On Saturday two of us took our loinfruit and went to The Belgians Have Not Forgotten. It is a memorial exhibition by the Passchendale Memorial Musuem. It is currently at Fort Takapuna.
The exhibition features photos, diary exerts, films, music and artefacts from the battles ninety two years ago. Five thousand crosses greet visitors outside, they represent the number of New Zealanders killed in Belgian during the First World War, double the number killed in Gallipoli.
The exhibition is intensely moving and powerful, words alone cannot describe the horror that of the subject matter, but the exhibition does well to convey so much, and a sense of place, history, sorrow, sympathy and understanding.
I was glad to have visited, equally glad to have walked out into a bright sunny spring day, stricken that so many whose lives featured perished in wet, muddy fields, so far from home.
Today, we do indeed live in fortunate times.
More information can be found here , the exhibition runs until November 15th 2009. Go, pay your respects to those that fell, remember them and the mass of others who have fallen in the various terrible conflicts that litter human history.
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