The same company ran the tours I took this day and the next two. I highly recommend Brussels City Tours. To get to the tour office from my flat, I walked a short distance, a short distance that took me straight through the Grand-Place de Bruxelles. The buildings in this square stun you with their opulence, two of which serve as the Town Hall and the King’s House, no housing the brussels City Museum. I love the fact that I got to see all this every day since I did not end up touring the city of Brussels as I had originally planned.
I had a brief moment of panic when I thought that I could not find the tour office but thankfully I made it with plenty of time. AFter I arrived and presented my voucher, one of the workers gave me a colored wristband and instructed me to wait outside until my guide called for that color band. Plenty of other people waited outside but I had difficulty locating anyone else on the same tour for several minutes. We ended up with a small but dedicated group including a fantastic guide and his two teenage sons who came along with us.
We had to walk a little ways to get to the bus but once there we settled in for a fairly short ride to our first stop, Vladslo German War Cemetery, one of four German World War I cemeteries in Belgium. Although originally the German soldiers were buried where they fell, this resulted in over a hundred smaller cemeteries dotted across the Belgian countryside. Obviously, many Belgians did not appreciate having these cemeteries practically in their backyard so the two governments came to an agreement with Belgium ceding territory for four concentrated cemeteries and Germany agreeing to disinter and reinter the bodies from the other cemeteries.
Vladslo Cemetery holds just over 25,000 soldiers in a relatively small area of land, surrounded by towering trees planted intentionally to hearken back to old Germanic traditions in which trees represented the connection between earth and sky. Gothic crosses dot the cemetery between stone slabs which each bear the names, ranks, and dates of death for 20 soldiers, installed after the consolidation of the cemeteries. Some original headstones remain at the rear of the cemetery near the entrance.
At the front of the cemetery, two stone statues draw the visitor’s attention, the Grieving Parents. Renown German sculptor Kathe Kollwitz, created these statues as a true act of grief for her son, Peter, who lies buried directly in front of these statues. Ultimately, her story ended with a grief unresolved as she faced professional exile and personal threat with the rise of Hitler and his Nazi party who did not share her beliefs in pacifism and desire to mourn the tragic losses of young German lives in the First World War. These ideas did not jive with the propaganda of injured parties in search of revenge that Hitler wished to propagate. She died a mere fortnight before the end of the war having had to flee her home, endure the death of her husband to illness and a grandson, also named Peter, to the battlefield, and suffer the overwhelming fear that the Gestapo would arrest her and send her to a concentration camp.
After the stop at the cemetery, we drove past some reconstructed Belgian trenches, built up with sandbags rather than dug into the low lying ground. By this time, I had started conversing with a lovely Canadian woman, also a teacher. We both prepared to get out so we could take pictures but the bus did not stop.
A few minutes later, we did stop at the Yorkshire trench, a reconstructed British trench, the more well-known type of trench dug into the sea-level ground. Although the small that assaulted our noses when we left the bus likely originated from some agricultural entity nearby, it enhanced our sensory experience of the trenches, giving us a small glimpse into the daily experience of the men who made those underground damp trenches subject to frequent flooding, their war time homes.
The gnats in the area made us glad to reboard the bus and head to the next stop, although quite a few of them snuck on to journey with us for a while. A few got off with us at the next stop, the Canadian memorial. The Belgian government established the memorial and ceded the land to Canada to honor the men who died there in the first recorded successful chemical attack. A tall monument stands in the center with the figure of a soldier from the chest up gazing down in solemn remembrance.
Circling the base, different city names lie etched in front of arrows which point in the direction of other nearby tragic battles that took place in and around the named cities. Most strikingly, the memorial itself rises from nondescript farmland and is immediately surrounded by eruptions of color in a tightly packed garden. Upon reflection, I realize that so many of these First World War memorials embed themselves in riotous color, at least in the summer like when I visited.
Before we visited our next stop, we paused in the town of Ypres for lunch, provided by the tour. This one stop provided the only low point of this tour. Not only did I end up isolated with no one sitting near me but the restaurant also did not provide any water along with the meal. (I foolishly forgot my water bottle back in the flat.) You could buy a tiny bottle at the bar for an exorbitant three euros except if you had just a credit card. You had to reach a minimum charge which I could not justify just for a tiny couple bottles of water. Also, the meal itself barely deserved the appellation.
We did not have to get back on the bus for the next stop. Instead, we walked a short distance to the In Flanders Field Museum. This museum told the story of the First World War through the lens of the Ypres Salient, appropriate for the location of the museum. This small geographic territory around the equally small Belgian town endured years of terrible battle over a few square miles of land. Thousands of people died and people still question what they died for.
This museum attempted a bit of interactivity with mildly customizable wristbands designed as poppies. I think the museum could have done without this bit because the rest of the displays brilliantly tell the story through carefully crafted text and intricately placed primary artifacts. Although I tend to move faster than the average in most museums I soaked up everything I could in this one, leaving the slimmest margin to peruse the gift shop for souvenirs. Although I ended up confining myself to my typical souvenirs, I briefly considered purchasing a 15 euro museum branded umbrella because it had begun raining, again.
The bus came to pick us up from the entrance of the museum so we enjoyed its comfort while we continued on to Essex Farm Cemetery. The rain gradually diminished, increasing my gratefulness that I refrained from the umbrella purchase. Here at Essex Farm Cemetery, then an Advanced Dressing Station, Scottish doctor John McCrae wrote the poem “In Flanders Field” in May 1915. Here I again noticed the vibrant flowers planted around the headstones, growing to spite the face of death with their vitality.
From there, we made our next to last stop before returning to Ypres, at Tyne Cot Cemetery, the largest cemetery for Commonwealth forces anywhere in the world for any war. Located near Passchendaele, this cemetery provides the resting place for 11,965 soldiers from the entirety of the then British Empire. Soldiers from both Newfoundland and New Zealand lie buried here. In addition to meticulously arranged headstones, thriving flowers and imposing marble memorials such as the Memorial to the Missing that rises up from the center, the cemetery preserves authentic military relics such as pillboxes, also known as fortified bunkers used by the Germans in the horrific Battle of Passchendaele, fought here in 1917. Many of the men buried here were collected by specialized “Exhumation Companies” who recovered almost 12,000 bodies from the surrounding fields. The stunning beauty of the site took your breath away, especially with the stark juxtaposition of the historical reality.
We last visited Hill 60, an artificial hill created during the construction of the nearby railway in the 1850s and used as a defensive point during the First World War as those meters of land passed between opposing hands in various battles of the Ypres Salient. At one point, the owner of the land donated it to the Imperial War Graves Commission (now known as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission) to ensure its preservation.
Preserved along with Hill 60, the Crater of the Caterpillar Mine testifies to one of the most catastrophic tunneling and mining campaign resulted in over 10,000 German casualties when 20 mines detonated simultaneously at 3:10 in the morning of June 7, 1917. The near perfect symmetry of the crater stands in stark contrast to the chaos that created it.
Before the last item on the itinerary, Last Post, we had about an hour in the city to shop and eat supper.
Last Post occurs at the Menin Gate. Both the Gate (built on a small bridge) and the ceremony hold immense historical significance. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission built the bridge as a memorial to the 54,000 Commonwealth dead who have no known burial place. Their names adorn the walls of the gate from floor to ceiling. Unveiled in 1927, the Gate also hosts the daily Last Post ceremony, an act of gratefulness towards those who fought for Belgium’s freedom. This ceremony has taken place every, single night at 8 since the unveiling of the Gate except during German occupation during the Second World War. The town held the ceremony again the very evening that Polish forces liberated the Gate even though fighting continued in other areas of the city and its suburbs. I watched in total silence with hundreds of others as the buglers played and as selected visitors laid wreaths. Even though the late hour of the Last Post ceremony meant a long day, I consider this tour one of the best I have ever taken.