Say My Name: Remembering the Horrors of War at Ypres

[drakonyx]

"The echo of footstep on stone seemed to waken them down the century. They stirred as if to rise as I passed, "Say my name", they said, "I’m lost, and the mud is cold, say my name. Please, say my name!" as if doing so would raise them from mud and time."

Ypres looks like what it is, a town with not very much to recommend it. At the height of its prosperity 700 years ago, it was larger than Paris and London combined and was one of the richest cities on the continent. It bought all of England’s wool and sold it as far as Novgorod.

The eventual collapse of the wool trade brought several centuries of a depressed economy and anonymity, and Ypres was forgotten, The Cloth Hall and its Cathedral the monuments left standing to a once great town, now a sleepy way station on the road to Lille. Until a fat Austrian in a uniform and his wife got themselves shot by a deranged student in a provincial capital half a world away. Ypres’ fame was then revived as a marketplace of death.

http://www.theprovocation.net/2011/11/say-my-name.html

[truedelphi]

1. How very sad to think of all these lives lost.

And sad too, how little things have changed.

Of course, one hundred years ago, someone actually had to shoot someone in order for wars to begin.

Now, all that has to happen for a war to begin is for our media to announce that "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction," or "Iran will obliterate Israel once Iran gets some nuclear weapons." And as long as this message is announced loud and clear, the destruction begins, with so many lives ruined and nations altered forever.