Some background: Ypres was, until the First World War, a wealthy and beautiful, medieval town, set in near-flat but rich countryside in Western Flanders. During that war, it became a symbol for stupidity in battle management … with both the German and the British Allied forces losing hundreds of thousands of men for little or no gain. Even then, it was seen as disastrous: In heavy rain and glutinous mud predominantly British troops eventually succeeded in capturing the small village of Passchendaele in the autumn of 1917, often regarded as a minor gain albeit achieved at heavy cost in casualties. In the third Ypres battle (September and October of 1917, in torrential rains) the Allies incurred some 310,000 casualties, the Germans 260,000.
At the end of the War, Ypres lay in rubble. Its fields and trees, and indeed the town itself, were nothing but mud, potholes, trenches and unspeakable carnage.
90 years after the fact … we visited Passcechendaele (now as then a small village outside Ypres), and went to the Zonnebeke museum. There, the chipper young man at the reception desk heard our accents and noted that we’d be most interested: they’d found the body of a Lancashire Fusilier (I may have misheard this) the week before. His hand still clutched his wallet. In the wallet still were identifiable documents, including something from a Santa Barbara bank. Inside the museum were artefacts and tableaux displaying the history of the war, displays of what trench warfare was like. http://www.passchendaele.be/#English At a streetside café in Ypres, a British family sat nearby. An older couple and their teenaged grandson: they’d been to battlefields in Northern France and now in Southwestern Belgium. At one of these fields, the boy had found bullets and a grenade. We visited the German trenches at Bayernwald (Bavarian Woods) http://www.wo1.be/ned/database/dbDetail.asp?subtypeID=34&typeid=15&ItemID=6150&lID=3 where you can wander in the trenches, you can understand why the British bombardments failed to break the German line (the Germans had built and hidden concrete bunkers: inside these miserable shelters, with ceilings just 45 inches from the muddy, damp, slimy, verminous and foul ground, the Germans packed and huddled, surviving much of the bombardment). In an odd touch, the signs are multilingual – English, German, Flemish/Dutch and French … but on some occasions the contents are clearly different. On one sign, Adolf Hitler is mentioned; none of the other languages mention him; I don’t read German well enough to understand what was written. Also mentioned in the German-language signs – Chinese slave labour used to build the German trenches, along with a picture of the tombstone of one of the Chinese slaves.
The medieval guildhall and Cathedral of Ypres were flattened during the war. Pictures taken of central Ypres at the end of the multiple battles show nothing left of the 14th-Century wall, or the medieval towers at the center of town AT ALL, save – for the largest towers – a few shattered walls standing perhaps 10 meters high, ruined, pock-marked, surrounded by rubble. The major buildings in central Ypres have been reconstructed – after a fashion. They do not look like the real thing. They have the outline, but not the huge stone blocks, of gothic masonry. However, in one touching note: one of the statues on the rebuilt medieval hall in central Ypres is not an original, nor a replacement … but a statue in original, medieval style, of a WW1 soldier, in greatcoat.
Another touching note: the evening ceremony at the Menin Gate. Once a gate in the city walls; now an unlovely military arch. Through this gate toward the northeast marched many hundreds of thousands of young men to their slaughter. After the demolition of Ypres by endless bombardment, a new gate/arch was built. Here are inscribed the names of 55,000 soldiers from the British Allies who died – and who had no gravesite as of the arch’s construction in 1927. British Allies: the first names I saw were Indians … the first I saw was of one Sepoy Singh; here are the names of tens of thousands of Canadians (their troops eventually ‘took’ Passchendaele), Australians, Irish, Brits, and more. And, again: these are just the troops whose remains were not found. Nor yet is this list complete, it lists just those who died between the outbreak of war and mid-August 1917. Another 35,000 Allied soldiers lost their lives afterward, and found no known grave; their names are listed elsewhere, at Tyne Cot Cemetery.
At 8 pm each night, traffic through the Gate stops, and a bugle brigade (made up of local policemen) plays ‘the Last Post’, ‘Taps’. This ceremony has been held nearly continuously since 1927, using WW1-era bugles. During WW2, when the area was under Nazi occupation, the ceremony ceased – but the bugles were hidden, and the ceremony resumed, using the same bugles, ‘tis said, the night after the Nazi occupation ended in 1945.
