Last Friday, four of us went to Belgium for the weekend. Now, Belgium’s always a fine place to visit on account of the fantastic beer culture they have. Add to that the art and architecture of towns such as Bruges, Ghent or Antwerp and… well, it doesn’t really deserve the “boring” tag.
In addition to the beer, though, we had another aim. The Flanders region is rich in First World War history; not surprisingly, since some of the bloodiest (and most unnecessary) battles were fought there. The Ypres salient was a small bulge in the western front around the market town of Ypres, where four years of trench warfare, ordered by distant, theorising generals, gained almost imperceptible territory gains at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. We wanted to learn more.
The most immediate lesson is the contradiction in scale – in the the battle of Passchendaele, this tiny bulge advanced just 8km in three months, at a cost of 325,000 Allied soldiers and 260,000 German soldiers. Walking around the almost totally flat, boggy farmland today, it’s not hard to see how months of shelling and trench-digging could turn the landscape into one huge, barren mire.
With so many key events happening in such a small area, and with so many cemeteries commemorating individuals, battalions or masses of unknown soldiers, you really need a good guide book. Coincidentally, the week before, an entry on my friend Pádraig’s blog inspired me to borrow Lyn Macdonald’s book ‘They Called it Passchendaele’. Combining the author’s historical account with the real memories of war veterans, this makes the perfect companion to the more tourist-based approach of the Holts’ book. There are plenty of museums… the main one in Ypres offers a great multimedia overview, but a surprising gem can be found in the village of Hooge. This museum has a preserved trench system, complete with dripping underground tunnels, and a fine collection of stereoscopic photographs from the western front. Museums sometimes give a cold, removed sense of history, but the Hooge museum illustrates perfectly the great futility of it all.