Soldiers
Soldiers’ cemeteries like this one, which we hoped might be the last, will always stick with me. The contrast with the anguish and chaotic death of all these soldiers, could not be greater: the static, very neat gravestones in an extraordinarily quiet, peaceful setting.
The – relative – beauty of these cemeteries is a stolen beauty, a corrupted beauty because it is at odds with the horror, the hideous suffering.
And yet, it might be an ideal place to commemorate the fallen in peace, were it not for the fact that even now, as I write this, thousands of soldiers are to be buried again
The photographs are, as it were, a mediation between the chaotic and the peaceful: hard contrasts, heavy grain and deep darkness.
Frank Verreyken
