We visited Flanders Field on a Sunday (I had forgotten what day it was) when we rode pass cemetery after cemetery. Over the years, our Rick Steves' tours have forced us into learning about Europe's involvement in the world wars. "Force" is too strong a word but frankly, I would not have studied this topic if it hadn't been for my travels on his tours.
Today was another chance for me to expand my horizons; I was a World War I virgin before this side trip. Because American forces played a relatively minor role in the fighting here, its history is obscure to many US visitors. So I don't think I was the only one. And it finally dawned on me--at age 63 (I'm not too old to learn)--that WWI was called the "Great War" because they didn't think, after the horror that it was, there would be another war of this magnitude! Duh.
We met the bus in front of the hotel at 8:30 AM and we wouldn't return to Bruges until late in the afternoon. We drove to Ypres, where we met out local guide, Filip, at the Menin Gate, an archway in the Roman tradition begun in 1921. The monument to the Allied effort marks the Menin Road, where many Brits, Canadians, Aussies, and Kiwis left this town for the grueling battlefields and trenches, never to return.
The gate was designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield and is made of French limestone. It is 135 feet in length, 140 feet wide, and 80 feet high, dominating Ypres along with the rebuilt Cloth Hall.
The gate was officially unveiled on July 24, 1927 in the presence of the King and several thousand relatives whose names of their loved ones--nearly 54,900 of the missing--were inscribed around the memorial. Like at Paris's Arc de Triomphe, local police stop traffic every evening while the Last Post is played by buglers from the local fire station. It is often attended by large crowds. This has been happening nightly since the 1920s except for the duration of German occupation during World War II. Amazing.
Ypres was so devastated by the end of the war that Winston Churchill advocated keeping it in ruins as a monument to the travesty of warfare. But locals did rebuild, resurrecting its charming main market (Grote Markt), watched over by the grand and impressive Cloth Hall. So although the buildings look ancient, they are only about 90 years old. "They rebuilt everything as it was before the war, even the buildings they didn't like," according to Hilbren.
After a short break to walk around the Markt, Filip began explaining the WWI battlefields known as Flanders Fields. It was here, in the second decade of the 20th century, that the world saw the invention of modern warfare: machine guns, trenches, and poisonous gas. The most intense fighting occurred in the area called the Ypres Salient, a nondescript but hilly--and therefore terrifically strategic--bulge of land east of the medieval trading town of Ypres (which the Flemish call "Ieper").
Of the estimated nine million people claimed by WWI, about a million of them were killed, wounded, or declared missing in action here in the Ypres Salient. Because there were five "Battles of Ypres" and soldiers were buried where they fell, there were nearly 1,000 cemeteries by the end of the war. Because this amount was unmanageable after the war, graves were relocated and centralized so that today, the number is down to approximately 150 war cemeteries in Ypres. And Filip says it would take over a week to visit them all. We would only visit four today.
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