By Benjamin Duffy
Down a narrow lane filled with stray cats and dusty Peugeots parked at odd angles lies a subdued boneyard that few have ever laid eyes upon. This is Tunisia, the ultimate prize of a campaign that has largely escaped notice despite being fought in the midst of a war that has been chronicled, idealized, and dissected more than any before or since.
The parking lot is small and completely empty. I had not expected that mine would be the only car in it today. The day is surprisingly temperate for early June, not hot enough yet to stain the collar of my button-down shirt. The cloudless sky is as broad as it is blue, besmirched only by an airplane leaving a moist white contrail across it.
For a moment, I wonder if I should even be here. This isn’t a tourist attraction, after all. But what is it? Hallowed ground? No, only the winners get to call their cemeteries by such names. This is Borj Cédria, the losers’ cemetery.
Less than a week ago, I witnessed how the winners are remembered at their own cemetery, dug into the ruins of ancient Carthage, some forty-five minutes’ drive from here. Members of all the armed services, dressed in their finest uniforms, came together with ambassadors and other dignitaries to recognize the sacrifices of the men interred beneath white stone markers, mostly crosses but a few six-pointed stars as well. Words like “hero,” passed easily over the lips. A Marine Corps color guard ushered in the flag, everyone stood for the national anthems of Tunisia and the United States, and a US Navy chaplain gave the invocation. Afterward, we all went for hamburgers and star-spangled cupcakes.
Here at the losers’ cemetery, there are neither color guards nor dignitaries. With nothing to stimulate my ears, I am cognizant of only one thing—the two-ton silence that hangs over this parcel of unforgiving North African land.
From the parking lot I scale the steps to the first landing then pass beneath an archway, expecting to see rows of headstones—yet there are none. Instead, there is a cement awning that protects a guest book. I open it and read the inscriptions, nearly all written in terse and tortured German, as if the signers had been afraid to put their names to statements that might be considered too reverent of the men or their cause. Most express only longing for a world in which war does not exist, which sounds to me like a world that cannot exist. Only the dead have seen the end of war. Even today, there is a grinding war in Ukraine, a bloody urban fight in Gaza, and the biggest conflagration of all looming across the Taiwan Strait. I write my own message, in German, so that future visitors, however sparse they may be, can read it. Then I sign my name as big as John Hancock’s.
Before the awning stands a heavy stone marker which reads “IN DIESER GRÄBERSTÄTTE RUHEN 8562 DEUTSCHE SOLDATEN 1939-1945.” In this cemetery lie 8562 German soldiers 1939-1945.
The number is quite high, more than we lost in Iraq and Afghanistan combined, yet Tunisia was only a skirmish in a much larger war. Even as these men met death, their brothers in arms were being slaughtered in far greater numbers at Stalingrad and in their inglorious retreat therefrom. These 8,562 Germans are an historical rounding error, once mourned mostly by their 8,562 families but now by almost no one.
I follow a path that winds over a small rise, onward and upward. Suddenly, the cemetery—like none other I have seen before—comes into view. Rather than headstones, there are dozens of heavy stone blocks, partially concealed behind masonry walls. What man cannot erase, he covers with a veil.
I pass behind one of the walls and gaze upon the blocks themselves, each consisting of eight panels chiseled with men’s names, and each abutting a matching block. The aesthetic here follows the brutalist style, which appears incongruous against the landscape. Tunisians are not fond of hard corners or sharp lettering. They prefer domes, minarets, and soft, almost lazy, arches. Their Arabic script flows smoothly like inked calligraphy. These German soldiers really were strangers in a strange land.
At first, I assume that these blocks are tiny mausoleums but then realize that they can’t be; there are just too many names etched into them. Surely there must be cremains inside, but I tap on a block and hear that it is solid. Then it dawns on me that there really are corpses beneath these blocks in coffins stacked sixteen high. Each hideous block thus covers sixty-four dead German soldiers, some buried far below the earth’s surface. A slick mortuary accounting trick hides the number of bodies by consolidating them into a relatively few plots. If each of these men had his own plot this cemetery would be more than sixty-four times larger than it is. Losers don’t get their own graves, I suppose. They have to share.
Their names are familiar and Teutonic—Rudolf, Wilhelm, and Bertold; Scholz, Inselmann, and Busch. Their ranks are listed, though I am not sure why. Here in the losers’ cemetery, dead men are stacked on top of dead men, with no deference given to rank. I peruse the dates of their births and deaths. Most died in 1943, a few in 1942. Some lived only nineteen years; others almost thirty. All were younger than I am now when they perished, many by half.
What did these men die for? But more importantly, what did they think they were fighting for? Pondering the contours of a lost cause strikes me as a fool’s errand, but if I’m to be their only visitor today, I might as well play the fool. Their government gave them a casus belli, and I must assume they believed in it. Some may have been fighting for something—the fatherland or to avenge the humiliating Treaty of Versailles—while others may have been fighting against something—international Jewry perhaps, or Bolshevism, or the creeping influence of cotton club jazz. But in real life each man has his own casus belli, as unique as his fingerprints, which he carries to battle beneath his dog tags. There were probably as many justifications for this war as there are names on these blocks: 8,562. And each one of them came to naught.
A curious thought occurs to me as I plod upward to the summit: what if they didn’t have, or even care to have, a reason to be here? Most were probably swept away by events they could neither control nor understand, alternately scared out of their wits and bored out of their minds, yearning for wives and mothers on the home front, or a respite, or just fresh socks. Some may not have had time to think, while others might not have had the depth or the courage to do so.
I was a young soldier once too, and I served in a place that looked much like this.
Am I being too kind to these men? They were, after all, the spearhead of a monstrous regime, themselves licensed to commit equally monstrous acts in the many lands they conquered: rape, torture, murder. Some of them may even have enjoyed it. But alas, no one’s hands are clean. God will judge them just as He will judge me and everyone else.
I stop for a moment at the summit of the hill and catch a glimpse of the Gulf of Tunis in the distance: placid and eternal. Roman ships once traversed it; Phoenician, Ottoman, and French ships too. These fallen soldiers crossed it, not knowing that they would never return, but some at least suspecting it. Today its beaches are a popular vacation destination.
Last week was Memorial Day; next week will be the eightieth anniversary of D-Day, the last hurrah for what we in America call the Greatest Generation. Both are sacred days but held so only by the victors. Here in the losers’ cemetery, there are no flags planted before the men’s graves—not the German flag, and not the blood red Tunisian banner either. There will be no elderly men in wheelchairs flocking here to recall the pinnacle moment of their century-long lives. There is no glory in the losers’ cemetery, only shame: the shame of fighting for something evil; the shame of fighting for nothing in particular; the shame of dying in a place so remote that their own countrymen have forgotten it, some by choice; the shame of losing. Their leaders picked a fight they could not win, and these very young men paid for it with their lives.
I have rendered my respects from one soldier to others, and it is now time to leave the losers’ cemetery behind. On the way back I pass by the awning again, noticing that it has a glass door marked “Büro.” It’s the cemetery’s office. I stop and peer inside, where I see only a desk piled with books and a lamp. I tug on the doorhandle; it is locked. To the side is a ledge, which I creep up to and dare to peek over. The scene is interrupted by the sight of a modern home—compact, unassuming—with a trampoline in the front yard. On the trampoline rests a child’s bouncy ball. The two second-floor windows stare at me like sullen eyes. There is no car in the driveway and the house is as still as the rest of the losers’ cemetery.
It is the caretaker’s home, I am sure, probably a German who is married with children. He must be extraordinary, or perhaps just odd, if he is willing to serve as his country’s sentinel for 8,562 of its dead sons. I doubt that he harbors sympathy for the cause they served, yet here he is, standing watch, proof that Germany not only lives on but also that it lives up to its obligations. Common decency demands that dead men, no matter who they were, deserve an eternal resting place. Ensuring that these 8,562 men are afforded that decency strikes me as patriotic. Patriotism isn’t always hamburgers and star-spangled cupcakes; sometimes it means performing the nation’s silent chores.
A word pops into my head: Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Roughly translated, it means coming to terms with the past, which is something Germans have struggled to do. They cannot come to terms with it because they cannot understand it, and they cannot understand it because they do not know how to remember it. And while Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a German word, it is by no means a uniquely German condition.
My car is already heating up, likely because it is black and absorbs heat. I start the engine with the push of a button, then turn up the air conditioning. I feel the sudden urge to flee, afraid that someone will see me visiting the losers’ cemetery. The caretaker might come home at any minute, and how would I explain how I ended up here, at the end of this narrow lane, filled with stray cats and dusty Peugeots parked at odd angles? Would the caretaker think my curiosity was morbid or would he be flattered that anyone cared enough to drop in?
I am navigating my car down that lane when I tap the brakes for a group of local boys playing street soccer. They stop their game and look at me, an obviously foreign man driving a conspicuously clean rental car. They are young, but not much younger than many of those who now rest in the losers’ cemetery above. I wave at them as I pass, and they wave back, smile, and resume kicking their ragged soccer ball around.
If they only knew.