Week 2 – Tuesday 9 July – WWI Memorials

Another big day today, buzzing round the country side looking at war memorials of significance to New Zealanders, and a couple of others, just for good measure along the way.

First stop was the New Zealand Monument in Mesen.  The Monument is a large obelisk that honours the men of the New Zealand Division in the battle of Messines on the 7^th to 14^th June 1917.  This battle was launched after the explosion of the 19 mines mentioned in yesterday’s blog.  The monument, does not list any names of the dead or missing, but acknowledges the work of the kiwis in achieving the objectives of their mission in re-capturing the town of Messines, in conjunction with British and Australian soldiers.  I made a bit of a clown of myself by telling Anne that we couldn’t park in what she thought was the Monument car park, because it was reserved for Stan’s Auto Hire’s.  The photo is in the blog, and when you look at it, you’ll realise what my mistake was.

After that it was round the corner to the Messines Ridge (New Zealand) Memorial which is located at the entrance way to the Messines Ridge British Cemetery.  The Memorial, is a large cross, that has the names of the New Zealanders whose grave is not known engraved on the base that the cross sits on.  The cemetery itself also contains graves of New Zealand soldiers who were killed in the battle.

Heading back towards Ypres, we saw another large cemetery, which looked like it was nicely laid out so we stopped at what turned out to be the Bedford House Cemetery.  Bedford House, was a building on the site that was originally called Kasteel Rosendaal, but as was the way at the time, was gradually renamed by the allied forces.  The house was destroyed during the war, but the name stuck for the cemetery that followed in it’s footsteps.  The cemetery was very beautiful, with ponds and avenues of trees.

After lunch we went to somewhere quite different – Polygon Wood Cemetery.  I had noted it down as somewhere to visit, but between my research and actually getting there, couldn’t quite remember why we were there.  This cemetery was tiny, a much smaller number of graves than we’d experienced so far, and unlike the neatly ordered, and architecturally designed places we’d experienced , this was quite random, with small groups of headstones in a line, but then other headstones at odd angles, some hard up against the wall of the cemetery.  This was obviously a cemetery that had been established by men burying their mates at the time of battle, having to deal with bombardment, sniper fire, mud and carnage.  As we entered into the cemetery and started looking at the headstones, one after another had the silver fern logo to signify that this was a New Zealand grave.  Of the 107 graves in the cemetery, 60 of them belong to New Zealanders.  It was a very eerie feeling wandering around the cemetery because of it’s informal layout, and the fact that so many of the bodies there were New Zealanders.

The final stop for the day was just over the road from Polygon Wood, at the Buttes New British Cemetery at Polygon Wood, which contains both a New Zealand Memorial, and a Memorial to the 5^th Australian Division.  The New Zealand Memorial contains the names of 378 missing soldiers, and the cemetery itself contains 96 graves of known kiwi soldiers and 67 graves of unknown kiwi soldiers.  The Memorial had a wreath from the Government and people of New Zealand.

One of the things that struck us was that despite the thousands of people we’d seen the night before at the Last Post ceremony at the Menin Gate, there was nobody at the cemeteries and memorials, and we were the only people at each of the places we visited.  We were glad that we’d watched a number of WWI movies before we came on the holiday to set the scene of what the whole conflict had been about and what the conditions were like during the war.  It’s certainly a different place today, and the movies were a great way of showing what millions of shells can do to a landscape along with the rain that is fairly common in these parts.  Not too much of the war was fought in the pleasant high 20’s temperatures that we have been enjoying.

The day was rounded out with drinks and then dinner in the square.