Scott Stinson: Among our war dead, thoughts of sacrifice and causes

It is almost impossible to imagine the West making the kind of effort that I saw reflected in a Canadian war cemetery in the Netherlands.

By: Scott Stinson

I was recently riding a bicycle in the Netherlands, which is a phrase I promise I have never used to open a column before.

I was there as part of a trip with my wife and a couple of friends, in which we biked from Bruges to Amsterdam, an organized group tour for people who are unaware that cars exist.

(I kid, I kid, it was great.)

Most of the days were spent gawking at the beautiful scenery, or stopping in small medieval towns, or observing the shocking number of barnyard animals that wander around typical yards in that part of the world, but on this particular day one of the possible stops was a lot more sombre: a Canadian War Cemetery outside the Dutch town of Bergen-op-Zoom.

I had never been to such a place before; Normandy is on my list of must-visits, but I haven’t made it happen yet. And so, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would it look sad and forgotten, all these years later? Would it look like any other cemetery?

From the moment we pedalled up, the answers to those questions, emphatically, were: No.

It was beautiful and understated, immaculately maintained, with a small crew working on the lawns and shrubs as we arrived. A large area was being reseeded, evidence of the care given to its upkeep (see photo, below). Since my childhood I had heard stories of how the Dutch loved Canadians for the role they played in liberating their country during the Second World War, and here was tangible evidence. Row upon row of white tombstones, most of them bearing a maple leaf and a cross, a name, rank, and date of death.

It was deeply affecting. My wife and I stood in front of one of the rows, and almost all of the soldiers had the same date of death listed: Oct. 13, 1944. Almost exactly 81 years ago.

What had happened on that fateful day? Had those Canadians died as part of a crucial Allied advance? Had they been overrun by a desperate German force as the war was slipping away from them?

The uncertainty, the quasi-anonymity that a war cemetery provides, with its rows of identical tombstones bearing so many different dates, is part of what hits you. Or hit me, anyway. Literally any day could have been your last. Eighty one years ago today, none of those young Canadians knew they’d be dead in less than a week.

I wandered away for a bit and found a registry in a brick-and-concrete portico that included the names of those interred at Bergen-op-Zoom and also some history of the Allied campaign in that part of Europe.

By the fall of 1944, months after D-Day, the Allies wanted access to the Belgian port town of Antwerp, which would make supplying the armies in Western Europe much easier, and would sustain the coming offensive into Germany. Taking Antwerp meant clearing the German army out of the Dutch peninsulas that jut into the North Sea above the port. Bergen-op-Zoom sits at the base of one of those peninsulas. Weeks of heavy fighting ensued, with significant losses on both sides, before the region was liberated. The Canadian Army suffered more than 6,000 casualties, almost half the Allied total during the campaign to take Antwerp.

Eight decades later, we got back on our bikes and rode away, next to vast fields of green as the horses and cows looked on. But the thing about riding a bike for hours is that it gives you a lot of time to think. And what I was thinking about that afternoon, and at times since, is how it is impossible to imagine the West of today coming together in a massive effort, full of selflessness and sacrifice, to defend freedom and democracy. Frankly it’s tough to imagine Western governments coming together to accomplish much of anything.

The fight against the COVID pandemic had its successes, sure, but the prevailing sentiment of that battle is that no one wants to think about it again, let alone scrutinize the decisions that were made in hopes of making better ones in the future.

Meanwhile, the Russian invasion of Ukraine rolls on, as does the conflict in Gaza, and the default position of Western leaders is to issue edicts and sternly worded letters, always with an eye to their political constituencies at home, rather than getting, you know, too involved.

Much of the current malaise can be blamed on America’s bizarre bout of isolationism — just try to imagine Donald Trump’s United States getting involved in an overseas conflict, unless he could try to turn it into a real-estate play — but let’s not kid ourselves, either. We have long elected governments that conduct their affairs through the ever-present lens of partisanship, where a policy is only as good as its ability to win votes. That’s how you end up with intractable long-term problems — health care, housing, and climate change, to pick just three — that require wartime efforts to solve but instead get a lot of fiddling around the margins.

And so that’s the thing that I thought about leaving Bergen-op-Zoom: all those young men died in service of a better future for the next generations. Have we honoured their sacrifice?

As it happened, we ended that trip in Munich — we didn’t bike there, praise be, but used this newfangled thing called an aeroplane — and squeezed in a visit to Obersalzberg, the mountainside retreat in the Bavarian Alps that was once home to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. There’s a museum there, atop the bunkers that the German leadership used as the Allies closed in, that tells the story of the region’s importance to Nazi propaganda, in the context of the changing fortunes of the Second World War. One of the displays shows maps of Europe on Jan. 1, 1944, and Dec. 31 of that same year, as much of the continent was liberated from German occupation and Nazism. The fate of the world changed over those months, thanks to an Allied undertaking whose scale is still a little tough to grasp. And almost impossible to imagine being repeated today.

According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 1,118 people are buried at Bergen-op-Zoom. The soldiers who rest there gave their lives for a worthy cause, and more than 80 years later, they’re remembered for it, with love and honour. Thirty one of them remain unidentified.

Scott Stinson writes from suburban Toronto. All the above photos are by him, from his recent trip.

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