Transcript for the Piece Audio version of RN Documentary: Footnotes from the Fields
WORLD WAR I DOCO
Broadcast dates: Nov 10 + 12, 2004
Production number: 1003852
Duration: 29”30”
MUSIC: Regeneration ,tr.1,Garden of Death,comp. Mychael Danna, Varese Sarabande, VSD 6005, NOS CD-98502., 1 minute
JEFF 18A: It’s just amazing.. it’s real. (34”)
INTRO: Radio Netherlands presents:
“Footnotes from the Fields”
A new generation studies the First World War
Produced and presented by Marijke van der Meer
TRENCHES/DUGOUT
CONT 1: Just east of the town of Iepres in Flanders, a group of Dutch and American college students explore a World War I dugout and trenches at Santuary Wood. The students are roughly the same age as the young men who died here in 1917, when the Allies launched a deadly offensive in the pouring rain.
BRAM a: I’ve been living… (14”-28”)4 or 5 years sometimes. (33” + noise)
CONT 2: Bram Hendrikson is one of a group of students visiting the Western Front. These students are from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and from Cleveland State University in Ohio.
BRAM b: When you hear…4 or 5 years sometimes (29”-47”)
KOCH 33A: You can…terrain. (25”)
CONT 3: Professor Koen Koch teaches political science at the university of Leiden in the Netherlands and is a specialist in the First World War. Twice a year he takes Dutch and American students to the very places where the worst fighting occurred in Flanders and northern France.
KOCH 33B: Only a few meters…soldiers. (15”)
BUS Ypres Salient
For four days of total immersion we drive along the Western front, listening to professor Koch’s lectures and we walk among the graves, through the fields and farmland that once was No Man’s Land.
Battlefield explosion
[4] In the museums we experience reconstructions of the battlefield, featuring smoke, the sound of shellfire, and even the nauseating smell of mustard gas.
Diksmuide: Welcome…(fade under)
We hear many different sides to the story of the madness and pain of the Western Front, for the British, for the Germans, for the French and for the Belgians. In Belgium, the Flemish remember their war dead at the Ijzer tower in Diksmuide.
Diksmuide 10: .. gigantic nonsense. (48”)
Bells 11
MUSIC: Duizend soldaten, Willem Vermandere, Dureco 1151242, Stemra 1989, C.206480, 1 minute
[5] Fighting began with the German invasion of Belgium in 1914. The most intense and murderous fighting occurred on the Western Front. Within weeks the front had frozen into a line of trenches over 400 kiometers long. It hardly shifted from 1914 to 1918, during four years of fighting in which millions of men were killed. The war was a vortex that sucked towards it all of the major powers of Europe, the Middle East, North America and Australia, and numerous people in Europe’s colonies in Asia and Africa. (41”)
LUCAS 27: Well the thing…this war. (44”)
[6] Lucas Korthals Altes is a 25-year-old student at the university of Groningen. As a student of medicine he is struck by the fact that more people died of disease than of gunfire in the war. Another student on the trip, young Clemens Barens, is specializing in tropical medicine.(18”)
CLEMENS 23: Yesterday…helpless. (2’11”)
MENTHE: I’m.. conviction. (36”)
[7] Most of the students are history majors, and it is only logical that they would study one of the most decisive events of modern world history. But many of the students have a special interest in World War I for their own unique reasons. Yannet Bosselaar, for example, is majoring in Hungarian studies.(20”)
YANNET 25: The First World War….sensitive. (1’20”)
MUSIC: “Over There”, comp. Cohan, perf. E. Caruso, Pavilion Records, GEMM CD 9355, C.214707, 30 sec
[8] The United States did not enter the war until 1917 but played a decisive role in the ultimate defeat of German on the western front. Some of the Americans on this trip are in the Europe for the first time. Like 29-year-old Kevin Paul who is doing legal studies in Cleveland. I caught up with him in the trenches at Beaumont-Hamel, and asked him what it’s like to spend your first days in Europe exposed to one of the worst chapters in this continent’s history.(30”)
KEVIN 20: It’s just that. It’s history. It doesn’t make me think worse of Europe now. I mean, things have changed, I think for the better, because of maybe the first and second World Wars.
This is a place where North Americans fought, in this case New Foundlanders. In America, people often hear they’ve gone to Europe twice to save Europe from bloody conflict. Is this still a dominant view in America?
Yeah, I think so. Before I started to prepare going on this trip I read a couple of books on World War I. I was always under the impression that the United States had a bigger role. But the reality of it was they didn’t come over til the end. So I think most Americans, if they know anything about World War I at all, they think we played a much bigger part. (1’14”)
KOEN 36B: It is for me…too much war. (1’21”)
[9] Most Dutch people are far more interested in the Second World War, however. The Netherlands managed to stay neutral in 1914, which explains why most Dutch people have little knowledge or interest in World War One. An exception is Johannes Ploeg, a 23-year-old history major from Drachten. (21”)
JOH PLOEG 8: I’m taking this course….2nd World War. (10”-1’50”)
MAURITS 13A: I was always….so (16”+ ruis)
[11] Even for war buffs like 23-year-old business administration student Maurits Muskee, the scale of the violence of World War I makes a deep impression. He was particularly struck by the three-dimensional stereometric photos we saw at the Sanctuary Wood museum near Ypres.(21”)
MAURITS 13B: There was this picture…horrendous. (1’50”)
SOMME BUS 16: We will now…battle of the Somme.(0-15”), then fade down and hold under text.
[12] The massive scale of the slaughter begins to seep in as we drive along the battlefields and cemeteries of the Somme. Walking along the Serre Road, for example, we saw that farmers had depositied mud-coated rusty grenades along the roadside. Every week, the soil still regurgitates these unexploded shells from the 1916 artillery barrage of the Somme.(29”)
SOMME BUS 16: Bring up 2’39” to 3’36”: Especially the first day…British nation.
KOEN Serre Road 35: We are here…German machine guns.(27”- +/- 2’30”)
JAMIE 22A: If you look around…as it is now. (19”)
[13] Just down the road at Beaumont Hamel, 21-year-old Jamie Lowe from the University of Groningen is amazed to see how close the German and Canadian trenches were to each other, separated by only about 40 meters.(16”)
JAMIE 22A: You do feel…don’t know what else to say. Sorry. (total 19”-1’24”)
GUNS/DRUMS < Regeneration, tr. 1, “Garden of Death”, and .
MUSIC: tr. 4, “The Declaration”, M. Danna composer, Varese Sarabande, VSD 6005, 50 sec.
KOEN 33B: Every time…owe that to these boys. (39”)
SHAWN 34: To think…revere them. (+/-1 min)
[14] Shawn Foucher is a student of European history and communications at Cleveland University. He is in his mid-twenties, in other words roughly the same age as many of those who died on the Western Front. A recurring comment both among these students and among those who lived through the war is a sense of betrayal of the young by the generation of their parents.(24”)
SHAWN 15A: This is Tyn Cot…just wasted. (37”)
MUSIC
SASSOON: “Base Details”, from CD “Poets of the Great War”, perf. M. Maloney, Naxos, NA 210912, 30 sec.
[15] Perhaps the most eloquent testimony of the older generation to the children they sent to the slaughter is the sculpture that German artists Kathe Kollwitz made of herself and her husband bowing in shame before the grave of their son Peter. He was killed at the age of 18 only a few days after he arrived at the front, and he lies at their feet among 22 thousand soldiers buried in the Vladslo cemetery for German war dead. This composition of silent despair leaves a deep impression on all of the students, including 24-year-old Rich Garr from Cleveland.(44”)
RICH 14: As a student of art…(+ rain) (1’25”) [cut cue 6-7 + 8-9]
Verdun Bells (hold under text and Rich)
[16] The bodies of many of those killed were never identified or even found and buried. Nothing more remains of some of those who suffered and vanished here but a name engraved in stone on one of the gigantic monuments to the missing, or an anonymous pile of bones in a mass grave, as in Verdun at the ossuary. (25”)
RICH 30: There’s a huge pile ….it all was. (+/- 2 min)
MUSIC: Regeneration, tr. 1, (see above) 2’30”
SEAN 15B: When I first started…. air force. (1’12”)
KOEN 36A: Especially …. to each other. (56”)
MUSIC ends
OUTRO: You’ve been listening to “Footnotes from the Fields”. The program was produced and presented by Marijke van der Meer.
This has been a Radio Netherlands presentation.
