In Flanders Fields the Poppies Grow....

Well morning all,
In Gosnay and trying, as usual, to get caught up before another day on the Western Front. THe first three days have been great. Lot's to see and things have gotten much more "user friendly" since my early days tromping the Western Front.

The first day was a relatively short one. We headed up to Dixsimunde to visit the Trench of Death. This was up at the far northern portion of the front and was held by the Belgians. Truly miserable existence. Right along the canal and flooded. A large section of the trench has been preserved as well as one of the redoubts. The museum is very good as it discusses an often overlooked part of the war. Saving Belgium was why the Allies went to war after all.

From there it was down to the Flanders Fields museum which has undergone a huge improvement. English text, lots of super artifacts and a full scale reproduction of a British underground bunker that is frankly mindblowing. Not to be missed. We squeezed in a few cemeteries as well-a handful of more than a 1,000 British cemeteries on the Western Front.

A good nights sleep and then it was off to Polygon Wood where we got to poke around some old British, German bunkers and trenches and I got attacked by a bee. He won that offensive and I've been itching ever since. It was a great day of battlefield tromping and muddy boots. "Harvested" my usual assortment of rusty bits, including most poignantly of all, a British Army fork. Joan is going to be cleaning it up to see if we can get a service number. Also crawled all over Messines Ridge, Passchendale and the Irish monument. All were super and the view from some of the spots was amazing. No surprise that Passchandaele was special for me with the Canadian Connection, but the other most impressing sight was the Bayernwald. It is a large section of German trenches that was excavated recently by some local archeologists and restored. They did the trenches right-just as they should have been done, not the usual concrete. There are lots of maps and text panels that explain why the sight was so important as well. Very interesting as Hitler was there at the BUnker for a time so there is another connection. Must admit, that given the scale of the death and destruction on the Western Front I wonder again how the Allies missed that little Bavarian SOB. Finished up the evening with the Last Post Ceremony at the Menin Gate. For those of you who don't know, every evening since the armistice (with the exception of the years of German occupation) the Ypres fire brigade has stood underneath the Menin Gate, where the names of 54,000 MIAs are recorded, at 8:00 P.M. to blow "Last Post." Believe me, even after the passage of so much time, if you have dry eyes during the ceremony your heart is made of Stone.

The next day started in Ypres where Steph joined up with us. We visited the Western Front museum, which is really great. Lot's of computer graphics and "effects," which are designed to tug at your emotions rather than "stuff" but for all that it does a great day of conveying the horror of the whole experience. Most interesting is that each person who enters is given the name of someone who fought and at different stations you can see what happened to him or her. It does a most effective job of giving the mass numbers a face. After the museum it was on to more bunker busing-Don would love all the concrete we found. Hill 60 and 62, Sanctuary Wood museum and trenches, Vancouver Corner and the site of the first use of gas and Langemark Cemetery, where the remains of some 40,000plus Germans are buried, most of them unknown. For those of you who don't know, in 1915 at Langemark some 3,000 German students charged into the mouth of British machine guns singing, according to legend, Deutschland Uber Alles. Very moving, particularly when you see the ages.

Then it was on to Yorkshire Trench, another recent discovery that has been restored by the battlefield archeologists. This time British. It was found in the middle of an industrial park and it was a little surreal standing in a perfectly preserved trench while office workers were going to and frow. We tried to see the Bremen Redoubt, but sadly the owners decided that a pit in the ground was of more historical worth than one of the largest surviving underground German bunkers on the Western Front and all that is left now is a BIG hole. The lady at the brick factory said they just finished carting the rest of it away two months ago. We finished up the day at the bunker where John McRae wrote in Flander's fields. It's been a little overwhelming, but great. Today it is off to Cambrai and Arras and this evening, I hope, pictures for the blog.

More later.
Chris
Oh yeah, How Bout them SOX!