On 15/1/08 11:20, in article , "cupra"
wrote:

snip
Tens of thousands of Mothers queuing for hours on end to pass the Tomb of
the Unknown Soldier as it 'could be' their son, families visiting the
battlefields for many years attempting to discover where their
Son/Brother/Father may have been buried, the temporary plaster Cenotaph
being replaced by stone as it became an unexpected focus of remembrance for
years past it's due. And so on....

As I say, a book I'd wholeheartedly recommend.



It's profoundly moving to visit the war cemeteries in Normandy. That should
be part of every child's education. We didn't see one headstone which gave
an age older than 36 and mNY were 18 or so. The American one was vast
because all were buried together but the British tended to be buried in the
churchyards nearest to where they had fallen, so the military cemetery in
Caen is nowhere as large as the US one. But the first time I visited the US
one, I was taken also to the very sombre German cemetery. What struck me
very much was that at the US cemetery, there had been dozens of visitors and
in the German one, I saw a solitary figure weeping bitterly over a grave.
My hosts told me that the Germans had let the cemetery go to such a point
that local farmers were grazing cows in it and cutting hay. The British War
Graves Commission encouraged the Germans to clean it up and maintain it, on
the grounds that even if defeated, their men had given their lives, too.
Now it is immaculate and when I saw it there was a fairly newly planted
avenue of trees leading up to it.
--
Sacha
http://www.hillhousenursery.co.uk
South Devon
(remove weeds from address)
'We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our
children.'