After Mardasson, we headed for Bois Jacques (Jack's Woods) to see the remains of Easy Company's foxholes. If you've seen the HBO mini-series, this is the episode where they're hunkering down in the woods during the dead of winter getting shelled to death by the Germans. (There are miles of these foxhole remains, but we only stopped at one place to see a few. It was raining pretty hard and we didn't want to be traipsing around forever in the wet woods.)
On the way to the forest, we stopped alongside the road in Bizory to see the Easy Company memorial put up by the town of Bastogne, Tom Hanks, HBO, and several other groups. It's pretty amazing that these men have their own special marker!
Here are the pics of the foxholes. I know in the pictures you can't tell very clearly how big or deep they are, but it was pretty amazing to be seeing these hollows where men huddled to keep warm and to hide from shell explosions.
The forest seemed a bit eerie, partly because the trees are so dense that it's quite shadowy, but also because of the rain and the knowledge of what happened here during WWII.
Here is a video clip from "Band of Brothers" that shows the shelling of the foxholes. Remember this battle occurred in the winter so everything was covered in snow in the movie.
And here's a video clip of a tourist walking through the foxhole remains in 2010. This video shows you foxholes that were deeper in the forest than where we went, but everything looks very similar to what we saw.
Seeing these foxholes was really an experience, and I'm so glad the weather cooperated so we could find them. (It was raining, but there weren't lightning storms like we had last night.)
Next up was the German Cemetery at Recogne. This cemetery has over 5,000 soldiers buried here, and the placque said it was the second largest German cemetery in Belgium. There is a beautiful stone wall around it and the entry gate leads directly to a reddish brown chapel that holds an altar, names of the dead, etc.
As I've said before, the German cemeteries seem very dark because of the dark gray stones they use as markers. This one was also dark, but instead of having a few of the short stone crosses scattered in between thousands of flat markers, ALL the graves had the dark stone crosses. It was quite a sight to look across this big, green space and see these black, squat stone crosses everywhere - as far as you could see.
More unknown soldiers, like we've seen at all the cemeteries.
Across the road from this German cemetery was a marker for the location of a temporary American cemetery from WWII.
The following picture is of a poem that's located underneath the sketch (above). It's very thought provoking. It reminds us all that we have to learn from the past; in order to honor the memory of those who died for us, we have to shape a better future for the world. I absolutely love it! I'm going to use it in my history class next year!
And now on to Part 3 . . .
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