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TSN Senior Reporter

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Ypres, Belgium - At first, you wonder when you will see one. And then, as you get closer to these towns and villages in Flanders that a century ago were the front lines, the cemeteries pop up, like tulips in the spring.

They’re in sections of farmer’s fields, in town centres, in quiet, wooded areas and next to highways. One after another and another they come, big and small, some grand, some more modest. They are always immaculate, always peaceful sanctuaries.

Most have been here for a long time, the world growing up around them, but still carefully maintained, with neatly trimmed grass and flowers growing up around them. They seem almost pastoral now.

When you enter, the white granite sits starkly, serving as the demarcation of the horrors of what happened. It’s not until you get closer that you see each individual marker, one after another after yet another. Each has a name, a regiment, a rank, a maple leaf and an age - 23 years old, 19, 17 and even 15.

These are Canadians, resting in a foreign land. Once they were impossibly brave, and at the same time remarkably unlucky. They came thinking it would be over in a few months - home by Christmas, they were told - and they didn’t want to miss out on the chance to be a hero. But they had no idea, no concept of what they would see when they arrived.

Forget the mud and the rain and the cold. Or the rats and disease that ran through the trenches. They were witness to bullets and mortars, bombs and bayonets. And later, gas and flame throwers. No man could have comprehended such repulsion.

They saw things no man should ever have to see - the human body torn apart piece by piece. One moment there, the next obliterated. Some were never the same, understandably so.

Remembrance Day in Canada is a solemn affair. We buy poppies and drop a Toonie into the Legion box. Maybe we stop at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month for a moment to pay respect to soldiers, past and present, but then we go on with our lives.

But not until you come here and see the graves does it really hit home. We talk about the ultimate sacrifice too often as a turn of phrase, something that comes off our lips in a classroom or perhaps beside a cenotaph. But, for example, come to Tyne Cot Cemetery near Passchendaele, where the white markers stretch out for what seems like forever, section after section, row after row, plot by plot, and you understand what it really means.

There are 12,000 graves here, Canadians, British, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Indians and more. There are Victoria Cross winners buried here. There are two Canadian brothers, resting side by side. There are teenagers who lied about their ages to make this trip. Every grave tells a story.

Perhaps the saddest part is that we don’t know most of them. Roughly 70 per cent of all the tombstones carry no name. The bodies weren’t identifiable. “A soldier of the Great War,” they read. “Known unto God.”

At least those poor souls have a resting place. On a wall that gracefully rings the east side of Tyne Cot, another 30,000 names are etched into the granite, line by line, letter by letter. They were put there because their names wouldn’t fit on the Menin Gate Memorial, a few kilometres away in the town of Ypres, where 55,000 names fill every centimeter of space. These are the ones whose bodies were never found, who simply disappeared, perhaps blown apart or buried in the mud most of these battlefields turned into.

Since July 1929, every night at 8 p.m., at the Menin gate, the locals perform a simple but powerful ceremony of remembrance, a bugler sounding the last post.

It happens every single night. It doesn’t matter if it’s Christmas or New Year’s, winter or summer, good weather or bad. They haven’t missed a day.

My grandfather was one of the lucky ones. He left in 1914 and came home at the end of it all. He survived Passchendaele, the Somme, Vimy and so many other battles where the Canadians distinguished themselves.

Like so many of his comrades, he never spoke of the horrors. We know he was in the trenches, that he fought the enemy, that he was gassed and that he was wounded. The medals, now resting behind glass on my father’s wall, tell us he did some heroic things at these places, too, time and again. Sometimes I wonder if I could ever imagine myself doing these things. How could he and so many others muster the nerve to do what they did?

Earlier this week, as I walked through the cemeteries near Ypres, I wondered if was passing the graves of my grandfather’s friends. Did he and my grandfather laugh, and perhaps share a smoke or a tin of bully beef before he died? Why did he die and my grandfather live?

At one point, when the enormity of it all simply drowned me in emotion, I cried. Not a sniffle but full-on weeping, tears streaming down my cheeks. It’s not uncommon to see that here. It is a powerful place.

Every Canadian should make the pilgrimage to Flanders and Vimy and Normandy, to visit not just the cemeteries, but the museums that tell the story, to mingle with the locals, still grateful for the brave Canadians who fought here and to see the quiet beauty of a place that was the site of awfulness almost beyond belief.

Simply put, if you need to know why we celebrate Remembrance Day, come here. You will never wonder again.