Visiting a WWI German cemetery

We're reading Harry Potter. Here's a post we've pre-written to fill the space while we disappear into a children's book. Yeah... that's right. This also demonstrates that we have a few more posts left in us from our trip to France/Belgium... watch for them.
As insensitive as it sounds, Commonwealth cemeteries look the same. They're meant to. So when our tour guide mentioned there was a German graveyard in the area as other Canadian cemeteries, Daorcey and I basically pestered her to see it. I'm not joking. I think every day one of us asked.

I"m glad we stopped to see the cemetery. The "winners" of a war are meant to forget that millions of the "losers" died during war time too. In fact, many of those remain buried in the land on which they gave their lives.

Allied grave sites are almost common in western Europe and we saw a number of them during our tour. It was interesting to know that Allied countries are leased land in France (and in other countries, I assume) for free. Axis forces, in particular Germany, are required to pay for their leased land if they wish to maintain a cemetery abroad.

So we visited a German WWI cemetery while in Belgium.

The mass grave in that dominates the cemetery is a mass grave of 20,000-40,000 soldiers. There aren't headstones either since the ground is too unstable to support them. Instead flat stone markers line the fields. The oak tree and leaf are important symbols for the German people and so oak plays an important role throughout the cemetery. In fact, the entrance archway is completely paneled in oak with thousands of names of (unknown?) soldiers engraved. We were sure to a photo of the few Wagners (the Le Bray family name on the paternal side).

This was a humbling experience. I think too often we casually forget about the other young men and women who died during the World Wars and other conflicts. Maybe it would be be too morally challenging to remember that whole generations were destroyed not just for us, but for them. Either way, we were glad to visit a site that doesn't get too much traffic from Canadian student groups. I hope it had a similar impact on the kids who came with us.