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| English: Aerial view of the village of Passchendaele (north is to the right of the photo) before and after the Third Battle of Ypres, 1917. Français : Vue aerienne du village de Passendale, avant et après la troisième bataille d'Ypres, en 1917. Le nord est à droite sur les photos. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| A CWGC cemetery from the First World War: Tyne Cot in the Ypres Salient (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| THE THIRD BATTLE OF YPRES The Battle of Pilckem Ridge : A British 18 pounder field gun battery taking up new positions close to a communication trench near Boesinghe, 31 July 1917. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Map of the Third Battle of Ypres (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
After a month away, I'm back in Victoria and have finally unpacked and got back to my desk. Today, Kaletor, Lykophron and Kleitos have all been killed, "it goes on and on" as Oswald remarks, partly because the list of dead soldiers in the
Iliad is so bloody long, but partly because those are a sequence of vengeance-deaths.
Ajax kills Kaletor;
Hector, enraged at the death of his cousin (N.B. we've never been told that Hector had a cousin called Kaletor until this instant), tries to kill Ajax, misses, and nails Lykophron; Ajax, enraged that his good friend of the family Lykophron who lived with Ajax' family because he'd killed someone back home and whom Ajax honoured like his own father (and we've never been told any of that before either), calls up
Teucer to avenge the death. Teucer sends out a hail of arrows but misses Hector and gets Kleitos, who is just riding up into the thick of the battle to help Hector out. "It goes on and on".
Oswald skips all the made-up-this-instant retconning
Homer inserts to give these deaths some emotional resonance. First Kaletor, then Lykophron, then Kleitos. They don't, in Oswald, need some made-up reason for someone important (Ajax, Teucer, Hector) to care about them for their deaths to matter. Their deaths already matter.
While we were in Belgium went to
Ypres and
Passchendaele, and the German and Tyne Cot World War 1 cemeteries. I stood at Ypres, where young men had died by the thousands, mired to the waist in a bog of mud, and blood, and corpses, and ordinance, and mustard gas, and poison, and rain; and knew that I was certainly standing over bodies, or parts of bodies, of soldiers whose corpses had never been found. I thought about the Iliad, where at least the dead, or most of the dead, had names.
