“National identity in First World War Belgian military cemeteries”

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to illustrate how the presence and the absence of Flemish bodies in the material spaces of a post-war commemoration of the First World War and the Second World War, in both state-sponsored military and in community cemeteries, have served a cultural and political agenda for nearly the past 100 years. The political views of both the kingdom of Belgium and the Flemish are articulated through the most common symbol of a war – the gravestone – marking visibility for the Flemish and a Flemish nationalist cause. The article traces the history of the formation of the cemeteries as well as chronicles the physical signs of Flemishness from 1915 during the Great War to the post-war commemoration of Second World War. In the Great War, this took the form of a modified Celtic cross, a heldenhuldezerk, a Flemish hero tombstone. The history of this grave marker is one of destruction and appropriation linked to a veneration of the dead who lay buried beneath. Although a symbol of a nationalist movement that, according to the Belgian Army, compromised the united effort against German occupation during the Great War, these gravestones were permitted to stand in the Belgian-sponsored military cemeteries created in the 1920s. This is contrast to the ways in which those veterans of the Second World War who fought for an overt Flemish nationalist cause were interred in a separate cemetery and physically marginalized in the post-war burial practices.