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In Europe

Titel: In Europe Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Geert Mak
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department meet each evening at eight to sound the last post. Riek van den Kerkhove has been doing it for nineteen years now, Antoon Verschoot for almost forty-six. They pull up on their bicycles, snap to attention, wait until two policemen have stopped traffic, then let the notes echo from the walls of the enormous Menenpoort with its plaques holding the names of 54,896 dead soldiers. A dozen or so people stand around, looking on. Within a matter of moments it is over, they shake hands with the policemen, the traffic races on across the cobblestones again.
    Antoon's broad face shines with amiability. He's retired now, but he continues to do this. ‘It's hard sometimes, in the winter, when you've been sitting nice and warm in front of the TV.’ Riek says: ‘It's an obligation of honour.’ He missed the call only once, when he was busy pulling someone out of the water. But otherwise the last post is always sounded, even when a house is burning down at the same time. ‘It goes before all the rest, you know,’ Antoon says.
    When will the emotion of the Great War fade? When will it finally become history? When will the Battle of the Somme become something like the Battle of Waterloo? Allow me to hazard a guess: within the next ten years. Somewhere between the third and fourth generation, somewhere between the grandchildren – who can scarcely remember anyone who was involved – and the great-grandchildren the feeling will change. In the great charnel house at Verdun, the daily Mass recently became monthly. To the southof the Somme a huge airport is planned, to be built across two war cemeteries. See here the writing on the wall. The spectacle, not the memory, gradually becomes the crux of the matter.
    At the Queen Victoria's Rifles Café, the tables still bear long rows of
vues stéréoscopiques
from the 1920s. For three quarters of a century the proprietor has been earning a handful of francs from his selection of the grisliest stereo photographs: corpses caught in the barbed wire, decapitated Germans, part of a horse in a tree. Today, this has all been raised to perfection. In the Yser Tower at Diksmuide you can stick your nose in a machine and smell the gas. Chlorine gas actually does smell a bit like bleach, mustard gas a little like mustard. At the impressive In Flanders Field peace museum at Ypres you can enter a darkened room for a trip through noman's-land, complete with snatches of dreams: what was going on in the mind of a German or British soldier as he went over the top? The room is full of noise and death rattles, full of images of running soldiers, phantoms from a peaceful life before the war: ‘Why me? Why us?’ Using a computer programme, you can pick out a soldier at will and trace the course of his life. I adopt Charles Hamilton Sorley, reading Greats at Oxford. He was killed at Loos, ‘a bullet through the head’.
    There are other approaches as well. At the new Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne, all the glory and illusions have been stripped away. The military uniforms and equipment are not displayed upright, but on the floor, like fallen men. Of course, that's how it was, almost everything here once belonged to the dead. But I am afraid the Historial will remain the lone exception. Today little cars trundle on rails through the old citadel of Verdun, like in an amusement park ride, and I am sure in twenty years’ time they will be trundling everywhere, through cunning replicas of the trenches complete with rats, excrement and the smell of corpses, the whinnying of dying horses and the cries of the mortally wounded. Slowly the feeling shifts from one of solidarity to one of curiosity.
    Along the autoroute from Lille to Paris, the Battle of the Somme is only a tap of the accelerator. In late summer 1916, 1.2 million people died here, between two exits. The motorway runs at a slight distance from the eastern boundary of the battlefield. Drivers are kept informed of that as well, on big brown signs along the road, LA GRANDE GUERRE , the way afamous chateau or a pleasant vintage might be pointed out elsewhere. Then they flash by, back into the serenity of present-day Picardy.
    Here the war has already entered the next phase, that of a popular tourist attraction, a mainstay of the region's commercial infrastructure. Everywhere one finds folders promoting these centres of infernal attraction; staying at my hotel – it is 15 February, the heart of winter – there are at least three

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