Michael B. Oren: Fleeing Moment - 'About 400,000 people, many of them children, annually tour the battlegrounds of Ypres, near the French border in Western Belgium, the scene of some of history's most savage combat. Millions of troops fought here during World War I; more than 600,000 of them died. Sightseers can view the numerous monuments extolling the bravery of the dead or visit the museum named for John McCrae's haunting threnody, "In Flanders Fields." And now, they can see something else, something unusual for a battlefield turned tourist destination--a memorial not to those who fought, but, instead, to those who didn't. The new monument comprises a single pole, reminiscent of those to which convicted deserters were tied and shot, set in a courtyard outside the cells in which the condemned awaited execution. Roughly 1,000 men on both sides met that fate during the war, killed not for their beliefs--very few were conscientious objectors--but for shirking the burdens of national defense...'