A Generation of Leaves

 Hotel d’Iéna where the YMCA sheltered Canadian troops awaiting discharge papers  after WWI.

My friend, Eleanor Morse, found this photograph in a Curiosity Shop in Parsonfield, Maine.  The framed photo hung on the wall before my desk as I was writing, A Generation of Leaves, the book that was to become the springboard for the play Le Retour which will be performed this summer in Nova Scotia and, hopefully, in Belgium next year as part of events marking the conclusion of the Centenary commemoration of WWI.

Often, especially as I was reaching the ending of A Generation of Leaves and my spirits would flag, I would look up at the silent faces of those men, those ghostly apparitions from the past, those men who made it through the war to end all wars.  They were going home and that was another story.  They were going back to mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers, to wives, to children, to lovers and maybe to no one in particular. But back, hopefully, to work, to fields or oceans, maybe to school, to life.  But what did they carry within them, what stories, what visions.  Look deeply into any of those faces and try to imagine. It shouldn’t be hard. Certainly we’ve had the practice having had so many wars since the one to end them all.

The  Battlefields in Flanders   WWI

April is the cruellest month, breeding /Lilacs out of the dead land/mixing memory and desire……..I am copying this from my college literature text Modern Verse in English 1900-1950 edited by David Cecil and Alan Tate.  My hardback copy of 688 pages was $3.85 in 1960 complete with my erudite marginalia referencing T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I found the poem as dreary then as I find it dreary and self-absorbed now, riddled with obscure references and sly nods to contemporary speech. I don’t think I received a stellar grade in that course.  But, often a poet is redeemed for me by a memorable line and I think  Eliot’s mixing memory and desire touched such a nerve.

                 The Battlefields today in Flanders

Six years ago when I went to the WWI battlefields surrounding Ypres in Belgium, I woke to a misty morning outside the city of Ieper (the reclaimed Flemish name of the city).  Looking out the window, I saw only green grass and mist and heard birdsong. This was the city where my young Uncle was somewhere buried in an unknown spot.  This was the family story, the family memory and, for me, now, the desire to tell that story.  That urge in itself is one of the oldest stories.  Why we can’t forget. Why we want to construct  memory out of the rag tags of history. So, I visited the trenches.  I walked through a few, startled that my shoulders went to the lip of the trench. In 1914, they would have been fortified at the top with sandbags and soldiers were smaller then.  I heard the skirl of bagpipes played by a man pacing in Sanctuary Wood where many Canadian forces had lost their lives.  I walked through many sun-splashed graveyards where Commonwealth graves are impeccably kept.  I saw one German gravesite that my guide took me to and wondered how shaded, dark and somber it was, wondered if that were some kind of retribution for their part in the war and was told no, the Germans wanted it that way.  They felt their fallen would like to be in a shaded spot that reminded them of the sheltering, black forests. My guide pointed out, “There, there was this spot for that attack and that spot for the counter-attack”.  This high ground, that low ground. I saw fields of green and  heard birdsong and felt a soft breeze.  Memory and Desire.

In 2018, the Commemorations of World War One, the Great War to End All Wars, will conclude.  Our little theater group from Nova Scotia will travel to Belgium to present our play Le Retour. We will walk on the earth that holds the bones of our relatives. There will be green grass and mist and birdsong mixed with memory. What will our desire be then?

I am reminded of another poet, Carl Sandburg, whose poem Grass references the battles of Waterloo and Austerlitz, Gettysburg, Ypres, and Verdun. Pile the bodies high, the poet says/I am the grass. Let me work.  Today on April 10th, 2017– Can we do better than letting the grass cover what we have undone?