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Wednesday, November 21, 2007 |
| A Moving Trip to Passchendaele by Paul Gross |
 
I was honoured to be invited to the commemorative ceremonies of the 90th anniversary of the end of the Passchendaele Offensive, an event spearheaded by the curator of the Passchendaele museum, the indefatigueable Franky Bostyn. It was an extraordinary trip on many levels, not least among them being back again on the actual soil of this punishing campaign, walking through these now verdant fields and easily imagining them stripped of grass, houses, barns and humanity. To stand at the Canadian Memorial to the battle is a sobering experience. It is sited at a patch of ground that was known in the war as Crest Farm. Across the valley you can see the Revebeek, little more than a ditch now, but in 1917 it was an almost impassable morass. The Bellevue Spur, a ridge of ground is clearly visible across the valley and the New British cemetery is atop the ridge. The Canadian Corps moved both on this ridge and the ridge that the memorial sits on, converging on the shattered village of Passchendaele. Standing at the memorial you can look up the road that rises up a few feet toward the rebuilt church in the village. It is humbling and horrifying. What today is an eight minute walk, in 1917 took our troops 10 days of the fiercest of fighting, cost almost 5,000 lives and 16,000 casualties. It doesn't take much effort to recreate the horror in your mind and see our forebears struggling across the tormented ground.
On the evening of the 10th Martha and I attended the official ceremony at the memorial. There were a number of bands and speakers and about 600-700 people in attendance. I was invited to say a few words and talked about my grandfather, Michael Joseph Dunne, a little bit. Then I and three other speakers placed photographs of our relatives on the memorial along with a candle. It was hugely moving, as you can imagine, and seemed to bring this long, long project full circle. To have been inspired by the stories my grandfather told me as a young man and then so many years later to be able to acknowledge him in such a solemn and public way was very stirring. And the evening was capped off by the entire assembly walking in a candlelit procession the 800 yards or so to the village of Passchendaele, on the same route and over the same ground the Canadian troops fought over in early November 1917.
The following day Martha and I went to the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Menin Gate. For anyone familiar with the First World War, the Menin Gate (now rebuilt) had become almost an abstraction by 1916, as though it had come to symbolize the gates to hell. Long destroyed by shell fire, it was still the main road from the town of Ypres up to the front lines. It was something Sigfried Sassoon referred to in one of his poems:
"Who will remember passing through this Gate
The unheroic dead who fed the guns?"
It was a site of enormous symbolic importance in the imagination of every soldier who fought and suffered in the Ypres Salient and the ceremony to mark the end of the war was very profound.
It was, suffice it to say, an extraordinary trip and one I would recommend without hesitation to anyone. If you have any interest in this subject you must make time to visit the battlefields of Flanders and northern France. They are resonant and profound and anyone who ventures into them will be changed by the experience. I certainly have been and it was the perfect punctuation mark to a long and difficult shoot.
Back into the editing room where, so far, things are looking very promising.
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| About the Blogger |
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The motion picture Passchendaele, an epic set amidst the horror of war, was shot in Alberta from August 20th to October 23rd 2007, directed and written by Paul Gross. The film is now in post production and will premiere in Theatres fall 2008, thus culminating a lifelong dream of Paul's, who learned of this extraordinary period in Canadian history from his Grandfather, Michael Joseph Dunne. The Battle of Passchendaele represents a story of determination, commitment and triumph, and this defining chapter in the forging of a nation shall never be forgotten. |
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