Back to the Front Read Online Free PDF

sympathies of many Flemish nationalists
     during the Second World War, naturally engendered more resentment. Using the masonry from the original tower, the people of
     Dixmude constructed on the site a modest peace arch. Beside that the massive new IJzertoren rose, inaugurated in 1962 by a
     bevy of bishops and old soldiers. On its side is an acrostic:

    This stands for Alles voor Vlaanderen y Vlaanderen voor Christus (All for Flanders, Flanders for Christ), a mix of Musketeer and Crusader sentiment that pushes the correct reactionary buttons
     for the extremists who hold rallies here. They are sometimes joined by like-minded fellows from France, Britain, and Germany
     in gatherings at the foot of the tower where, presumably, everyone compares skull tattoos and trades Adolf and Benito bubble-gum
     cards.
    I feel distinctly queasy as I pay my money to ascend the IJzertoren. Here in Dixmude, the Old World seems incurably steeped
     in old ways, and the contemplation of the past reserved for people bearing grudges. I have barely begun my journey and already
     I find myself wondering whether visiting the Western Front merely adds another small brick to the edifice of Reaction. Perhaps
     it's better to ignore history, for history is too often used as a defense of the ignoble. The know-nothing ugly American exists,
     but so too does the do-nothing ugly European, who constantly invokes the past as an excuse for his present. We've always done
     it this way, so it must be right; we've never had your kind living amongst us, so we can't allow you to stay; my father hated
     your father, so I hate you.
    I share the elevator ride with a small boy and his parents. We are enclosed in the heart—the dark heart—of the flat country.
     The problem of history and hate continues to nag. When the cult of the past involves a war, the freedom to speculate shrinks,
     for the more destructive the activity, it seems, the more zealous its curators. Even far from the battlefield in North America,
     remembrance of wars past regularly brings out the thought police. Veterans' groups act as self-appointed censors of large
     swaths of history, shrieking like outraged virgins whenever the record is challenged. In Canada in 1992, veterans tried to
     quash a TV documentary about the Allied bombing of Germany in the Second World War. In 1995 the Smithsonian Institution canceled
     its Enola Gay exhibit under similar pressure. Intolerance came disguised as warrior virtue.
    The museum at the top of the tower, organized around the central shaft and composed of mementos evoking life in the trenches,
     is dusty and deserted. The Fleming family and I head for the windows to look out over a patchwork of green meadows and redbrick
     villages lying far below. Guy de Maupassant once said that he liked the view from the Eiffel Tower because it was the only
     place in the city from which he couldn't see the Eiffel Tower. The same holds true, mutatis mutandis, of the prospect from the IJzertoren. To the north is the blue blanket of the sea. To the south are the first timid signs of
     relief in the Flanders plain. A modest, wooded ridge rises beyond the distant spires of a large town. The scene is disingenuously
     ordinary, for the town, Ypres, and its surroundings form one of the most terrible landscapes of the twentieth century.
    I take the elevator down. The distasteful connotations of the tower have faded, as have visions of aiding the mastodons of
     conservatism by pursuing this journey. War, French Premier Georges Clemenceau is supposed to have said in the wake of a battlefield
     debacle, is too important a matter to be left to the generals. The same could be said of the past. It needn't be surrendered
     to the nostalgic and the intolerant, to the ugly European, to the frat boys of neo-fascism, or to the antidemocratic mullahs
     of military memory. The past belongs to everyone. It's too important to be left to the professionals.
    3. Dixmude to Ypres
    Strange popping