In Flanders' Fields

Ieper (Ypres) is a city with a grim past- the site of a vicious four year struggle during World War I, which reduced the city and everything within miles to rubble. The battle was largely fought by Commonwealth forces, along with the escaped Belgian army and some French and French North African units, in the Westhoek- the last piece of Belgium not overrun by the Germans. Ieper has the dubious distinction of being the site of the first poison gas attack in modern warfare, launched by the Germans in April 1915 as the onset of the Second Battle of Iepers. I wanted to get the pictures out of the camera before I posted about my trip there, but I don’t really know why since that doesn’t really do it the justice it deserves.

I set out early by train from Kortrijk on the 11th of November- Veteran’s Day/Armistice Day/Remembrance Day/Jour de’armistice and of course, Wapenstilstanddag. It is just over the hill from Kortrijk, so I arrived just in time to catch the packed Poppy Parade start past the “new” cloth call, and followed the procession to the Menin Gate.



The Poppy Parade was motivated by Lt. John McCrae's iconic poem “In Flanders’ Fields”. If you have never read it, you are obligated to do so now. The Menin Gate, a large dome arching the Menin road in the center of Ieper, is a memorial to the almost 60,000 Commonwealth soldiers who fell at Iepers and have no known grave. To put this into perspective- this represents only people whose bodies were never found, who died at this specific town, among the Commonwealth forces alone. That number is equivalent to U.S. losses during the entire Vietnam War. The names blanket the walls of the memorial- inside and out.




Since the end of the war, the local fire brigade has dutifully stopped traffic at the gate, and played “Last Post” each evening. At 11:00 A.M on the 11th of November each year, this is played by the bands of military units that have a history in the battle. After this moving event, I went to the cloth hall to the “In Flanders’ Fields” museum, which is an excellent exhibition of the horrors of this battle and WWI. Rifles and gas masks, shells and shovels, mud stained uniforms and more accompany interactive multimedia explaining the major events.





To round out my day, I took a bus outside of the town proper to walk in the trenches of Hill 62, a preserved section of trenches and battlements. It was quite chilling to kneel on the firing step and peer over the placid Flanders countryside. Adding to the ghastly mystique of the place was the knowledge that in adjoining sections there are bodies and weapons still buried in the ground above which I walked. There are long lists of specific soldiers that anthropologists know died in certain areas and were never found, and many bodies are still recovered every year, making the “Great War” of almost a century ago seem uncomfortably recent and tangible.