C'Obs: Fallen on Flanders Fields

Taken by Britain's first ever official War photographer - Ernest Brooks Yorkshire regiment, Broodseynde Ridge 1917
greatwar.co.uk

Easter Sunday was a rather somber affair for us this year. Instead of celebrating the miracle with a big brunch and an egg hunt we got away early in the grey of the morning to go cemetery hunting. It is only 150km between Ghent and Calais but we had decided to wind around Flanders before our 6pm sailing back to Dover. 2014-2018 have a full calender of WWI Centenary events including a huge list of BBC programming, we've just enjoyed watching a series, about a field hospital, called Crimson Fields, so we thought we'd take the opportunity to look at a few of the memorial sites.

Emil Kreiger's brass sculpture of Mourning Soldiers 'on the horizon' of the Langemark cemetery

M picked out the the sites and the route. Our first stop was Langemark and probably the most shocking. It is not the most crowded or large of the cemeteries we were to visit but in some ways the most confronting. This is a cemetery of German soldiers from WWI.

The entrance building to Langemark - looking across the Kameraden Grab to the Mourning Soldiers
The lintel gives a strong impression of entering a tomb.

As you enter through a pink stone portal a large, bordered rectangle lies in front of you. Then you read that it is a mass grave of nearly 25 000 men, the Kameraden Grab (Comrades Grave). I struggled to deal with this number and the plot but around it are large blocks of Basalt with closely typed names of the soliders thought to be interred there. Although 2 British soldiers are listed on stones in the lawn cemetery the remainder are all German. The Belgium locals gathered them and bought them here from across the Flanders battles when the German army was pushed back and no longer able to do so. All those bodies tumbled together, often in pieces. Where descendants have visited, the raised bronze names have been polished.

Many of the bodies in the Mass grave to the right were exhumed from smaller temporary grave sites closer to the battle fields. Each plaque on the lawn has between 3-15 names engraved on them. This memorial site was opened officially in 1932 - how sad that in only a few more years it would all happen again.

Oak Trees - the national tree of Germany, surround the graves. The cross is a
repeated motif. The concrete boxes are German bunkers from WWI

In a separate part of this cemetery lie 3000 Kriegsfreiwilliger (war volunteers) who were all students. They died in the first 1914 Ypres battle as they charged singing Deutschland .. which became the German National Anthem. Goebbels made the most of this in WWII by creating the legend of the strong and noble youth sacrificing themselves for the Fatherland when the Third Reich needed more troops.

M overheard a German tour guide telling his group (in English!) that the King of Belgium refused to commit his troops and withdrew his whole(small) army to safety. This didn't improve his opinion of the country after experiencing the only rude and incompetent driving on the whole trip coming out of Ghent. I have searched through many sources and can't find anything that even hints at this. In fact I have found that King Albert personally led his troops to slow down the Germans in their Schlieffen plan of occupying France quickly so they could concentrate on the slower mobilising Russians. They had planned to take Liege in 2 days but the Belgium army held them for 11 days, giving British and French troops time to get in position. The Queen worked as a front line nurse and the son and heir was allowed to enlist underage and fought on the front line - They all survived.

This building separates the carpark from the cemetery.
It has several screens showing live footage from WWI.

When Langemark was behind the German front line in WWII Hitler visited the site as part of his tour of the area and is said to have visited the Belgian family that had looked after him when he had been wounded by a grenade near the Messines ridge in 1916. Langemark became a legend of German heroes but I do not imagine that it made it any less difficult for family to accept that their fathers and sons would forever lie in enemy territory.
(Our German inspired term for the type of homesickness and people missing we have had is Folkelyern)

The brooding soldier at the Canadian Memorial

The battle grounds around Ypres - first battles of WWI, mid Oct 1914

In two years of fighting the territory won back by the French and English - hardly anything at all.
image from http://www.battlefield-tours.com/Battlefields_map.jpg

Our GPS seemed to think that the address for Tyne Cot cemetery was in a beautifully wooded but otherwise empty spot. On the way we had passed the Passchendaele Memorial Museum so returned there for a look around and for directions to the biggest Commonwealth burial ground in Flanders.

In 1917 more than 400 000 soldiers fell forever into the Flanders mud within 100 days for a few kilometers of German territory. The village of Passchendaele was completely obliterated. They had a model of one of the USA kit houses that were sent over to the town after the war to provide housing for the returning refugees. This kind of charity gave life back to the people who were in the way of the front line. Most were destroyed in WWII.

During the second rebuilding of this place after WWII, trenches from the Great War were found and have since been recreated by archaeologist guided engineers. These trenches and a reconstruction of a British dugout forms part of a Museum that celebrates the lives of the commonwealth allies and also acknowledges the German losses.

Reconstructed British Trenches at Passchendaele

Reconstructed dug out.
Left: tunneling equipment Centre: Pump to take water up to the surface Right: bunks

Huge posters in the Museum - each has a list with all the badges of each division and battalion

WWI artillery display. Not sure about the message - Phallic symbols of strength and power, a potions lab, evil can be pretty too? So many formulae for injury and death.

Left: An art installation by NZ ceramic artist Helen Pollock, arms reaching from the mud infront of a huge photo of what was left of a forest where the first gas attack happened. Right: Memorabilia for 'home'

Tourist route signs and a well fertilized field

We got a map and new directions for Tyne Cot but still managed to get muddled because the map had a tiny N and an arrow to the left of the page, M had assumed N was to the top of the page (normal apparently). By using the rare road sign we were able to correct our assumptions and eventually made it to our destination. The new visitors center outside the cemetery has displays of memorabilia gifted from families and items found in the fields over the years.

As you approach, a calm clipped English voice reads out each name and the information known about that person in a great loop, without stopping during opening hours. Inside a photograph of them is screened if they have one. Breaking the enormous numbers down into these individuals certainly sets the tone for your walk around the graves. So many are engraved 'Known unto God' meaning there was a body there, often with the nationality identified but with no name. On the path down to the cemetery, Petal and M spotted a dud bomb casing that had been found in the recently ploughed field. There is a special task force in the Belgium army whose job it is to travel around the country side collecting these relics that are still being dug up. They have huge warehouses where they are stored until they can be disarmed and recycled as metal scrap. For decades after the wars Belgium children and farmers were losing lives and limbs to these 'treasures'. The bombs didn't know that the war was over.

Inscribed on walls of marble are thousands of names of soldiers whose bodies were never found or identified that gave their lives in the last gasps of the war. The grand Thiepval memorial was full already by March 21 1918 when the Germans launched their last ditch effort to win the war. Eight more months of killing until the stalemate finally pottered to a stop at the November Armistice.

Entrance

The ocean of headstones was overwhelming as an eerie light of a storm on its way glowed

This is the largest Commonwealth cemetery in Europe. Rudyard Kipling, youngest ever winner of the Nobel prize for literature and author of the Just So stories many of us were read in our childhoods, came up with the term 'Known unto God.' He lost his son in the battle of Loos and struggled to accept that he would never know where his remains remained. Check out this website for the full story. http://www.webhistoryofengland.com/?p=163

Top: A huge wall of names Bottom: either side are a circle of Kiwis and a circle of Aussies - so far from home

Found in a soldier's diary by a downsizing granddaughter
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-15667914

Driving on towards France, the countryside is littered with grave sites, all looked after by the locals whose great grandparent's property and communities were the collateral damage. The sad horror of relentless white crosses and acres of head stones caused by nationalistic idiocy and power given by birth rather than talent would be a terrible burden to live with, yet these people mow and clean to keep the reminder sparkling
'Lest we Forget'. Yet only 21yrs after the Treaty of Versailles, Europe was flattened again.

http://changipowart.com/archives/1203 artist unknown Lancashire gunners hauling an 18lber through the flanders mud.

Elections are due soon here in the UK and there are at least two political groups whose advertising literature gave me the creeps - The British National Party and UKIP have put brochures through my letterbox that are full of protectionist, nationalistic fervor and scapegoating that gives me a dose of dejavu for pre-WWII history texts. Australia continues to treat refugees and asylum seekers as an unwelcome plague instead of developing social processes to help us and them cope with assimilation and psychological recovery. Let's hope that the vast majority of people will voice their impatience with this fear mongering and stand up for humanity's best solution, compassion.

All it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.
Attributed to Irish philosopher, Edmund Burke 1729-97