Ypres, Belgium: Flanders Fields
I’d never spent much time learning about the Great War. World War II was more personal with Grandad’s history and the Civil War was more immediate with battlefields across the South. I’d even visited Revolutionary War sites in New England. But World War I? Not really on my radar.
But here we are in Belgium. Not just Belgium but Flanders, the notorious killing fields of the Western Front exactly 100 years ago. We decided to drive west from our base in Oudenaarde to the town of Ypres (pronounced “EE-pruh”) to learn more about the events of 1914–1918.
But first, a detour. I had to satisfy a curiosity of mine related to beer. I’ve previously discussed Trappist beers and the six famed abbey breweries in Belgium. The monks at one of the monasteries, the Saint-Sixtus Abbey of Westvleteren, produce what’s considered THE best beer in the world.
We’ve visited the world’s largest ball of twine, world’s deepest hand-dug well and world’s greatest who-knows-what in Kansas so yes, we could make a small detour to sample the world’s greatest beer.
The monks produce a very limited amount of Westvleteren 12. It’s not really for sale anywhere. Your only guaranteed chance to taste it is by visiting the abbey itself (which isn’t easy to find). But Mom navigated us through a series of tiny, single-lane roads until we finally discovered the visitor’s center.
In short order, we had two goblets of the dark Westvleteren 12 and Westvleteren Blonde in front of us. They were rich and delicious. We were able to buy our limit of two boxes of the beer complete with branded glasses. Once packed safely in our Opel Astra, we were on our way to Ypres.
As we neared the town, we passed several military cemeteries along each side of the road. We finally stopped at one filled with markers to British soldiers.
Some were dedicated to “a soldier of the Great War known unto God” while a few were personalized with individual photos. The vast majority were simply etched with the soldier’s name, rank and date of death. These were aligned in silent, endless rows.
After that numbing walk, we parked in the town center of Ypres and made our way to the massive Cloth Hall. We were greatly impressed by the extensive Flanders Fields museum housed inside. I even climbed to the top of the bell tower to look across the rooftops to the surrounding battlefield.
The intensity and mass scale of the killing took all sides completely by surprise in the fall of 1914. Mechanization, outdated field tactics and miserable trench warfare combined to kill more than 2 million and wound another 5 million on the Western Front alone. In addition, millions of maimed soldiers and war widows suffered the rest of their lives.
The effects of the war on the landscape were still visible a century later. Bomb craters filled with water in farmers’ fields while shells, instruments and soldiers’ remains are still pulled out of the mud. The town of Ypres itself was reduced to rubble from German shelling.
Amazingly, the town we were standing in now was painstakingly rebuilt after 1918. We decided to stay until the evening to attend The Last Post, a traditional British ceremony conducted at the Menin Gate every night since 1928 (except when Belgium was occupied by the Germans in World War II).
On this night in front of our silent group, buglers played, an honorary detachment of Czech soldiers marched and a memorial wreathe was laid by a relative of one of the solders whose name is etched in the memorial. The Menin Gate is dedicated to the 55,000 Commonwealth soldiers who died around Ypres but whose bodies were never identified or found.
As you know, we previously visited the American Flanders Field cemetery near Oudenaarde. This evening, we also visited the Canadian monument in Ypres. This brooding soldier atop a column marked the spot where 18,000 Canadians, anchoring the British left flank, withstood the first gas attacks in the history of war in April of 1915. Fully 2,000 soldiers were killed in the horrific attack and buried nearby.
Several miles out of town, we made a special trip to visit one of only four cemeteries in Belgium allowed to the Germans. The standing markers and crosses we’d seen at other cemeteries were not allowed here at Langemark.
These gravestones were flat on the ground and held the names of numerous individuals including Unbekannte Deutsche Soldaten (unknown German soldiers). More than 44,000 German war dead were buried here including 25,000 in one mass grave.
Remnants of the front line anchored one end of the cemetery. While we visited, the massive oaks planted when the grounds were established were silently burying the graves under a field of golden leaves.
Today was a full day and we were left with plenty to think about as we made our night drive back to Oudenaarde. Now that I’ve seen some of the history, I’m determined to learn more about World War I. It only seems fitting.
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