We started off the morning at our B&B just outside of Ieper, and it's owned by two Brits with personality plus! When Liz checked us in yesterday she was wearing a t-shirt with a huge picture of Liza Minelli on it (Liz LOVES musicals & show tunes), and her husband John definitely has the gift of gab (with a wonderful Cockney accent)! They only have two rooms they let out, and the other room is occupied by an older British couple (again with Cockney accents and big personalities) who are regulars here at this B&B!! All of them kept us entertained last night for a couple of hours before we all headed to bed.
Today has been filled with a lot of stops at some of the many WWI sights around Ieper. The Flanders area was hit just as hard as The Somme; every town was razed and had to be rebuilt from scratch after the war ended, so there are hundreds of sights to choose from.
Our first stop was Essex Farm, which was a medical aid station dug into the bank of a canal during WWI. It was the place where Lt. Col. John McCrae, a Canadian surgeon during the 2nd Battle of Ypres, wrote "In Flanders Fields." (The poem was inspired by the death of a soldier who was a friend and former student of his.)
The dugout in which he wrote the poem has been rebuilt with concrete to preserve the site. There are several plaques dedicated to McCrae and the poem's presence is seen everywhere.
"In Flanders Fields" poignant beauty is matched by the heartbreaking tombstones of the surrounding British military cemetery. I told Tammy that I thought I was done taking pictures of cemeteries, but once we started walking through the stones I just couldn't help myself. Again, the British inscriptions brought tears to my eyes as I read the personalized notes from many of the soldiers' families.
The long low stone of remembrance in front of the obelisk (pic to the right) is inscribed with the words: "Their name liveth evermore." This particular stone is in every British military cemetery that has over 1,000 buried soldiers. It breaks my heart every time I see it, and we've seen it too often in the last two weeks.
In every military cemetery that has over 40 graves, you'll see the tall cross of sacrifice, which you've probably noticed in a lot of the cemetery pictures I've posted. This particular shot has the beautiful rays of the sun streaming through the shadows. The sun has finally come out today after almost two weeks of cloudy gray skies and chilly wind, and we're so happy to feel its warmth. And somehow, even if it's just in our minds, it makes the sadness of the cemeteries a little lighter.
We wandered through the markers reading and weeping like we have so many times on this trip. I'm starting to feel the way I do after teaching the Holocaust for a week - overwhelmed with sadness, loss, and the massive disregard for human life. Imagine what all of these young men could've done with their lives, the people they could have impacted, and the families they could have returned home to. Even though these losses occurred almost 100 years ago, the heartbreak and tragedy are still palpable in Flanders
These are the kinds of inscriptions that just break our hearts as we wander through line after line of markers.
After this memorable stop, we moved on to......another WWI cemetery, of course. We're asking to be depressed, I know! This one was Langemarck, a German cemetery that was actually much more beautiful than the other German ones we've seen. The approach to Langemarck led us down a tree-lined pathway and then to this stone wall that surrounded the entire property.
The low raised stone rectangles you see in front of the trees are actual bunkers from WWI. There are several of these spread throughout the cemetery.
Inside the main gate of the cemetery we found a small room on either side. One of the rooms was paneled with German oak and the wood was inscribed with the names of all the missing German soldiers from the battles in the Flanders area. This is the first time we've seen this type of inscription in a beautiful polished wood. It was absolutely breathtaking - for both its beauty and sadness.
Immediately after we walked through the main gate, we were stunned by a huge square space covered in landscaping bark and surrounded by rectangular markers. This space is the mass grave of 25,000 unknowns. Can you imagine finding that many soldiers' bodies with no way of identifying them? It's so terrible, and sadly, so common.
This cemetery has over 40,000 dead buried here. It's almost unfathomable. All the British cemeteries we've been to have had just a few thousand, the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach has 9,300 and it seems never ending; to see the enormous number of names (or unknown soldiers) on these dark stone markers is really so difficult.
Each of the stones in Langemarck has between six and 20 soldiers buried beneath it, some of them named and some not. The stone to the left shows six named soldiers, and the last one is, "Ein. . . Deutscher soldat" but without a name.
This stone has several unknowns.
After wandering around Langemarck for awhile, we headed to our next stop, Vancouver Corner. This is a Canadian WWI memorial with an extremely moving statue called "The Brooding Soldier." This single memorial is all there is in the large park that surrounds it, but it speaks volumes. (I'm sorry that my pictures don't show the detail in the soldier's face, but it was in shadows and I couldn't lighten it enough.)
This plaque is at the base of the statue. It would be very moving in any situation, but before this trip we started doing some geneology research on my Grandma Spradlin's father, Lewellyn Gilbert. He was Canadian, and we found out that he was wounded at Passchendale, which is very close to where this memorial stands. The Canadians had a terribly bloody experience in that battle, and I'm so amazed that he was only wounded and managed to survive. But he ended up being sent to England to rehabilitate, and then for further recuperation he was billeted with an English family whose daughter he ended up marrying. So luckily things ended up turning out very well for him
The next stop on our tour for today was the grand and very emotional Tyne Cot Cemetery, the largest British cemetery in Europe with close to 12,000 burials and names of 35,000 missing. 8300 of the men buried at Tyne Cot are unknowns.
These are the two heart wrenching quotes we saw on the walls of the visitor's center. And as people move through the center, there is a picture of a fallen soldier projected on the wall and his name is read out loud over the speaker system. Every 20 seconds or so this is repeated with a different lost soldier. It's a roll call of the dead.
" 'Tyne Cot' or 'Tyne Cottage' was the name given by the Northumberland Fusiliers to a barn which stood near the level crossing on the Passchendaele-Broodseinde road. The barn, which had become the centre of five or six German blockhouses was captured by the 3rd Australian Division on 4 October 1917, in the advance on Passchendaele." (http://www.cwgc.org) They wanted something to remind them of home, and this is where the name of the cemetery comes from.
Again, this sort of visit tears at the heart. So many graves, so much sorrow. Over and over the personal inscriptions catch the heart; here we saw the stones of two Australian soldiers - the only sons of heart broken parents - mourned by their families. I could only wonder if they ever got to see the resting places of their beloved boys lost so far from home. And that is what catches in the heart and rises in the throat.
I know this is a strange picture to see after all the moving inscriptions above, but I wanted to pay tribute to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which is the organization responsible for the upkeep of all British war cemeteries all over Europe. We have seen their employees working diligently in every single British cemetery we've visited. They clean graves, mow the lawns, weed the flowerbeds, and even re-engrave the most worn stones with new inscriptions. They really are the heart and soul of all these sacred places.
And finally, my last picture of this beautiful and peaceful place of rest for thousands of heroic young men..
The cross above is sitting on a base that includes a piece of the Tyne Cot bunker, so named by the young men who dreamed of home but didn't get to see it again.
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