From War Graves to an Onion Bread Festival: Can Military Archaelogy Promote Peace?
Dec 2007, Vol. 152, No. 6
By Andy Robertshaw & David Kenyon
As a nation, the British tend to have an almost colonial attitude towards the Great War battlefields of France and Flanders. On the rare occasions when a French or Belgian group is seen at one of the well-visited sites, the British visitors adopt a vaguely proprietorial attitude that suggests that this is ‘their’ battlefield and although the interested foreigners are welcome, they are visiting the British, not the other way around. This is inevitable to a certain degree for two main reasons: first, the sovereign soil of Commonwealth war graves cluster particularly thickly in northern France and Belgium; secondly, the British memory of the events of 1914 is markedly different from the other combatants.
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By Andy Robertshaw & David Kenyon
As a nation, the British tend to have an almost colonial attitude towards the Great War battlefields of France and Flanders. On the rare occasions when a French or Belgian group is seen at one of the well-visited sites, the British visitors adopt a vaguely proprietorial attitude that suggests that this is ‘their’ battlefield and although the interested foreigners are welcome, they are visiting the British, not the other way around. This is inevitable to a certain degree for two main reasons: first, the sovereign soil of Commonwealth war graves cluster particularly thickly in northern France and Belgium; secondly, the British memory of the events of 1914 is markedly different from the other combatants.
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