We woke this morning to rain again, and we had it confirmed by our hostess that the predominant weather in this country is rain. It rains for 306 of the 365 days in a year. But today the rain seems quite fitting for the pursuit that we have in mind, today we are going on a tour of the Flanders fields, the scene of some of the bloodiest battles of WWI.
What we learnt today was very sobering, the numbers that we were hearing were completely astounding, and to be in the place where this massacre took place, is still hard to imagine. 65 million men took up arms in WWI, quarter of a million of them are buried here in Flanders and another half million of them in France. In this small 25 square mile piece of Belgium, 35 men died for every metre of territory.
Everywhere you turn there seems to be another large war cemetery. As well as many others we visited Tyne Cot Cemetery, the largest British Commonwealth war cemetery in the world. There are about 12,000 buried here and another 35,000 names listed on the walls of those still missing. Throughout these cemeteries there are a significant number of NZ names, and we were told that the NZs suffered the greatest number of losses per capita. We saw several memorials dedicated to the NZs that fought and died here, each of them finishing with the line, ‘From the utmost ends of the earth’, and when you are here, you get a real sense of that. About 750,000 Commonwealth soldiers, sailors and airmen dies on the Western front. And these are buried in the 1000 war cemeteries, and 2000 civil cemeteries, with a further 300,000 having no know grave.
We passed through what was known as ‘Hellfire corner’, where a German shell was to land every five seconds, every day. We visited ‘Hill 60’ where the British laid a system of tunnels and underground explosives, to blow up the ridge occupied by the Germans. To say that this was a ridge, was an overstatement. In a flat country like this, anything with a ten metre elevation was considered the high ground, and in WWI was occupied by the Germans. Anything else was a quagmire of water filled shell holes.
This battle site known as Flanders fields, seems to be the expression of the pure ‘bloody mindedness’ of the British General, who had the mentality that he had 12 million troops, the Germans had 10 million troops, he was always going to win, it was just a matter of who ran out of men first.
One of the aspects that it is hard to grasp, is just how hard it has been for the locals here during that time and since. During the war, most fled, of which most ended up in internment camps near Paris. When they returned, they found this whole area just blown apart. The ground was churned, the buildings were flattened, and the only thing left standing were a few shattered and burnt trees. For the first few years they took whatever shelter they could, living underground, living in camps, living like cattle. Today, everything that you see has been rebuilt, there is nothing here older than 90 years old.
Of the 1.5 billion shells that were poured into this area, over half of them didn’t explode, and are still being dug up today. As you drive down the road, you see piles of shells and grenades waiting by the farmers gates, to be picked up by the demolition squad. 250 tonnes of them are discovered every year. The scary thing is that some of them disappear before the army gets them, and you never know just how stable these things are. There are 2-3 deaths every year from these things. 20 – 30% of them are chemical bombs, designed to have very nasty effects, using everything from Chlorine to what is known as mustard gas. One farmer recently was ploughing his paddock when he hit something metallic that he recognized as a chemical bomb (they have become very good at recognizing these things), and he called in the army. Out of that one paddock, they dug up 600 British chemical shells, still lethal. The army has a special depot for dealing with these things, but they have such a backlog, that they project another 58 years of dismantling, but probably another 90 years before they will consider that the land is cleared. Last year was a busy year and they recovered 700 tonnes of explosives from the land around here. As well as the explosives, they also regularly recover bodies. Once again last year was a busy year, with 38 soldiers reburied.
One of the ironic things that we discovered was that the Germans weren’t the first to use the poison gas that this trench warfare will always be remembered for. It was the French that used it first, using chemicals and instruments developed by the Swiss! Of course the Germans saw that as a precedent, and the British retaliated, and it escalated from there. In the same vein, the Germans were known for the quality of their bunkers, but in an indirect way, the Brits helped them build them. The Germans were using good quality Portland cement, all the way from Britain, imported by the Dutch and sold to the Germans! Whoever said “No one wins a war”, maybe not, but there is always profit to be made. The evidence of the quality of the cement can still be seen in the remaining bunkers. Many of them have been demolished since, but at the time the boys were fighting here, there were over 1000 German bunkers confronting them.
After a day of visiting war graves and listening to the horrific stories, numbers, anecdotes, and trying to come to grips with the circumstances that they were doing this in, we finished the day on a slightly different and pleasant note. We went to the Irish ‘Peace Park’. This may sound like an oxymoron, but you need to hear more. When the explosives at ‘Hill 60’ were detonated, there were 24 sites set to explode at the same time, to create an almost artificial earthquake. Unfortunately only 19 of them exploded, two of them weren’t detonated because the troops had advanced over them before the day of detonation (they had been prepared and laid a year previous), the one at the Peace Park site exploded 20 seconds too late, and the Irish who had advanced took the full force of the blast. The memorial was to have been built in Ireland, but firstly they couldn’t agree on where it should be built, and secondly they couldn’t be sure that it wouldn’t be torn down, so they built it here. A very Irish, grey stone, round tower. Placed along the path as you approach it you read a series of very poignant poems that have been written about war and its effects. At the end of the path there is a plaque, which firstly explains the circumstances of the deaths, then it asks for forgiveness for their own Catholic/Protestant conflicts, then it calls for peace, and brings your thoughts back to the Catholic and Protestant soldiers who fought here together and lost their lives. It was a very nice touch, very well done, and an excellent way to end the tour.
To say this was the end of the tour, it wasn’t quite. Our last stop was in the city of Ypres, the city that was the hub and the focus of all the fighting in its surrounds, the city that was the gateway to the German march on the rest of Europe, the march that was stopped in its tracks, but at huge cost. There is a large gate here with a list of those still missing. Every night at 8:00pm the traffic is stopped, and a bugler plays ‘The Last Post’ in remembrance of all those that have fallen. ‘Lest we forget’, in this part of the world, you cannot forget. In 1914 millions of young men marched off with flowers on their rifles, set off with excitement for the adventure of a lifetime, 15% of them lying about their age to be allowed to go. They were going to be home for Christmas, or so they thought. As time dragged on, this was going to be ‘the war that ends all wars’, but even that wasn’t true. Twenty years later it happened again.
It was a very informative, and sobering day, but at the end of it we felt that it had been predominantly one sided, what about the German side? They were fighting in the same circumstances, the same situation, suffering the same losses as those on the allied side. We were told that even now there is a real anti-German feeling around here. Our tour guide told us two stories which showcased this. As the tour was about to go into a museum, a young German couple asked if they could go in (speaking in English), and they were told by the owner, “You can visit my museum, but then you can go home, you can’t stay for four years” (and he wasn’t joking). In another case an Australian couple had hired a car in Germany (with German plates), and they spent their entire time in Belgium going around in circles, because the locals would deliberately give them wrong directions. After 90 years it is hard to comprehend that this attitude still exists so strongly. It makes you want to say, “That was 90 years ago it is time to move on”. To us it seems quite sad that the current generation is being punished for the actions of their great grandparents generation.
