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Might as well have been the bones of a German. Farmers still find bones when ploughing their fields as well as all kind of weapons and bomb shells.
In front of one of these no name tombstones somebody had put a photograph of a certain Jack Morris, a young Australian lad with farmer hat who obviously had got lost during the slaughtering. The next tombstone had a name on it. It was dedicated to 17 years old P. A. J. White from Australia, who definitely did not come to surf in Europe.
I visited a few more sites – and did not find any monuments or war cemeteries of the German losers by the way – and got a faint impression of what happened here in these two years of 1916 and 1917.
It somehow was the appropriate end of a short trip through some of the European epicentres of the renaissance of nationalism. It was not the most cheerful trip as it often was a trip into a past that should not become our future. And it was trip that left me angry. Angry about the imbecility of politicians playing the great simplifiers and the stupidity of the people following their ideas. I strongly recommend everybody taking a visit to the battlefields of the Somme or any other major European battlefield from the past century to get an idea where nationalism (and fascism) has led us not that long ago.
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