Word: ypres
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...dispatches to the Dutch paper NRC Handelsblad. These reports, collected here, create a journey through the last century, with Mak breaking up what is essentially traditional, narrative history with short, contemporary portraits of historical settings. So Mak settles down to write about World War I from a farm in Ypres. He tells us about Hitler's disastrous Russian invasion from a square in Volgograd. He recounts the splintering of Yugoslavia from a restaurant in Novi Sad. Think of it as history with a journalist's sensibility - and datelines...
...school, he believes in seeing what you write about. With history, he must be content to recreate things, like a detective at a crime scene. "You try to redraw the landscape," he writes. "You try to draw in trench lines ... and khaki bundles hung up on barbed wire." Near Ypres, he watched archaeologists probe the spot where a man's bones had been found. They unearthed a belt buckle, bullet casings, bits of leather. The unknown soldier kept coming into Carlyon's mind for weeks. "What was he doing when the shell hit?" he writes. "Who wept for him?" Near...
DIED. ALFRED ANDERSON, 109, last surviving participant in the famous Christmas Truce of 1914, during which British and German soldiers emerged from opposing trenches along the Western Front near Ypres, Belgium, to exchange gifts, sing carols and smoke; in Newtyle, Scotland. The unofficial World War I truce spread to much of the Western Front, lasting for days in some areas. Last year he said of the reprieve, "I remember the eerie sound of silence...
...Washington, carved into the wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, are the names of 58,226 Americans who died in an unpopular war. Now, in your mind, fly to Belgium, where about the same number of names--54,896, to be exact--are written on the Menin Gate outside Ypres. But these are not the names of all who died in a whole war; they are not even the names of all who died on a single battlefield. They commemorate the Britons, together with about 13,000 Canadians and Australians, who died at Ypres between 1914 and August...
...Washington, carved into the wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, are the names of 58,226 Americans who died in an unpopular war. Now, in your mind, fly to Belgium, where about the same number of names - 54,896, to be exact - are written on the Menin Gate outside Ypres. But these are not the names of all who died in a whole war; they are not even the names of all who died on a single battlefield. They commemorate the Britons, together with about 13,000 Canadians and Australians, who died at Ypres between 1914 and August...