's images of Civil War casualties, or Robert Capa's falling soldier of the Spanish Civil War ” were posed or otherwise doctored.
Elsewhere, three exhibitions in '1917: Total War in Flanders' take an ecological view of the war. The most substantial is 'Passchendaele: Landscape at War', at a villa next door to the Memorial Museum Passchendaele, in the town of Zonnebeke. The low-lying fields outside regularly flooded before the epic rains of 1917, and Allied artillery obliterated the battlefield even before the infantry arrived. In this new landscape, evoked through maps, petrified trees and unnerving photographic projections, even the trenches were not safe, and this show persuasively argues that ecological ruin had psychological effects.
'Passchendaele: Landscape at War' prepares the visitor for the museum's eerie permanent exhibition, which swears off the In Flanders Fields Museum's modern museology for uncanny dioramas. Cases of uniformed mannequins, and a large collection of gas masks, munitions and propaganda posters, precede an entrance into a reconstructed dugout.
These are necessary codas, of the sort that were lacking from this year's grander commemorations ” like the one British Prime Minister Theresa May led in July, or the one President Donald Trump declined to attend in April ” or amid London's porcelain poppies. We like our wars to have clear moral purpose and unambiguous villains, like the Civil War or World War II. Most wars, however, are like World War I ” wars barren of virtue, wars that, as Harvey Cushing wrote a century ago, reveal civilisation as a veneer over barbarity. '1917: Total War in Flanders' took the war's futility seriously and offered a model institutions could learn from: how to mourn the dead and to understand their loss, without triumphalism.
