Tuesday, March 18:
We went to Henri-Chapelle, a little town in Belgium near the German border where my grandfather is buried. (He died in WWII.) We took a high-speed train from Paris to Liege, stopping in Brussels, and then caught a commuter-type train into the small town of Welkenraedt, the closest town to Henri-Chapelle with rail access, and the last stop before you get to the German border (about 13 miles in). The folks from the cemetery were so nice—they picked us up from the train station, drove us to the cemetery, showed us to the gravesite and put together a packet of information on what was going on in the war around the time of his death. We spent several hours here—the cemetery and the Belgian countryside were just beautiful!
I was amazed at the precision with which the graves area is designed. If you look from one direction, you'll see a perfectly straight line. From another angle, you get gently sweeping arcs, still completely straight. I found this perfection really stunning.
Here are a couple of monuments at the cemetery:
The Henri-Chapelle cemetery officials had placed a flag at my grandfather's grave, and they used sand from the D-Day beaches to rub into his name so that it would show up better in our pictures:
The cemetery superintendent drove us back to the train station, and we waited about a half hour to catch a train back to Liege. Here is the gorgeous countryside:
While we were waiting in the Welkenraedt train station, lots of school children were there too. One of them was going around saying something to everyone else in the train station. When he came to us, of course we had no idea what he was saying. We just shrugged our shoulders and said “We’re sorry” (in English—how dumb) until Bobby finally thought to say “Anglais??” He shook his head and moved on to the next person. A few minutes later, we heard him talking to his friends saying “Anglais.” I figured they were just laughing about the dumb Americans, but a few minutes later he came back up and said, very slowly and deliberately, “Six ... ty ... cents??” He was asking to borrow money for the snack machine! I was amazed that a group of kids who appeared to be no older than 10 or 12 knew enough English between them to figure out how to ask us for money!! Unfortunately, we didn’t have any coins, or we would have gladly given them to him.
We got back to Paris at about 9:30 p.m. and rode the Metro back to our hotel. This was the only time we encountered any remotely anti-American sentiment: a drunk guy on the subway was saying “F- America, F- George Bush, F- Tony Blair,” etc. etc. I never understood it—the guy was French, but he was shouting these things in English! We just kept our mouths closed (and I hid the U.S. flag they'd given us at the cemetery) and got off at our stop without a problem.
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