Week 2 – Monday 8 July – Ypres and WWI Memorials

Today we bid farewell to Bruges.  We have 4 days here and walked our feet off all round the town and up and down the Belfry.  Our guide book took us on 2 long walking tours – 1 through the main Bruges tourist sites, amongst what felt like a million other tourists, the other to the more out of the way parts of Bruges, beside the large outer canals, past windmills and through some quaint little back streets.  To sustain ourselves, we’ve eaten some wonderful meals and have really enjoyed the Hotel Aragon, which is about a 5 minute walk from the main square.

As we headed out of Bruges in the car, we were reminded how low the low countries are – The GPS told us we were at 10m altitude, and on the trip down to Ypres, we saw it get as high as 30m at one stage.  This was better than in Holland, when it read -10m for a considerable period of time.  In Ypres, where we are heading to, they name the hills by their height above sea level – Hill 60 and Hill 62 (Mount Victoria by comparison is 196m).

The weather came right a couple of days ago, and as we cruised down the roads to Ypres, the temperature was a delightful 34 degrees Celsius – with a nice cooling breeze from having the roof down.

Our first stop was at Roeselare for a Decathlon store – a favourite of ours – Europe’s sporting mega store extraordinaire, and to be found in larger towns in France, and obviously Belgium.  On the purchase radar were an air bed, a pump (electric of course), 2 chairs, a small table, a torch, and two pillows – to complete our camping setup, the rest of which we’d bought from New Zealand with us.

Our destination for the next 3 nights is Ypres, home to the Menin Gate and the centre of all things World War I, in this part of the world.  We got interested in Europe’s war memorials in 2009, when we ended up in Verdun, and then learnt that it was the site of one of WWI’s bloodiest, longest and toughest battles.  I wrote about the battle at Verdun in my previous blog, and the basis for this holiday was formed from that visit. 

http://david-anne-france-2009.blogspot.com/2009/07/thursday-9th-july-week-4-verdun.html

We had marked out the key towns of interest from WWI, and northern most and on the road between Bruges and Ypres was Passchendaele, the scene of the worst disaster in New Zealand’s military history, in terms of lives lost in a single day with 5,000 dead, missing or wounded.  When we arrived in Passchendaele, it is about as insignificant a town as one could imagine.  The highlight was the town map that showed that Tyne Cot Cemetery and visitor centre was only a few Ks down the road, and this was the start of our WWI journey. 

Tyne Cot is the largest British war cemetery in the world containing 11,956 commonwealth war dead and 4 Germans.  8,369 of the graves are unknown.  The name Tyne Cot was given by the Northumberland Fusiliers, who thought that the German pill boxes looked like typical cottages from the banks of the River Tyne in their native country.  This naming convention, of a British “slang” name becoming the official name, is repeated at numerous places throughout the area.

As we walked up the path to the visitor centre, a woman’s voice could be heard solemnly reading out the names and ages of fallen soldiers.  As we entered the visitor centre, the woman’s voice was synced with a screen showing the photo, rank and regiment of the soldiers.  The visitor centre is very modern and contained some interesting information about NZ’s contribution to the war.

The population of New Zealand in 1914 was just over 1m people.  120,000 soldiers enlisted for WWI of which 103,000 served overseas.  More than 18,000 New Zealanders were killed in WWI, 12,500 of them in France and Belgium.  Nearly 50,000 others were wounded.  More than 4,600 servicemen are buried or commemorated in some 80 cemeteries in Belgium.

Some of the overall facts of the various campaigns, are also quite horrendous.  From the 16^th July 1917, the British forces fired 4.2 million shells at German Positions.  In 100 days, they gained just 8 kilometres at a cost of 245,000 British soldiers dead, wounded or missing and 215,000 German ones.  I read later that gain was later conceded in a single day in 1918. 

I guess that was the thing that is really driven home in the places we are visiting – this wasn’t a campaign where the Germans got to a certain point, then there was a stalemate for several years, then they were sent packing.  This war ebbed and flowed – even over a single day.  Some of the stories were of a group of soldiers making a significant breakthrough, at a large cost in lives, only to become stranded and be turned round and sent packing with a similar loss of life, sometimes on the same day, sometimes only a few days later.

One of the most poignant things in the visitor centre are two photos of the area before and after WWI.  Before, there are towns, fields and roads.  Afterwards, there is just a flattened earth, there is nothing of it left.  I’ve posted up 3 photo of Ypres that are in a similar vein – taken in 1911, 1919 and 2011 – before WWI, straight after it, and now.  At the end of the war, the British were keen to leave Ypres in ruins, as a stark reminder of what the war was like, however, the locals who had other ideas, won the day.

From the visitor centre, we exited out onto the cemetery grounds.  All the British Commonwealth war cemeteries, monuments and memorials are administered and maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission – www.cwgc.org, (funded by you and me, but I don’t begrudge it a bit) and all the sites are kept in pristine condition.   Prior to WWI, there had never been individual war graves, but the need for this type of memorial was recognised even before the war was over. 

The Tyne Cot Cemetery is in a beautiful location, in a slightly elevated location (remember everything here is dead flat), with great views of the surrounding countryside.  It is out in the countryside, so is generally very peaceful and quiet, although there was a sign apologising for the noise of the maintenance work in the entrance way.  The headstones are arranged in neat rows, with as much identification as is possible based on the remains that were retrieved.  For some headstones, this means that there is the name, rank, age, regiment and nationality of the soldier.  There is also a circular emblem when the nationality of regiment has one.  For the New Zealand headstones, there is a silver fern in the top half of the circle, with the words New Zealand underneath it.  For others there is just a headstone, with a cross, with the words “Known Unto God” at the bottom of the headstone, where it was not possible to identify anything about the body.

The semi-circular wall at the back of the cemetery at Tyne Cot is their memorial to the missing.  It holds the names of 34,957 soldiers who have no known grave, and who all died after 15 August 1917.  Their names could not be added to the Menin Gate Memorial because there was no space available on it.  Tyne Cot is one of the places that has a memorial to New Zealand’s fallen soldiers, where their bodies were never found.  There are two Rotundas at either end of the curved wall, with the New Zealand Memorial in the centre of the wall.  There, the names of 1,116 are listed, by order of rank within regiment.  Seeing the glowing references to the New Zealanders efforts in Passchendaele and the memorial to our fallen soldiers was a very humbling and moving experience.

Next stop was at Zonnebeke – just down the road from Tyne Cot and the location for the Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917.  This Museum was well worth the couple of hours we spent there.     There were displays discussing the introduction of chemical warfare, flame throwers, mine warfare, both shallow and deep.  The first section was in chronological order and showed what happened in each year, what of the above “technologies” were introduced and where, and what the objectives were. 

The deep tunnelling warfare sounded really interesting / scary.  Both sides were doing it, so sometimes they’d break into each other’s tunnels, at which point the put in a charge on blow it up –bad luck if someone happened to be in there.  On 7 June 1917, they blew up 19 mines with over a million pounds of explosives.  4 of their mines didn’t explode, although 1 later did in 1955 after a heavy thunderstorm.

The second section of the Museum was 20 feet underground, and contained a mock-up of the bunkers that were used for medical procedures, accommodation, and strategizing.  It seemed a very real recreation, and with the flickering lights, constant noise of explosions was a fascinating insight into what life would have been like in the bunkers.

From Zonnebeke, we headed to Ypres to check into our hotel.  Ypres is another beautiful Belgian town.  The Menin Gate leads you into the town, and 200m down the road is the beautiful town square.  Each night, the last post is played at 8pm, and is one of the major events in the town.  We decided we’d go along on our first night, and were expecting a couple of hundred people and a fairly low key affair.  I was not expecting the couple of thousand people that were crammed in under the Menin Gate that started gathering from 7pm onwards.  The ceremony itself takes about 15 minutes, and tonight, there was a platoon of Fire and Rescue Services Officers from Oxfordshire, and a group from Canada.  As well, there were other groups laying wreaths.  I’m not sure how it works, but there were schools as well as families laying wreaths, and there is a program of who will be part of the ceremony each night.

The day concluded with a beautiful meal in the square, at a lovely restaurant, that I suspect we might be back to every night while we are here.