Of all the places I visited on my trip to Belgium and Holland, the most most moving and disturbing was the day was spend in the Ypres Salient. Most Americans (myself included) are woefully ignorant about the details of the fighting during WWI. We've heard about trench warfare and mustard gas, but really don't have a good understanding of where the battles were fought, and how many died. (I was much better prepared emotionally for the Anne Frank House in Holland, having more intimate knowledge of the Holocaust in general and having read her book several times).
We spent the day visiting memorials and cemeteries for soldiers killed in this area - mostly from the British Commonwealth, but also one German Cemetery as well. I finally understand why the men killed in WWI are called the Lost Generation in Britain.
Here's a brief description of the video I made of my visit there:
The first pictures are from Essex Farm Cemetery where
Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae of the Canadian Army Medical Corps wrote the poem In Flanders Fields in May 1915. The dimly lit image from the inside of a medical bunker.The next images are from Langemark Cemetery which is the only remaining German/Central Powers cemetery. There are almost 25,000 coffins buried in a mass grave along with about 3,000 graves of student volunteers and other individual graves totaling 44,000+ burials in all.
A fallen soldier's medal left at a guest house by a visitor from Australia.
The base of a monument to Georges Guynemer, French flying ace. He shot down over 50 enemy planes.
The next image is at St. Julien's Cemetery in honor of Canadian soldiers.
This is followed by a series of images from Tyn Cot Cemetery
near Passendale. This is the largest cemetery to British war dead in the world. I totally lost it at this point. It's almost too much to comprehend. Almost 12,000 individual graves - those who were known often have their country (e.g. maple leave for Canada) or regimental symbols on their headstones. But most of the bodies are unidentified - 8,300+ are inscribed with "known unto G-d."And then there is the Memorial to the Missing - over 34,000 names of British Commonwealth soldiers whose remains are still missing - or are in some of the unidentified graves. Plaque after plaque arranged by regiment. But you can see the disparity - many bodies have never been found - over 90,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers remain missing, a small fraction of which are in the unidentified graves.
The final image is the top of the statue to Georges Guynemer. He was shot down in 1917 not far from where this monument stands. Neither his body nor his plane have been found.
We also visited a site that still had some of the original trenches, as well as bomb shells, display cases full of medals that have been found in the area, and other gruesome remnants of war.
I didn't get a good picture of the Menin Gate in Grote, which also has names of missing British & Commonwealth soldiers engraved on it. Every night, 365 days a year, someone comes out at 20:00 and plays "The Last Post" (what we Americans call taps) at the gate. The people of Grote haven't forgotten the sacrifices made by their British allies.
It was a very difficult day, but an important one.
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