Day 2 Post 1: Battlefields--Living Cemeteries

0800
Maastricht, Netherlands

I have started reading a new book. Written by Michael Sledge, Soldier Dead: How we Recover, Identify, Bury, & Honor our Military Fallen explores all the questions and avenues of interest about handling the affairs of those that die in battle. I have learned some new processes and stories in this book, and it has brought quite a few interesting thoughts to mind.

Historically, those who fell in battle were buried in place. It would be easy to look at this as a strictly logistical matter. Obviously it is easier to repatriate (send home the body of a fallen soldier) with modern transportation technology. But exploring a little deeper shows that even in modern times there has not been a big priority in caring for the dead even among modern countries.

 If all of the trenches from WWI were laid end to end they would reach 25,000 miles--more than the circumference of the earth. Flanders Field in Belgium is the name of the largest front of World War I. It was the sight of the death of tens of thousands of soldiers from a dozen countries in horrific trench warfare. Across the entire trench line, more than a million soldiers were killed on both sides combined. Well as you can imagine, removing this number of people from the battlefield is a logistical nightmare, let alone under the context of continuing battle.

In most cases during the World Wars, soldiers were buried in place alongside their national comrades. The grave sites were marked and the bodies were moved to cemeteries at a later time. For countries like the United States with the financial resources for this repatriation, or European interment this was an organized process. I see a larger purpose of establishing permanant American cemeteries in Europe - not just to ease the logistical burden of sending everyone home, but also in making sure that those who were unable to be recovered were not alone in their European resting place.

For countries will smaller forces and less established infrastructure, movement of bodies was much more haphazard.The vast majority of fallen soldiers were buried in place and later recovered. However tens of thousands of fallen, especially on the Eastern front remain in graves--mass or individual. Marked or unmarked. Battlefields across Europe are exciting to tour and learn about. However they are inevitably the resting place of thousands. It is always important to keep this in mind when walking across these vast spaces. Respect and honor is always at the forefront of my mind.

To this day historical excavations of battlefronts almost always lead to the discovery of fallen soldiers. For perspective, there are currently more than 100,000 American service members who's official status is "Missing in Action." The Department of Defense and other government and non-government agencies continue to search for and identify the missing.