Schoonselhoff

This is the first war cemetery that isn’t a dedicated memorial. This war cemetery is actually located within an existing cemetery. And what a huge cemetery, it had to be over a square mile. It took me almost 30 minutes just to walk from the entrance to the war cemetery. The war cemetery was also huge, and also for the first time this memorial wasn’t just to commonwealth soldiers. The majority of the graves here were Belgian, with some Dutch and French areas as well.

It was very interesting to see how the Belgian graves and memorials were different from the ones I had been seeing so far. Each grave had a coloured Belgian flag on it, which is interesting because most memorial shy away from using colour as it fades over time. One these however, each of the colours was bright and vibrant, which leads me to believe that these graves are very well kept and restored often.

When I was planning this trip, I figured that there might be some weird experiences because I was going to be spending the summer in cemeteries. But I never expected anything this weird, and I could even write down this story until I got to a place with lots of people. On my way to find the grave of Corperal Dummer from Regina, the only one in this cemetery from Regina, I found a gravestone with the name Hird on it.

Now this was bizarre and weirded me out quite a bit. Not that Hird is a unique name, but it’s also not exactly the most common of names. But as I got up and continued on my way I started to recognize other names, names of friends from Regina. Two graves down was one with the last name Semple, one of my best friends from High School. Right beside it was the name Duke. And in the row right behind them I saw Stinson(looking back at the pictures now I realize it says Tinson, but at the time I wasn’t necessarily the most level headed). After that I just stopped looking, and went to go do what I needed to do. Each of these men were the same age my friends and I are now. It really struck home just how young these soldiers really were. I started to ask myself if I could do what these men had done? How would it have felt to have my friends there beside me as we fought and died? I don’t know the answers to these questions much to the credit of these men. They fought so that our generation could grow up in a better world and I am incredibly lucky for the opportunities I have been able to have because men I never knew decided that the sacrifice was worth it. They left their family and friends, sometimes they even took their friends with them, in the hopes that they were creating a future without as many evils as the one they lived in.

What are the great evils that our generation faces? Global Climate Change is certainly one of them, but we seem only too happy to shrug and say it’s not our problem, why deal with it? Well that certainly worked during World War II. Chamberlain tried it for a while with his policy of appeasement towards the Nazis. That worked out well for everyone.

I can’t think of another thing that affects the future generation than the damage we do to the planet now. This is different, though, there is no one to fight against, no one to place the blame on accept ourselves. These men were willing to give up their lives, but we aren’t willing to give up our Hummers?