German War Cemetery in Trois-Epis
24 May 2018
From Kaysersberg it was a climb up towards our first stop in the small town of Trois-Epis. In a clearing in the woods on the edge of town there is a small cemetery, but behind that and further down a trail you find another cemetery. This is the final resting place of German soldiers who lost their lives here in the World Wars.
It can be easy to dehumanize your enemy. It can also be easy to assign blame in the aftermath of war. Even when there is clearly a villain like the case with Germany in WWII, the fate of an individual is often lost to the greater picture of the actions of the country as a whole. We’ve experienced this a fair bit in our own history – we’ve long debated if the United States was in the wrong when it got involved in Vietnam, but what about the individual soldiers sent there to fight? Most didn’t want to be there, and they surely didn’t want to die there. They had no say in the war, they were simply drafted from their lives and sent to fight. We are having that same debate again in Iraq, where the ones who start the war aren’t the ones who are actually there suffering on the battlefield. They aren’t the ones who get sent across the world and not make it back home. When we look over history we tend to get wrapped up in the actions and choices of a country or government, but often overlook the fact that most of the people dying on the battlefield were poor farmers, poor workers, and sometimes poor kids just out of school. They were pulled from their homes, their families, and their lives to be given a gun, sent off to fight, and most often sent off to die. Who knows what would have awaited their families had they refused? It’s easy to dehumanize them and to assign them the blame for the actions of their countries, but we should separate the sad fate of the individual from the mistakes of the government.
This idea is a good reason behind the cemetery we visited. Imagine - a war memorial cemetery in France dedicated to the German soldiers who died whilst invading France. It’s an interesting concept, one that can take some time to really understand, of a country having a war memorial to what were essentially enemy soldiers. Most graves were of soldiers who perished in WWI – a pointless war where millions died for no reason at all - which only added to the sad atmosphere. The graves were scattered across the hillside, possibly not very far from where many had fallen in battle, and each inscribed with their name and what they did – farmer, merchant, even some with a word we found loosely translated as “country-bumpkin soldier”. These were poor regular people who paid the price for their government’s desire for power and conquest. It was a somber, quiet, peaceful place; the only sound was the overhead rustling of leaves in the wind. Rather than a wide-open field like we usually associate with cemeteries, being in the woods gave a different perspective to the site. More of a reminder of how and where they died, also more of a reminder of how they were almost forgotten. Ultimately, it was not a place for pointing fingers at whose government was responsible, nor for placing blame on the people who died for the actions and crimes of their governments; rather it was a place to remind us that they were all individuals, human beings with families, passions, and lives not any different from our own. Each walked into this forest not knowing this was where they would take their final breath. Each one was a person who would have rather been home with their loved ones than dying on a foreign hillside. This was a place dedicated to their memory.
We spent more time than we expected to in the cemetery. It was a very powerful place, and it inspired a lot of reflection – about the pointlessness of war, about the people who had their fate out of their own hands, and about how easily it can be to forget these beautiful villages in this beautiful countryside once witnessed unimaginable violence. Let’s hope cemeteries like this stay as just memorials and never need expanding, that the pointless wars never affect this place again.
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