Three Months in Albion: Friday the Thirteenth

13.06.12 - Cambridge American Cemetery and Museum

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard among the guns below.

-John McCrae

Hi, Ozzie.

"Was it Marshall?" I ask the man holding the American flag binder, telling me all about the Cambridge American Cemetery and Museum. He stands at about five feet ten, wearing a polka dot tie and white shirt, a hat with a United States emblem, the first I've seen in Cambridge.

"Malcolm 'Ozzie' Osborn. Call me Ozzie," he says. "That's what everybody calls me."

"Okay, Ozzie," I say.

The Cambridge American Cemetery and Museum is located about three point six miles, about an hour walk along A1303, an hour from my current place of residence. I'm sure there's some unwritten rule about visiting a cemetery on Friday the thirteenth, but then again I've never been a very superstitious person.

He tells me about the landscape, holds out a binder with a photograph of what the cemetery used to look like in the fifties. He shows me a photo of the hermetically sealed coffins and the boxes they were also enclosed in, buried just three feet below the grass. He shows me a detailed report from the American government about how the dead who wanted to be transported back to the States were going to be. He shows me pages and pages of information, numbers of American dead - six hundred and something thousand.

"Hard to wrap your head around that number," he says.

"Yeah, it is."

"Over there," he points to a wall lined with statues, "is the Wall of the Missing. Those names on wall are all the soldiers whose bodies were unaccounted for during the war. Some of them have marks next to their name, which signify that they've found and identified their bodies and then buried them properly. Three thousand, eight hundred and twelve are buried here in total. The Olmstead brothers designed it. They were the ones who did the White House and several other American monuments."

I thank him for the explanation, and I make my way around the cemetery. This is the only American cemetery in England, and it was donated by the University of Cambridge (Ozzie had remarked that this might be the only thing Cambridge University has ever donated). Likewise, I am the only American in the American cemetery. There are Brits everywhere (and a few Spaniards) but no other Americans.

On the wall outside the memorial is a map of the UK and all the bases and training facilities used during WWII.

Inside the memorial.

The view back, toward the entrance.

View Larger Map

On the way out, I run into Ozzie again, who wants to introduce me to another American from Seattle, one of the supervisors at the cemetery. His name is Michael (I don't catch his last name), and he wears a service uniform. He says he hasn't been back to Seattle for thirty years. We talk briefly; he seems busy and I tell him it was nice to meet him.

"Say hi to the Space Needle for me," says Michael.

"I'll tell it 'Michael says hello.'"

Ozzie tells me that there's a better way to get back to Cambridge. Go to the footpath across the street, he tells me, follow it to Coton, take a left at a bar, follow the footpath back to Cambridge.