Flanders Fields

While I was in Brugge I realised just how close I was to the Flanders Fields area of WW1. I decided to take a tour of the area. The tour company I went with was a good company to use. It is called ‘Quasimodo’ and is run by a Belgium man and his Australian wife.

Whilst I hate all forms of war, WW1 was absolute madness as our tour guide explained. I did know some details about WW1 but I certainly learnt a lot from this tour. The tour is a very sobering experience and at the same time it really does make you wonder and get quite angry about just why mankind has not learnt a lesson.

A couple of things that did surprise me were just how flat the whole are is. While they do talk about hills, they are just that, and not very big hills at all. The other being just how close each side were to each other. In some cases a couple of hundred metres!

We covered the area of the Ypres Salient. Our first stop was at a German War Cemetery and as we soon discovered very different to others we visited. In the German War Cemetery all the headstones are laid flat on the ground and they were only allowed to have a few groups of wooden crosses in the whole area. Oak trees were planted and these are now very large.

Probably the place that has left an indelible mark with me is the ‘Tyne Cot Cemetery’. It is now the largest Commonwealth War Cemetery in the world in terms of burials.  There are 11,956 ‘Commonwealth’ servicemen of the First World War buried or commemorated in Tyne Cot Cemetery. I believe there about 3600 Australians at Tyne Cot. 8,369 of the burials are unidentified but there are special memorials to more than 80 casualties known or believed to be buried among them.

The number of Australians that were sent to the Western Front is enormous, in a 2½ year period 295,000 were on the Western Front, 60% were casualties and 46,000 lost their lives. We certainly lost a generation of young men during WW1.

We did stop at a local farm; even today it is not unusual for farmers to find live ammunition and live gas shells on their farms. When these are found, they leave them, usually by a light post and someone from the bomb squad collects them. Where we stopped, the tour guide commented that when he had been there 2 days ago there were 2 ammunition shells but that day a 3^rd shell had been added and that was a gas shell. At another farm, the farmer had quite a collection of items he has found on his land. Fortunately these are all safe, and quite interesting to see. This farmer was a strawberry farmer and we did see something very unusual outside his farm on the roadside. It was a refrigerated, self-serve strawberry machine! Several people stopped while we were there to purchase strawberries.

The tour took us to many well know WW1 sites including: Hellfire Corner, Polygon Wood where the Australian Memorial is, Hill 60 – where a very large man-made explosion was heard in London & in Ireland. At Hill 60, there is a special memorial to the 1^st Australian Tunnelling Division – these soldiers all had mining experience and helped create the tunnels that were eventually used for that massive explosion.

Towards the end of the tour we went to the Menin Gate in the town of Ypres. Listed on this memorial are 1000’s of names of soldiers that are missing, that is, not known to be buried in a marked grave. Every night of the year at 8pm without exception, the Police close the roads around the Menin Gate and members from the Fire Brigade play “The Last Post”.

Our last stop was at Essex Farm Cemetery. This was a smaller cemetery but did include some interesting things. One being some bunkers that were dug into the sides of a canal. These were used by the medical people to help wounded soldiers. It is also the resting place for the youngest known soldier of WW1. He was a young man from the UK who ran away to join up when he was 14 years old. He lost his life at the age of 15, just so sad.

Essex Farm is where the Canadian Army Doctor and artillery brigade commander Major John McCrae composed his now famous poem “In Flanders Fields”.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

RIP

In a way, it has been rather poignant for me and my family that I did a trip to a WW1 area this week.

The reason being that after 70 years of not knowing, my family finally has confirmation that our uncle – Pte Leslie James Pattle from the 2/22^nd Battalion was on board the Japanese ship the ‘Montevideo Maru’ during WW2. The ship was torpedoed by an American submarine as it was not marked as carrying POW’s. The official list was lost and only recently found and translated into English.

RIP Uncle Les.

Tyne Cot Cemetery - a Commonwealth War Graves Commision Cemetery.

The Australian Memorial at Polygon Wood.

'Hill 60' as you see it today (see below for WW1 photo)

'Hill 60' during WW1 - the whole area looked like this!