December 1, 2013 Sacred Soil

This November 11, nineteen short days ago, marked the 98-year anniversary of the end of WWI.
At the time, it was “The Great War”.  The “War to end all wars”.  There is barely a piece of 20th or 21st century history which cannot be traced back to it.  International Communism was borne of the Great War, without which there would have been no cold war, no Korean War, nor Vietnam. The killing fields of Cambodia would have remained mere rice fields.  The spiritual descendants of Chiang Kai-shek’s brand of capitalism would be running all of China, instead of only Taiwan.
The current boundaries of the Middle East arose from the Great War. While the region’s tribal alliances and religious differences are nothing new, they would have taken a very different shape if not for those boundaries.
World War II, a conflagration which left more dead, wounded or missing than any conflict in world history (WWI was only #5), was little more than the Great War, part 2. A Marshall of France, on looking at the Versailles Treaty formally ending WWI, said “This isn’t peace. This is a cease-fire that will last for 20 years”. He was off by something like 36 days.
I’ve long believed that we can’t be participating citizens of a self-governing Republic, we can’t know where we want our country to go, if we don’t understand where it’s been.  It’s one of the principle benefits of examining history.  It’s why I think something wonderful happened three years ago, and I don’t think many of us heard about it.
More than 1,000 British and Belgian schoolchildren visited 70 battlefields of the Great War in the summer of 2013.  Ypres.  Passchendaele.  Verdun.  The Somme.  All over Northern France and Belgium, the region known as “Flanders”, there they collected samples of the sacred soil of those fields.
The soil from those battlefields was placed in WWI-style burlap sandbags, each stenciled with a red poppy, where it came from, and the dates.  These seventy sandbags were transported to London, and installed with great care at Wellington Barracks, the central London home of the Grenadier Guards, Coldstream Guards and Scots Guards. There the soil of the Great War will nourish and support a garden.  Ready for the following year – a solemn remembrance of the centenary of that war.
That day, December 1, 2013, was for the Flanders Fields Memorial Garden, the first full day of forever.
I can’t think of anything more fitting than that it was children, our future and posterity, who retrieved the sacred soil of Flanders and installed it at that garden. It is now for that posterity to keep our history alive, and not let it fade into some sepia toned and forgotten past.

This is what it looked like

Author: Cape Cod Curmudgeon

I'm not a "Historian". I'm a father, a son and a grandfather. A widowed history geek and sometimes curmudgeon, who still likes to learn new things. I started "Today in History" back in 2013, thinking I’d learn a thing or two. I told myself I’d publish 365. The leap year changed that to 366. As I write this, I‘m well over a thousand. I do this because I want to. I make every effort to get my facts straight, but I'm as good at being wrong, as anyone else. I offer these "Today in History" stories in hopes that you'll enjoy reading them, as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them. Thank you for your interest in the history we all share. Rick Long, the “Cape Cod Curmudgeon” View all posts by Cape Cod Curmudgeon