The Somme, France
Almost a century later, the scars still blight the open field. The grass has grown back and the birds have returned, but they fly now over traumatized and disfigured terrain — sacred land that will never fully heal. At Beaumont-Hamel, in a remote corner of northwestern France, embryonic trenches zigzag across the meadows. Between them are a host of craters, each four or five feet deep and almost preternaturally rounded, as if cut out by a tablespoon. In the corner of one dugout, bent and rusted steel spikes still thrust upward to the sky — in preparation, perhaps, for a moment that never came.
Comments