Flanders Fields with David and Di

Belgium was the home to some of the bloodiest and most important battles of World War I, in and around the Ypres salient. We headed out on a tour run by Quasimodo (based in Brugges), and had a fascinating (and more than a little emotionally draining) day...

Stop one was the St Juliaan Memorial, or the Brooding Canadian. This is a memorial to the Canadians who fell in the war, but in particular those who stopped the Germans on the day after the first gas attack. And in 'Chemistry in Action', the only reason they were successful was that one of them was a chemist, recognised the smell of Chlorine, and knew that by moistening a sock and putting it across their face they might survive (even better if they'd used urine (which contains ammonium), which many of them did)

The Brooding Canadian (or St Juliaan Memorial)

From there we went to the cemetery at Tyne Cot, which is the largest cemetery to Commonwealth soldiers in the world. At the end of WWI the Belgian landscape was dotted with hundreds of cemeteries, so in the years between the wars many of them were aggregated up. Tyne Cot is the largest, and contains nearly 12,000 graves (only 25% of which are identified) as well as the 'memorial to the missing' with around 35,000 names. It was truly a sobering place, and brings home the futility of war.

Tyne Cot cemetery, the largest memorial to 'Empire' soldiers

Row upon row of graves at Tyne Cot cemetery

From here we toured through the countryside, seeing some of the shells that they are still digging up just piled up by the side of the road. Our tour guide knew the locals, and could tell stories of people who have almost died from running over shells, or who have had houses partially collapse because they don't realise they're built over a WWI-era tunnel. It is amazing that the landscape is still scarred by the war - the Belgian Government have a stockpile of chemical shells to destroy that will take them 60 years to deal with.

Much of the landscape which was twisted and torn by war has now been plowed back to flat land for farming - in fact, the countryside is incredibly flat to the extent that 60 meters of height was enough to fight battles over, and gave an excellent vantage point in wartime.

One place that hadn't been turned back into countryside was 'Hill 60', where the British had one of their most successful battles. Very early on in the war the Germans had captured much of the higher ground, including this location at Hill 60. But by 1915 the British had buried around 50 tonnes of explosives in and around the hill, but did not set it off until mid-1917 at 3:10am after a week of continuous shelling. They were able to capture the hill (at the loss of relatively few lives)...but only held it until later in the year when they lost it to the Germans. The hill and its battlefield are a memorial and have been preserved - although it is difficult to capture exactly what it would have looked like as the trees and the grass have grown back over the past 90 years, and it is an incredibly lumpy field.

A British Pillbox built on top of a German Pillbox at 'Hill 60' where there is a preserved battlefield

Lunch was just near Hill 60, at the Hoogecrater museum (I haven't been able to figure out whether Hoogecrater is a literal translation of Hugecrater, but I suspect not - the pronunciation is very different).

From here we headed down to Ypres itself, via the Menin Gate. This structure was an enormous memorial to many of the Allied soldiers who marched down the Menin Road toward the front and never returned. Ypres itself was bombed until virtually nothing was left standing, but has since been rebuilt as an almost exact replica of its original state - although many features are missing from some of the buildings as there was no record of exactly what they looked like. It was a little disappointing that we only had a short while to wander around here, and weren't able to visit the local museums - but that it was already becoming a very full day

The 'Menin Gate' memorial at Ypres

Sarah in Ypres - which was leveled in World War I and completely rebuilt

The final stop on our trip was the Essex Farm cemetery, located at one of the earliest field dressing stations. The field dressing station was where John McCrae wrote the famous poem 'In Flanders Fields' - the tour finished with a recital of the poem:

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The grave of V. J. Strudwick, who at 15 was the youngest soldier buried at the Essex Farm Cemetery (it is scary to think that people younger than this are still fighting in places like the Sudan)

Just a little something to lighten the mood on the outskirts of Ypres