Try to imagine the river Moose.
A valley aims the river from France in the south, through Belgium and the Netherlands
to the North Sea.
Its people tied together by the Moose, connected by riverbeds and railbeds.
Seer paths, old trails, country roads and highways, great and small.
Drive off the beaten path in the tracks of those who came by yesterday.
Through soft hammocks of summer meadows.
Now winterdusted, a stark desert with cold dunes of fresh snow.
This beauty has a thin skin.
Scratch the land and imagine, if you can, what lives buried beneath today.
The valley is a border between empires.
The land itself a barrier, where great armies of flesh and bone came together.
Were broken and bled, more than nine million dead.
The earth and wood, no protection from the maelstrom of steel and lead.
Unimaginable how they died.
Long to bits and maimed by mortars, bombs and grenades.
Unimaginable soldiers harvested too young by the thousands mowed down by machine guns.
Unimaginable, the terrible sight and sound of approaching tanks through the haze.
Unimaginable, the grim horror of trenches full of dead soldiers.
Drowned in their own lungs, destroyed by poison gas.
Unimaginable, the diseases, typhus, malaria, influenza.
Unimaginable, the madness of men.
When this war ended to think it would never come again.
Unimaginable, the madness of men.
Unimaginable, the unimaginable.
