Picture at Menin Gate
I led a few students from BSIS to the town of Ieper (Ypres) on the 11th of November, Armistice Day. About a hundred years ago, British soldiers used to cheekily mispronounce the town’s name as ‘Wipers’.
The Ypres Salient was the scene of unimaginable violence during World War I, the town was nearly wiped out (painstakingly reconstructed after the war) and many young soldiers – shockingly young – were themselves wiped out.
The annual anniversary of the Armistice that ended this senseless loss of life is a somber and stately affair. It was quite remarkable to note how much of this Belgian town remains marked by the cemeteries and memorials administered by the British Commonwealth (formerly Imperial) War Graves Commission (CWGC).
The students and I walked through the arch of the monumental Menin Gate, whose white marble is etched with names of men who were brought from across the British Empire to die ‘In Flanders Fields’ and whose bodies were never found. We saw the memorials to Indian and Nepalese soldiers and wreathes left by Trinidad & Tobago. We reflected on war, the contestation of its memory, and WWI as a tragedy of imperialism. We ended our visit at a cemetery by reading the names carved on rows of uniform white headstones bearing the names of British imperial subjects. Just as the war mass-produced death, it led to the mass-production of these graves and these same cemeteries across the world, kept up by the CWGC. At the cemetery, as it exists in every such British cemetery of the war, we saw the memorial stone bearing the words ‘Their name liveth for evermore.’ Words chosen from the King James Bible by Rudyard Kipling, the bard of the British Empire, who lost his own son in the war. John Kipling was only 18. We cannot let wreathes, parades and melancholy white marble conceal the cruelty.
Zoheb Mashiur
Early-Stage Researcher
WWI Literature and Indian Soldiers
MOVES: Migration and Modernity – Historical and Cultural Challenges
Brussels School of International Studies, University of Kent (Brussels)
Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Charles University (Prague)
Indian Forces Memorial
Parade in Ieper Grote Markt
