Our private tour to the WW I Flanders Field battlefields about 40 miles southwest of Bruges was with Quasimodo Tours which had been in operation since 1990. Philippe told us that since Flemish was a dialect of Dutch, all the newspapers and books were in Dutch as Flemish wasn’t a written language. He added that the Flemish dialect in Antwerp was markedly different than that spoken here in Bruges. By the age of 18, high school students graduate will have studied four languages – normally Flemish, English, German, and Dutch.
Some background of WW I in Belgium: Germany invaded Belgium on August 4th, 1914, because the county’s king, Albert I, refused to allow the Germans to pass through the country to reach France. As soon as the country’s neutrality was broken, Britain and the other Allies declared war on Germany. By 1917, 80 percent of the world’s population was at war.
The German army faced unexpected resistance from the Belgians as they’d mistakenly believed they could run right through the country en route to France. The delay by Germany allowed the British 30 days to gather forces to come to Belgium’s assistance instead of just the five days Germany had expected. That made a huge difference in the ultimate outcome of the war.
There were five major battles in the Ypres region of Flanders. As this part of the country and the Netherlands was almost totally flat, occupying the small ridge of just 57 meters above sea level was a huge advantage. Half a million people died in this area and the locals still live with the evidence in their backyards. Not a single building has remained from before the war. It had looked like a lunar landscape with piles of nothing but rubble marking the region. As we drove through the area, I can't begin to tell you how strange it was seeing nothing had remained from over a hundred years ago.
I liked how Philippe catered the tour depending on what nationalities his clients were because there were, sadly, too many memorials to possibly see all in the one-day tour. With almost every mile we drove, there was another monument or memorial. He knew obviously that we would want to see the Canadian Memorial but would have less interest in some of the others. That's why we didn't stop at this British cemetery that would have been of greater interest to people from the United Kingdom.
In the middle of a roundabout in the center of the small village of Poelcapelle, a monument honored the war's second-best pilot, Frenchman Georges Guynemer, one of the great pioneers of aerial warfare who shot down 53 planes and three balloons. Though he just started flying in 1915 at the age of 21, he became leader of a squadron known as 'The Storks.’
In this spot, German troops shot 23-year-old Guynemer down on September 11th, 1917. His body was never recovered. He had previously been awarded the Legion d’Honneur medal, and this memorial surmounted by a stork was put up at Poelcapelle in the 1920s to commemorate him. The stork motif was also shown on the side of the column.
In the village of Poelcapelle, twenty percent of the local population were told to flee because of the threat of German atrocities. They left their homes and livelihoods, thinking it would only be for a fairly short time before they could return. They made new homes in the United Kingdom and France and only slowly returned to Flanders six years later once new homes had been rebuilt.
I hadn’t realized Belgium was such a large corn grower. Philippe said it wasn’t for food consumption but rather for silage when I asked him after seeing miles and miles of cornfields.
There had been an almost fantastical 600 German cemeteries in Flanders after the war. After the war, few Belgians wanted to look after the cemeteries because of their antipathy to the men they had fought against in the war. The cemeteries, therefore, looked in poor shape. There are now just four German cemeteries, one of which, Langemark, we visited that had the final resting place for 44,000 Germans soldiers who died during the Battle of Langemark in what came to be known as the First Battle of Ypres.
The oak trees in the cemetery symbolized the strength of the German army. Twenty-five unidentified soldiers were also buried here. Germany has repatriated many of the soldiers’ bodies as family members wanted them buried on home soil.
Four imposing bronze statues of mourning soldiers watched over the graves where multiple soldiers were buried together in a grave plot, with their names inscribed in horizontal laying gravestones.
It is also known as the Studentenfriedhof or Students’ Cemetery because those who died were young schoolboys and volunteers who didn’t fully realize what they had signed up for, had received little training, and wanted the chance to travel beyond their hometowns. The Germans still say their young men were killed in the Battle of the Innocents.
But even more heartbreaking is the mass grave that marks nearly 25,000 men, the ‘Comrades Grave’ whose names were placed on granite blocks.
This was the only grave marker in the entire cemetery that I noticed had any flowers or stones paying homage to loved ones who died. We would soon see what a striking difference that was to so many graves in the Allied cemeteries.
Langemark was now maintained by locals and also German volunteers who come twice a year to care for the cemetery. This was one of the very places anyone could pay respect to the German losses because the emphasis throughout Flanders is on the Allied losses and cemeteries. Philippe remarked that Germans were still taught very little in schools about WW I and that very few Germans arrived in Flanders on the centenary of the first war.
Following the war, the Westhoek was named the Devastated Region. Military cemeteries were built for other dead, monuments were erected for the missing, and museums to ensure the memory of the Great War would be preserved forever.
The Canadian Battlefield Monument Commission in 1920 decided that of the eight official memorial sites erected on the Western Front, six would be cube-shaped monoliths as here.
The St. Julien Brooding Soldier Memorial recognized the 18,000 Canadian soldiers who fought from April 22nd-25th, 1915 in their (our!) first major engagement in the war. The Canadians, facing overwhelming odds including the first chlorine gas attacks of the war, gained international recognition for their courageous and determined defense of Allied positions during the Second Battle of Ypres. Rising almost 11 meters from a stone-flagged court, the monument comprised a single shaft of Canadian granite with a bowed head and shoulders of a Canadian soldier with folded hands resting on arms reversed.
The sign at Vancouver Corner was put up by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada and Parks Canada. I certainly never expected to see such a sign outside of my native Canada! The land was owned by the Canadian government as Belgium has generously ceded thousands of hectares of land to Allied nations to bury their dead.
As I still consider myself a Canadian first and foremost, it was very somber visiting the memorial honoring the two thousand young men who paid the ultimate sacrifice for our country's freedom.
Even now more than a hundred years after the war ended, farmers are still finding unexploded, rusty armaments when they till their fields. That didn’t seem so unbelievable when you realize that the war was called the Iron Harvest and 1.5 billion shells were deployed with one-third of them never exploding. Two hundred thousand kilos of ordnance are found yearly in the Flanders region and 1,320 people have died from exploding shells. The numbers seemed just mindboggling to me over a century after the war's end.
Philippe indicated that the standard operating procedure is for farmers to just place them by or in electrical posts as that is far simpler for busy farmers to do rather than calling the Bomb Disposal Unit immediately who don’t always come promptly.
Philippe stopped at a friend's garden center where he knew the owner always kept ordnance that had been found hidden from passersby but in a spot Quasimodo Tours could show their clients. It looked so innocuous, almost like logs, I thought. Just yards away was a farm and windmill - an area that looked so 'normal' and peaceful as if the war had never sullied the landscape.
Twenty percent of shells were chemical shells and, when collected by the Bomb Disposal Unit, they would dispose of them in the Bay of Biscayne until 1973 until that was banned for environmental reasons. A few kilometers later, we stopped at an electrical pole on the side of the road where we saw shells that had been placed in the openings. They had been there for weeks, Philippe said with a smile because the Bomb Disposal Unit have still never picked them up.
Field upon field upon field all containing leeks!
A huge number of shells were found when digging out this water reservoir. It has been estimated that it will be another 80 years before all the remaining shells will be found, not including those under streets and homes! The travesty of war is all I could think of.
On October 4th, 1917, during the advance on Passchendaele, the New Zealanders captured this section of the ridge known as 't Gravenstafel but they called it Grab and Stumble as they couldn't pronounce the Flemish location! The memorial commemorated the New Zealand Division’s participation in the early part of the Passchendaele offensive. Only ten percent of the New Zealand forces survived the assault.
In the Third Battle of Ypres, more commonly known as the Battle of Passchendaele, four million projectiles turned the countryside into a wasteland. Historic rainfall turned the area into a sea of mud and the ground like quicksand. So many drowned in the mud in what was described as the worst circumstances of the entire war. The battle was the first time the Germans used mustard gas which blistered the skin on contact. A quarter of a million soldiers died in Passchendaele with, at one point, just 30 meters gained but with a loss of 3,000 casualties. Photos kindly provided by Philippe:
As Philippe adroitly summed up the war, it was a war of attrition with no decisive battle concluding the war. It was a number’s game with the Allies having more soldiers than the Germans.
We stopped next at Tyne Cot, the largest of the Commonwealth cemeteries with almost 12,000 buried, and another 35,000 listed on the memorial wall at the back of the cemetery - those with no known grave. It was named for a blockhouse on the site captured by the British who named it for a river in northern England called Tyne Cottage. We could just spot the city of Ypres in the distance four kilometers away from where the Third Battle took place.
After 100 days, the Allied front line had only moved 8 km and the captured terrain was like a lunar landscape. The losses were estimated at 245,000 Allied troops and a further 215,000 German dead, wounded, and missing, The Canadians 'lost' 16,000 men in the offensive contribution.
Most of the soldiers who perished were only 18-20 years of age. How tragic to think that a whole generation of young men was gone in the four years of the war. As most soldiers’ remains couldn’t be identified, their gravestones could only include the words “A soldier of the Great War.”
The ground on which the cemetery now stands was dominated by a series of bunkers, the largest of which was used as an aid post. Those that died there were buried close by which became the start of the present cemetery. After the war, the Cross of Sacrifice was placed symbolically on top of the bunker.
Four Germans were buried together here so they could rest in peace with their comrades. Their graves were immediately identifiable because of the flat versus the slightly rounded tops of Allied graves. Unfortunately, I can't find the photo I am sure I took of the difference.
As families had to pay for each word on the gravestones, some of them had little on them if families couldn't afford to pay.
Philippe stressed there was no order in how the graves were listed so graves containing Canadians were next to British, New Zealanders, next to British. There were likewise gravestones of men from different regiments all mixed in together.
The flint on the back walls containing the names of those whose bodies were never found came from the United Kingdom. This part of the memorial was created in 1927.
The cemetery also held the memorial for the Australian 3rd Division in a separate area as they didn't want their soldiers interred with other Commonwealth soldiers.
The first, if still fake, poppies we saw that day were at Tyne Cot.
Even though I hadn't been aware of Tyne Cot beforehand, I couldn't help but be struck and profoundly moved by the thousands of graves in the cemetery, by the stark beauty and utter simplicity of the headstones, and especially the landscaping throughout. Any family member visiting would be proud to see their loved one 'resting' in a cemetery so loving tended as Tyne Cot.
Knowing of my interest in Canada's participation in the war, Philippe kindly stopped at Canada Gate. This marked the place where the Canadian corps saw fierce fighting during the Second Battle of Passchendaele and won possession of the high ground at Crest Farm. In 1914, there were a couple of outbuildings that the British called Crest Farm because that was where the buildings were located. We noticed there was a slight ridge as we looked toward Ypres or what the Belgians call Ieper. Philippe said there were an astounding nine Victoria Cross medals awarded at Crest Farm, more than at any other single battle.
Canada Gate is the second of two so-called “portals of remembrance.” The first monument, installed in 2020 on the Halifax waterfront in Canada, marked the departure from Pier 2 of 350,000 soldiers who boarded ships bound for the battlefields of Belgium and France. Canada Gate marked the arrival place of a lot of Canadian soldiers. Ellen: Have you and Peter seen the Halifax Canada Gate?
Philippe showed us a farm whose barn had a collection of hand grenades, shrapnel, and nose caps! The Bomb Disposal Unit could have been called to remove it but the farmer had never bothered. Philippe said some people sell the items for not just chump change.
Philippe holding a rifle and also some bullets.
Shrapnel inside the canister:
We just whizzed through the town of Passchendaele.
Philippe pointed out Polygon Wood as we drove by. It contained two cemeteries, the small original cemetery and the larger Buttes New British Cemetery that was created after the war by collecting isolated bodies scattered throughout the area. There were also two memorials, one to the Australian 5th Division, the other to the New Zealand Division who held the Polygon Wood sector from September of 1917 through May of 1918. They have no known grave.
We also drove by the unfinished Brothers in Arms Memorial even though the war has been over for over one hundred years. It was dedicated to Australian veterans and funded by private donations of family members who lost at least two brothers in the war.
About one kilometer from Ypres on the notorious Menin Road was Hellfire Corner, a particularly dangerous place because German guns were always trained on it. Even with canvas screens blocking their sight, the Germans were almost always sure of hitting something because it was such a busy spot.
A large crater was created by successive mine explosions in the town of Hooge in July 1915 during a relatively quiet period on the British part of the Western front when few major assaults were made. There was fierce fighting in the area over the next three years, during which the village was totally destroyed. The Hooge Crater Museum, reputedly the best private museum in Flanders Fields, was located next to a church the mayor of Hooge had rebuilt after the war to lure townspeople back home after they had been forced to leave their homes at the beginning of the war.
The museum reminded us that WW I was a trench war where the armies, from 1915 onwards, stayed on the same spot and the soldiers dug trenches to protect themselves. The war changed from a war of movement to a trench war. The trenches were even given names like streets today.
Beginning in 1915, both the Germans and the British armies tried out new weapons. The soldiers in the trenches were specially frightened of toxic gas that, as I mentioned earlier, the Germans used on April 22nd, 1915, when they deployed chlorine gas near Poelcapelle for the first time. Photos of some gas masks that were refined over time:
There were not many women in the war zone. The most important group of women near the front were the nurses who cared for and comforted the wounded soldiers. Women on the home front replaced the many men who went off to war by working in the fields, as police officers, and in the factories making bullets, grenades, and tanks.
The scene at Hooge on September 20th, 1917:
The best fighter pilot of the war was German Manfred Albrecht von Richthofen, better known as the Red Baron because he shot down 80 enemy aircraft. The Red Baron got his name because of the color of his plane. The eye-catching color scared enemy pilots when they saw his red plane approaching.
Children used to go looking for the leaden balls called shrapnel in the fields to earn extra money from being sold to ironmongers. Even now, they are worth a lot of money. The poster advised children to not touch any war materials they might find because of safety concerns.
Philippe had keys to nearby recreated British and German trenches that the British had built by Hooge.
Finally, we saw some real poppies at the trenches. When Philippe said they were just a weed that grew wild along the highways from spring to August, I was disappointed as they've always been among my favorite flowers and we have some in our spring flower beds.
Altogether on the Western front alone, there were 40,000km of trenches, the same as the earth's circumference! Having read about the horrific conditions of the trenches, I was befuddled looking at these photos of these well-kempt men in the trenches from the war. That was until I read that only official photographers could possess cameras so we were definitely looking at 'sanitized' photos. The soldiers, Philippe said, were in the trenches, just three feet from their comrades so they couldn't stretch out to sleep. They were there for a 16-day rotation and had no toilet facilities, only buckets to use. As rats crawled everywhere, the men suffered from dysentery, typhoid fever, and lice. Ten-day-old 'fresh' bread and other food were delivered through the trench lines.
Once the war became a trench war, barbed wire entanglements were put up to protect the trenches and to ensure they slowed down or stopped the attacker so he could be fired at for a longer time. The British alone protected their lines with about 1,380,000 km of barbed wire and used just 80,000 fewer sandbags between 1914 and 1918.
The town in the distance was Ypres aka Ieper.
Photo of the absolute devastation at Hooge in June of 1916:
Philippe gave both Steven and me the opportunity to walk down into the recreated trenches but Steven stayed above ground. I was able to see the typical German trenches had woven wickerwork branches to reinforce the sides and sandbags for the parapet. There was wooden drainage to get rid of the water under the duckboards or planks on the ground.
The British trenches were reinforced with corrugated iron sheets held into place by wooden poles with the upper part or parapet made of sandbags to lessen the impact of bullets and fragments of debris flying all around. Because the British lines were mostly lower in the Ypres region than their German counterparts, they needed a good drainage system. To prevent trench feet, the British used wooden planks so the soldiers walked above the groundwater.
The evacuation of wounded men from the trenches was extremely tough because no stretchers could make it around the corners in the trenches.
As the British couldn't easily pronounce Ieper, the Flemish word for Ypres, they called it Wipers! The Wipers Times was a satirical paper distributed to the troops to lift morale.
I had hoped to write just one post on our tour of just some of the memorials and monuments in Flanders Field but found I could not possibly adequately explain and describe all that I felt it necessary to include in a single post. I hope you will stay with me to the end in the next one.
Next post: More of our 12-hour tour of Flanders Fields including touring the Hill 60 Preserved Battlefield at Messines, the site where Canadian Dr. John McRae wrote his famous poem In Flanders Fields in 1915, and finally the tremendously moving Final Post Ceremony at the Menin Gate in Ypres that night.
Posted on October 5th, 2021, from Interlaken, Switzerland, where Steven and I had an amazing day walking and hiking twelve miles, downhill for the most part thank goodness, here in the Swiss Alps. I think this was the only country Steven had never been to in Western Europe (except Luxembourg now, regrettably!) and he was beyond thrilled to catch a few glimpses today of the snow-capped mountain tops!
How fortunate we are here in Canada never to have fought on our own land and so few of us have ever carried a gun to be used against other humans. The sorrow for such incredible losses seems to be infinite. What madness is war!
ReplyDeleteEloquently expressed, Paul.
ReplyDelete