To Flanders and back again

On Friday, my old University chum appeared in a train station in Brussels.  I parked my car a completely different train station in a vain attempt to pick him up.  Luckily I got lost and accidentally wandered to the wrong train station and found him before my phone ran out of power.  Very typical Great War August day where even the best of plans founders upon the shoals of poor execution.

Soon enough we were righted back on to our original scheme, which was to visit various towns and cities in Flanders.  Most significantly we wished to visit Ypres, which is often pronounced "Eep", which is what the men in the trenches of WWI said when they saw a rat, or as the British called it, "Wipers", rat or no rat.

The Ypres salient was where the Belgian army ended up after Germany captured most of the country.  They were able to stop there at the edge of Belgium in part by planned flooding, but mainly because they linked up with the French army.  Eventually, the British joined the Belgian, French and in the end Americans, as everyone settled in for what would be 4 very long years of attrition and stagnation - trench warfare.

The main square of Ypres, looking very much like it
did in 1913, minus all the automobiles.

The town of Ypres itself is very beautiful, with the typical cobble stones I've become used to seeing in European cities, old churches and tightly crowded stone building fronts.  As typical, it has a main central square with a cathedral, brasseries and other assorted shops and attractions.

Another view of the main square,
this time in 1919.  Still no
automobiles.

The town of Ypres was of course bombarded heavily during the war and almost completely destroyed.  The fact that it currently resembles so splendidly the original town is testament to how much effort went in to its reconstruction.

In the central cathedral is the In Flanders Field museum.  The museum provides a good overview of what the war was like and what events transpired in the Ypres salient.  I must admit I was not as moved as the "Expo" at the Liege train station, however, it's certainly worth a visit when in Ypres.

Memorial to Queen Victoria's Rifles,
complete with representative
British person.

The entire area around Ypres is a patchwork of farms, cemeteries, monuments, craters and unexploded munitions.  Someone told me that they still blow up ordinance twice per week.  Every week.  For almost 100 years.

The cemeteries seem to be everywhere, and represent every country that fought in the salient.  There is even a German cemetery, which we did visit.

Everywhere and at every cemetery can be found endless lists of names.  Names on the tombstones themselves, names of soldiers that were missing, and some of those missing placed into graves of unknown soldiers.

Speaking of unknown soldiers, when we were at the Hooge Crater cemetery (an unexpectedly appropriate name for the crater), Jon and I got to talking about the British Tomb of the Unknown Warrior.  Apparently what was done was that bodies were selected from all the major British battlefields and brought under one roof.  There a blindfolded selection of the bodies was made and one was chosen to be buried in Westminster Abbey among the nations most honored individuals.  One of the most powerful ideas of this arrangement is that since the body was chosen from all the battlefields, and nobody knows which, the soldier could be the body of anyones missing son and husband.  In this way, it would have been cathartic for the whole country.

One of the few places around Ypres that has not been
reclaimed by humanity.  The misshapen ground is
as close as possible to the conditions of the whole
area in 1918.

Visiting other sites, we fond there are very few battlefields and structures that are well preserved, and rightfully so.  In fact, we learned that the British had wanted to preserve Ypres as it was, in its destroyed form, as a kind of holy ground.  While the multitude of monuments in the area around Ypres are appropriate, a greater monument still is to return the land to life... life lived by people.  The Belgian government turned down the British request and created incentives for the farmers to return to the land.  The battlefield were too toxic to be farmed normally, and thousands of bodies needed to be removed, but in time, the area was restored to farmland.

Tyne Cot cemetery, one of the larger ones for British Commonwealth
soldiers of the war.

In the evening, we returned to Ypres and another monument put in place by the United Kingdom - Menin Gate.  There we attended the "Last Post" ceremony, which has been conducted every night since July 2nd, 1928, except of course during Belgian occupation during the Second World War.  The Menin gate itself is an impressive monument which is engraved with thousands and thousands of names of the British and British Commonwealth dead all over its structure.  The names are on the interior walls, they are on the external walls where stairways of names guide you to the park around the old wall of the city.

The ceremony was well attended and included some unidentified persons of importance.  It is with great apologies that I must say that I failed to record the sounds of the ceremony.

I leave now with reference to an explanation of why people in Europe wear poppies on Remembrance Day.  It comes from a poem "In Flanders Field" written by a Canadian physician during the war.  It was in this area that the poem's author penned it.  He died of sickness before the end of the war.