After checking in for a 3pm Eurostar we settled down for the short journey to Lille, and onward train to Ypres to view the Flanders Fields that were once so notoriously brutal but today are peaceful farmland albeit snow covered and bitterly cold as January can be in this part of Europe.

We arrived in Ypres, checked in to the Novotel Ypres Hotel and had a quick shower to warm up before heading out for the short walk to the town’s famous Menin Gate.

Every night at 8pm men from the Last Post Association of Ypres gather under the Gate’s cavernous arch, two police vans stop either side of the Gate and stop the traffic from entering and a short ceremony gets under way. The buglers play the “Last Post” in an eerie silence and it reverberates around the Gate, for the silence to take over again once the final note drifts away. After that the freezing cold was taking over again so we decided to take cover in the one of many taverns lining the Grote Markt for an obligatory plate of escargot and frites washed down by the local Ypres brew.

Next morning we met Steve (who runs and guides the Salient Tours) at the “British Grenadier Bookshop” in the centre of Ypres. Today there were only 2 others taking the morning tour with us, a couple from Australia who had some family members who had fought in the region. Luckily the minibus that Steve takes you around the battlefields has a powerful heater as the temperature had dropped down into minus double digits!

The tour departs Ypres passing through the Menin Gate and down the Menin Road, the same way most of the Commonwealth soldiers marched on their way to the front. We first visited a small private museum, which has intact trenches from WWI in the grounds. It is quite a shocking sight when you first see the trenches, especially at this time of year when the ground is covered in light snow, water at the bottom of the trench and the trench’s dug-out earth sides and floor are completely frozen. It really does make you shiver to think what life must have been like in this frozen hell.

From there we moved on Hill 60, one of the hills (more like a small ridge) that was of so much strategic importance during the battles. We discovered that both sides had built networks of tunnels under these hills. As the Germans held the high ground at the time, the Commonwealth tunnellers’ aim was to dig under the hill, pack the tunnel full of explosives and then blow them up. Setting off 19 of these bombs along the ridge created a noise that was heard in London! This story is told at the base of the ridge and then as you get to the top a massive 90 foot crater drops away below and you get a real idea of how big and deadly the bang would have been that morning.

After that we visited the Polygon Wood Anzac memorials, before travelling to a point halfway to the main Tyne Cot Memorial where Steve explained a battle that was poignant to New Zealanders like myself, called the battle of Bellevue Spur (Passchendaele). On the 12 Oct 1917 New Zealand troops suffered 2700 casualties in just one ill fated morning. The blackest day in terms of lives lost in the country’s history.

It was then a short drive through the farmland to Tyne Cot cemetery, the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the world and holding the remains of 12,000 soldiers, and over 34,000 names are on the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing. Standing on top of the cross of sacrifice looking down on the graves and the memorial to the unknown soldier is almost daunting with the sheer number of soldiers buried here, a sobering sight on a frozen foggy day.

Just before the end of the morning tour we also stopped at the German cemetery and memorial at Langemark whose dark headstones and memorial stone laid flat in ground make a stark contrast to the Commonwealth’s white stone rows of headstones. As you enter the cemetery there is a small room in which is a wooden panel carved with 6500 names and Steve explained that these are the names of student voluteers who were basically used a canon fodder, some marching into battle unarmed for the German cause.

From there we returned to Ypres and the tour ended for the morning, if we had more time we would have continued to join Steve for the afternoon tour which takes in some more of the area’s bloody history. For us it was back to the station for the train back to Lille, with heads full of thoughts of everything we had learned and grateful to Steve and Salient Tours for explaining the history of this frozen landscape.

Book a Salient Tours Ypres Battlefields trip with any Railbookers’ Ypres short break or holiday. Please call for details.

Posted in: Belgium, Ypres | Author: Mark