How does war look when it's on the way?

The view from Europe

In Europe, the World Wars feel closer than what I remember in the United States.

Every small town in Italy has its war monument with names of the young men dead from that town. Often, to make a World War II monument, they simply added a new segment onto the monument from the Great War that already dominated the town’s main square. I can only imagine the exhaustion of that, the feeling that wars would never end.

Sometimes the list of names on these monuments is so long it’s hard to imagine how such a tiny town produced (and then lost) so many young men at once. And then you look closer and notice how many of the dead share the same last name. Fathers and sons, killed in successive wars? Brothers or cousins who went to war together and never came home?

I think, too, of the names not inscribed, the mothers and sisters and wives who made do under rationing, resisted occupation, waited for their men in vain. Here in the Netherlands, if you died during the war, there’s a good chance it was from starvation. The Nazis occupied the country and blockaded food shipments to major population centres, causing the “Hunger Winter” of 1944-1945, which killed tens of thousands of ordinary citizens.

In total, 300,000 Dutch people died in the war—the vast majority civilians—out of a population of less than 9 million. For context, total American WWII casualties were 400,000 (nearly all soldiers), out of 130 million.

All horrific, and every death an incalculable loss. It’s awful comparing numbers. I’m just trying to convey how much more likely you were to die during World War II if you were living where I live now, in the Netherlands.

Almost anywhere you go in Europe, the war happened right there.

We live in a world peopled by those who survived. My paternal grandfather, Royce Bringhurst, operated the radio in a B-25 bomber during World War II. He flew sixty-five gruelling missions, each time not knowing whether he’d make it back. In fact, my only real family connection to Italy is that my grandfather flew bombing runs there during the war, so some of the bombs that devastated Italian cities fell from his plane. How awful is that to contemplate? My dad wasn’t born till years after he came safely home.

My maternal grandfather, Boyd Farnsworth, was half a world away in the South Pacific, slated to be part of the 1945 invasion of Japan that never happened because of the atomic bomb. I’ve sat with that many times, the sense that one of the most horrific atrocities of World War II may well have resulted in my existence. History is more personal than we sometimes like to think.

I’m not a World War II buff, in the sense that I don’t go out of my way to read up on historical military strategy. Still, in my lifetime I’ve heard hundreds of stories set in World War II. When I think back to my childhood in the 80’s and 90’s, I feel like what my grandparents referred to simply as “The War” permeated everything back then. From Snow Treasure to Number the Stars, I must have read dozens of children’s books on WWII. Even the Chronicles of Narnia begin with the children being sent to the country to keep them safe from the London Blitz.

Is it still the same today? Do we remember the war our grandparents fought? Yes, in some ways, but maybe not as much. Which is natural. Time passes, memory fades, and the Hitlers and Stalins of the past become distant bogeymen. The terrible things that have happened so many times in history begin to feel unimaginable for new generations with no memory of them. And maybe even when we know what happened, we don’t really feel it.

For instance, I watched the movie Dunkirk when it came out in 2017. It felt like a movie about history, something long ago. A couple of years later, we happened to be in Normandy for Christmas, and visited Omaha Beach, one of the D-Day beaches. You can see the beach from the giant Normandy American Cemetery up the hill.

That was a time when war still seemed distant, when I could gaze out at the rows of crosses and feel grateful for their sacrifice without immediately wondering if we’re on the cusp of such times again.

Last month, we spent a long weekend in De Panne, on the southern coast of Belgium. It was the first time we’d been away from home since my son’s injury last year. We chose the place because we liked the view from the apartment we rented just above the beach. I can’t resist a winter holiday in an empty beach town. Our plan was mostly to relax in front of the sea.

Which we did. Here’s sunset from the balcony our last night there.

But Dunkirk—the real Dunkirk: the town in France—was only 25 minutes away. The beach out our window was the same long beach where the Germans pinned down the French and British armies in 1940. Given the setting, my husband had brought along the Axis & Allies board game, and we put Dunkirk—the movie—on as background.

Even though I’d seen it before, I was riveted.

The first time I watched Dunkirk, my children were twelve and nine. Now they’re twenty and seventeen. I couldn’t help noticing how close in age they are to those boys dying on the beach.

So I sat and watched Dunkirk and looked out the window at that same beach. Then I picked up my phone to check the news, and read in the Guardian that the prime minister of France says the risk of war hasn’t been this high since 1945.

The next day, we drove to Dunkirk. It’s a charming little French seaside town. Near the port, there’s a museum with historical artefacts from “Operation Dynamo,” the events of which are depicted in the film.

Many of the bits and pieces in the museum are marked as private donations. I can imagine the inhabitants of Dunkirk literally picking up the pieces of their town (almost entirely levelled by the Nazi bombardment), and finding the odd grenade pin or rusty spoon or button from a uniform.

The screaming gas mask in this photo haunts me. Is there a more apt metaphor for war?

Here’s the story of Dunkirk: it was May 1940. The United States had not yet entered the war, and the Allies were losing. The Germans had pushed the French and British armies to the very edge of Europe. They were trapped on the beach in Dunkirk, with the Nazis blowing up the town behind them. The Luftwaffe was sinking British vessels right and left, and shelling the soldiers on the beach. Without an evacuation, there’d be no army left, no defence against Hitler, no way to do anything but give up.

Which was when, famously, the “little ships of Dunkirk” were called upon by the British Ministry of Shipping to help evacuate British and French troops to the safety of England. Hundreds of fishing and pleasure boats made the journey over the Channel, and over 300,000 soldiers made it home. It was a retreat, but also a victory for morale, and the Allied army lived to fight again.

Of course, it was also early 1940. There were five terrible years of war ahead. And that’s what I found myself thinking about as we walked along the beach at Dunkirk, where remains of some of the Allied ships sunk by the Nazis can still be found.

I thought this too: war has been raging in Ukraine for three years now. What lies ahead for us in Europe? On what threshold of history do we stand?

This week it was my pick for family movie night. I chose a spy thriller called Munich: The Edge of War. It’s a weirdly positive spin on the Munich Agreement (aka the Munich Betrayal), in which Western European leaders appeased Hitler in 1938 by selling Czechoslovakia down the river.

While the film’s main characters aren’t historical, the setting against which it plays out very much is: Londoners at the beginning of the movie are buying gas masks for their children. Then the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain goes to Munich to meet with Hitler and (as he sees it) prevent a war.

I watched the film because I wanted to put myself in that moment, try to see how it felt to know Hitler was at the gates; to not know for sure what might happen; to hope against hope there was some way to achieve (as Chamberlain puts it) “peace for our time.”

As Churchill predicted less sanguinely, “We seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War thrown in a little later on even more adverse terms than at present.” And sure enough, that’s what happened. Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement to prevent a war, which Hitler immediately started waging.

Suddenly last month, all of Europe was talking about the Munich Agreement again. European leaders happened to be meeting in Munich at the annual Munich Security Conference held there every February. Ukraine, of course, was very much on the agenda. The United States had in fact recently conducted Munich-Agreement-style talks with Putin, excluding Ukraine.

No one could miss the obvious parallels, which were nevertheless explicitly articulated by several attendees to the conference, then repeated by news outlets all over the world. Needless to say, we were and are all desperately hoping that 2025 turns out nothing like 1938.

Just a few months ago, I wondered aloud if anyone else was worrying about wider war in Europe. It was weirdly reassuring then to hear I was not alone.

I wouldn’t ask such a question now. I wouldn’t have to. Everyone’s talking about it, even if just to reassure each other that this or that worst case scenario won’t happen. Which is less and less reassuring with every passing day.

I have no grand pronouncements, no special insight. I’m not a prophet or pundit or anyone who really knows what they’re talking about. I just know how it felt to stand on the beach at Dunkirk and feel that history never stopped.

I hope I’m worrying for nothing, and things will get better soon, rather than worse. But haven’t people always hoped for that? In the meantime, we hold our breath, and the brave Ukrainians fight on. The unthinkable is all we’re thinking about these days.