Whatagain in Flanders battlefields

[whatagain]

I had a day off yesterday and went Passendaal and Ieper.
Known by ll commonwealth members as Passchendaele and Ypres where so many of their soldiers lost their lives.
There are around 200 cemeteries in West Vlaanderen nearly all of them commonwealth with 4 to about 12 000 tombs.
The Germans collected their dead in 3 cemeteries totalling above 100 000 fallen men.

We call it une boucherie. A slaughterhouse.

We started with the museum at Passchendaele which comprises a dug out : rooms well below ground under the trench network.

[whatagain]

En route to Ieper we go past … Nazareth. 
yet God was too busy then to stop the carnage. 

The first room of the museum - and old so called palace - more a mansion - gives the atmosphere. 
brits here.  


The dugout : here a command post room

The tunnels. The museum adds sounds of distant bombing and the lights flicker. 

Poor guy has no intimity. 

You needn’t even book on hotels.com back it was all provided for. 

The officers had more comfort. 

Back up - the villa Zonnedael hosts the museum.  
literally sunny valley. 

[whatagain]

The famous - or infamous - German leather helmets of the cavalry - the Uhlans. 
the nickname ‘casque à pointe’ can still be used to describe our eastern neighbours. 

A beautiful cannon (howizer) with rows of shells behind it. 

The museum lets visitors put on the Stahlhelm and an armour protection worn by the sentinels. 
i don’t think the poor guys would have been smiling. 

They recreated trenches outside. 
quite realistic. 

A German trench. The British ones used massively corrugated steel for faster building and protection. 

A mortar position. 

I find it nice to have written on a whole wall a sentence describing the absurdity of war … in German. 

[kerouac2]

Excellent. Ypres is always impressive even when you just stay on ground level, as a few of us at Anyport have already done.

The underground sleeping quarters always creep me out, but they are so much better than the trenches, where the soldiers also had to sleep in the mud and filth and rats and corpses. Those nice clean trenches that one can now visit are sort of ridiculous but they are better than nothing for stimilating one's imagination.

[whatagain]

And nobody can imagine the goth and the smell.

[whatagain]

In the way to Ypres we stopped at Tyne Cot. 
this hill was bitterly fought and is now the resting place of more than 12 000 allied soldiers. 

I find it so sad that so many men were found in such a state that you could not know the nationality of the fallen. 

And there are about 35 000 names of unidentified comrades whose earthly remains were simply not found.. 

Ieper has been totally rebuilt in the 20 and 30’s and some designed modern churches !

A typical Flemish house. 

This door dates from 1714. 

The main hall. Mostly rubbles in 18. 



You can climb into the belfry. Look at the thickness of the walls. 

I suffer from vertigo. 

The ‘carillon’ like in many Belgian and northern French towns. 

The view from the top. 



Quite high enough for my liking. 

[bjd]

A few months ago I re-read All Quiet on the Western Front (A l'Ouest Rien de Nouveau) by Erich Maria Remarque. It indeed describes a slaughterhouse. No wonder the Nazis banned the book in the 1930s.

Adding that both my husband's grandfathers were at Verdun. His paternal father wrote letters to his wife every day. My husband typed up all those he managed to find and put them together in a self-published book. Of course, there is little mention of how terrible life in the trenches must have been.

[kerouac2]

I strongly recommend that anybody who has not seen 1917 by Sam Mendes correct that oversight if they have any interest in the subject.

[bixaorellana]

Whatagain, I let this excellent report get past me, but just enjoyed it (if that's right word) now & slowly enough to be deeply affected by it. All wars are a grotesque waste of human life, but somehow WWI comes across at the saddest war in many ways. There the world was, really poised on the brink of modernity, high political consciousness, etc. and then the powers that be just killed and killed and killed. Both my grandfathers were in France during that war. My maternal grandfather talked about it for the rest of his life. (My paternal grandfather died when I was little.) Then those men were expected to send their sons off to more carnage.

Kerouac took Htmb and me up to Ypres and to the cemeteries. I was initially unenthusiastic about the cemeteries because I am a snotty little bitch, but I will be forever grateful for having gone. The endless names in that beautiful setting can only bring home how dreadful humans allow themselves to be, how they mow down young people and never learn from that.

The novelist Sebastian Faulks is a most uneven writer in my opinion, but his novel Birdsong should be required reading for everyone. He not only brings home the unrelenting horror of war, but makes us understand, at least to some degree, how it must be for those who must endure it.

Your daughter is darling, your pictures are wonderful, and your captions and explanations are perfect. Thank you.

[kerouac2]

I drove past Ypres again just last week but unfortunately did not have time to leave the motorway.