#belbium

We'd booked our tour with Quasimodo, a tour group recommended by Rick Steves. It's a good service, and we highly recommend it. They offered a complimentary pickup from our Airbnb. We were pleasantly surprised by their generosity, but it turned out they were being more generous than they realized. In other words, they hadn't thought to check how far away from the city center we were actually staying. We were picked up by one of two vans that were splitting the task of collecting the day's tour group, and we got some friendly ribbing for making our van a bit more than fashionably late to the rendezvous.

After an hour's bus ride south, we'd made it to the area of Ypres, near the French border. (It’s pronounced “ee-per,” though the British and American soldiers during WWI often called it “wiper.”) The city's actual Belgian name is Ieper, but Americans use the French spelling---just like we do with Bruges, which the locals prefer to spell Brugge.

Before we dove into the battlegrounds of Ypers, we were given an enlightening introduction to why the area was so heavily fought over during WWI. I'll try to keep it succinct.

We need to start with the domino line of treaties that turned an isolated act of terrorism into a global war of unprecedented scale and lethality.

After the assassination of Austrian heir presumptive Franz Ferdinand by a group of Serbian radicals, Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia. Serbia was in a defensive alliance with Russia, so Russia declared war against Austria-Hungary in support of Germany. Germany was in a defensive alliance with Austria-Hungary, so Germany was also at war with Serbia and Russia.

France wasn't allied with Serbia, but it was allied with Russia, so it was compelled to join the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary too. The UK was also allied with Russia and France, but it declined to enter the war at that time.

Germany decided to launch a preemptive invasion of France. The border between Germany and France was already heavily fortified, so Germany decided to launch a surprise attack against France's northern border by moving through Belgium. Belgium refused to allow this, so Germany invaded Belgium by force. Belgium was also allied with the UK, so the UK finally enters the war in defense of Belgium.

Now, since the UK is an island, it needed a safe staging area to organize its troops and supplies on the continent. They chose a spot just 5 miles west of Ypres. As long as the Allies controlled Ypres, they could defend the British supply base from German attacks. If the Germans captured Ypres, however, there would be nothing in the way of them cutting off British supply lines and leaving the British troops stranded, unfed, and unarmed.

It's no surprise, then, that Ypres and the surrounding countryside of Flanders became one of the most brutal arenas of the western front. The German forces had the city surrounded on three sides, creating a bulge of Allied territory known as the Ypres Salient. There were five distinct Battles of Ypres over the four years of the war. Together, they resulted in over a million casualties, over a million displaced Belgian citizens, and the total devastation of Ypres.

It's a relatively small area, but it's densely packed with powerful monuments and cemeteries.

Our first stop was the Langemark German cemetery. Nearly 45,000 German soldiers (less than half of whom are identified) are buried in a collection of named and mass graves, and a separate section holds the bodies of 3,000 Belgian students who were killed during the First Battle of Ypres.

The cemetery is located on the site of a battlefield, and the original German bunkers and front line have been preserved in one corner. 

Our next stop was a monument to the Canadian soldiers who died in one of the first poison gas attacks by the Germans. It happened in April 1915, during the Second Battle of Ypres. My understanding had always been that the Germans were the first to use poison gas during WWI, and the effects were so terrible that the use of chemical weapons was banned after the war was over. All of that is true, but the full story is a bit more nuanced.

The use of chemical weapons had already been banned by international treaty before WWI, and it was the French who first violated it. Almost immediately after the fighting started in the summer of 1914, French soldiers started using tear gas in their assaults on German positions. It wasn't until the following April that the Germans upped the ante with deadly chlorine gas.

Because tear gas and other non-lethal irritant gasses were already being used, the Allied soldiers had gas masks to protect them. But the masks didn't protect against this new weapon. The first victims, who didn't seem to have their own monument at the site, were actually African soldiers that had been conscripted from French colonies. They initially mistook it for a smokescreen, but they soon realized their mistake. The Allied front line collapsed as soldiers retreated in terror.

It was then that the 1st Canadian Division (18,000 men) stepped up and held the line against the coming German assault. The attack never came---the German soldiers were just as scared of the gas as the Allies were---but the Canadians held firm even as 2,000 of their brethren fell to this new and horrifying weapon.

This monument honors those soldiers. It was built from Canadian granite and sits in a circle of Canadian soil.

From that point on, both the Allies and the Central Powers used lethal gas without reservation. As better and better gas masks were invented to protect against them, deadlier and deadlier gases were also invented. The Allies developed a gas called phosgene. It was colorless, virtually odorless among the smells of a battlefield, and its deadly effects didn't manifest until hours after exposure---long after the window for treatment had passed. The Germans started using phosgene, too, and it was responsible for the vast majority of poison gas deaths during WWI.

The Germans also developed a variant of chlorine gas that came to be known as "mustard gas" because of its acrid smell and yellowish color. Mustard gas is the most famous gas from WWI, but it wasn't nearly as deadly as phosgene. It could kill, but mainly it was used as a demoralizing weapon. Exposure to mustard gas caused painful burns and blisters, sickness, and difficulty breathing. Soldiers unfortunate enough to receive a fatal dose could spend weeks suffering before they died.

And mustard gas didn't dissipate after it was released. It would settle on the ground where it could continue to affect people for weeks or even months afterwards. If you were a WWI soldier, how would you feel about being ordered to charge through a muddy field covered in potentially still-active mustard gas?

Of course, the mustard gas eventually did dissipate, but not all of the shells, casings, and barbed wire. Our next stop was a small farm, where we got a first-hand look at the ongoing legacy of the Battles of Ypres.

During WWI, over one billion explosive artillery shells were fired in Belgium alone. One in three were duds that failed to explode upon landing, leaving hundreds of millions of potential bombs scattered throughout the countryside. Most of them have yet to be found, and even a hundred years later, they can still detonate with deadly results.

The Flemish countryside is largely dedicated to farmland, and each year, the plowing season is referred to as the "iron harvest" with somewhat grim irony. Mostly, the stuff that gets dug up is worthless barbed wire or potentially collectable shell casings. But often enough, what comes out of the ground is an unexploded artillery shell.

The Belgian government has a dedicated task force to just for disposing of these shells, and it can be a harrowing job. Around 5-10% of all the shells fired around Ypres were filled with poison gas instead of explosives, and it's not always possible to tell which one is which. And you don't want to guess wrong.

But despite the presence of this task force and the fact that trying to disarm a shell yourself is not only incredibly dangerous but very illegal, a lot of farmers still do it. A defused WWI shell can go for a lot of money in the souvenir market, and some farmers feel entitled to the payout. After all, if a shell goes off and damages their tractor while they're tilling their field, there's no compensation from anyone---they have to pay for the damages out of pocket.

It's not surprising, then, that some Belgians have come to resent their larger neighbors of Britain, France, and Germany, feeling like they've been stuck with the bill for cleaning up a mess they had no say in creating.

Our next stop was the beautifully somber Tyne Cot Cemetery. It is located on the site of a major German fortification that was captured by Australian forces during the Third Battle of Ypres in the fall of 1917. Dedicated to the British and Commonwealth forces who died in the Ypres Salient, it is the largest Commonwealth military cemetery in the world.

As at Langemark, the original German fortifications were kept in place, with the central bunker used as the foundation for the cemetery's central monument.

While it doesn't have the sprawling grandeur of the American Cemetery in Normandy, there are actually more soldiers buried in Tyne Cot---11,965 compared to 9,388.

But for me, at least, the most powerful element of the cemetery is its Memorial to the Missing. Framing the back of the cemetery is a long semi-circular wall, and on that wall are inscribed the names of nearly 35,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the Ypres Salient and whose bodies were never identified.

The Third Battle of Ypres is also known as the Battle of Passchendaele. Essentially, the British wanted to push the front line about five miles eastward and capture an area of German-occupied high ground around the Flemish village of Passchendaele, just down the road from Tyne Cot.

The British generals anticipated that the battle could be won in 72 hours. The battle was won, but it took over three months and 100,000 deaths.

At least the way our guide explained it, much of the blame for the battle's cost can be laid at the feet of the generals, who planned the operation weeks in advance in a far-away city without any regard or flexibility for changing situations on the ground.

For two weeks before the assault, the British artillery fired millions of explosive shells into the German lines. They did a fair amount of damage to the German forces, but it also completely wrecked the local drainage systems. Belgium is part of the Lowlands; without proper drainage systems, the land would be a swamp.

And that's exactly what it turned into.

When the planned day of the attack finally came, the British soldiers didn't face the quick sprint against a softened enemy that they'd been promised. Instead, they faced a slow, muddy slog into a line of 3,000 fortified German machine gunners. Of the hundred-thousand soldiers who died in the battle, about a third of them are believed to have drowned in the mud after being wounded.

After three hellish months of this, the British finally managed to take those five miles of land back from the Germans. They held it for about three months before the Germans retook it in a counterattack.

It sounds more like a story from Vietnam than from the Great War, but in a lot of ways, the two wars were similar. Unable to achieve any lasting, concrete victories in battle, the generals and politicians began to define success in terms of kill ratios. It didn't really matter how many boys died in the mud, or even whether their deaths accomplished anything, as long as even more boys on the other side died, too. It was a gory, shameful race to the bottom.

Over the course of the battle, the village of Passchendaele changed hands five times. It was so devastated by artillery that by the end of the war, it basically didn't exist anymore. Not a single building was standing, and not a single foundation intact. The entire village had to be cleared out and rebuilt from the dirt up. Even today, sinkholes occasionally appear in the village overnight, revealing buried trenches and tunnels that had been dug during the war.

It was getting close to lunchtime, but first we made a quick stop at the nearby Polygon Wood. It was an artificial hill that the generals on both sides considered a perfect spot for artillery. Both sides were determined to have it---or at least to deny it to their enemy. The Germans ended up holding it for most of the war, for whatever good it did them. The titular woods were quickly destroyed by artillery fire, and the trees standing there now were planted after the war.

As we left, we couldn't help but be cheered by a friendly donkey in the yard of a neighboring farm.

Moving onward, we stopped for lunch at the Hooge Crater Museum. The crater is certainly quite large, but the name actually comes from the adjacent village of Hooge. I can't tell you what the proper way to pronounce it is, but I do know it isn't even remotely how an American would or could pronounce it.

Before going into the museum, we enjoyed some tasty if austere open-faced sandwiches, as well as a delicious glass of St. Bernardus Prior 8 dubbel ale straight from the tap. Covering every wall of the restaurant were decorated shell casings of various calibers---there was no shortage of material to work with in the area.

After lunch, we took a quick tour through the Hooge Crater Museum. It was an interesting if somewhat overwhelming experience. Like many of the WWII museums we visited in Normandy, it was less focused on teaching the context of the war and more focused on immersing people in the small details. Display case after crammed display case was filled with artifacts like uniforms, weapons, gas masks, and spent ammunition recovered from the soil over the years.

There was also a collection of reproduced photos taken during the fighting around Ypres.

Many were chilling, to say the least.

In the field behind the museum, we got to see and walk through a set of recreated trenches. And we learned that there was a lot more to trench design than simply digging out lines in the earth.

Because the water table around Ypres is so shallow, water was a constant problem even when it wasn't raining. It would seep up from the ground, turning the bottom of the trenches into muddy bogs. Less than a day of standing in this muck was enough to risk a case of trench foot, and a normal rotation in the trenches was over two weeks. For sixteen days, a soldier would be given a single uniform---no chance to change or shower until they rotated back from their post.

The filthy conditions also fostered other diseases like typhus and trench fever, a brutally painful lice-born disease that afflicted  J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and A. A. Milne during their service on the front. The trenches may have also fostered the outbreak of the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed over 50 million people around the world, far more than were killed by the war itself.

Both sides had plenty of motivation to improve the design of their trenches to make them less miserable and unhealthy. The Germans, who mainly occupied areas that were slightly higher and less wet, were able to get away with simply lining the trenches with plank floors and wicker walls. The British, on the other hand, reinforced their trench walls with corrugated iron and floored them with an ingeniously simple bit of engineering called the "A-frame."

Imagine a picnic table or sawhorse with a cross-section like a flat-topped letter A. There's the top, the legs that stick out at an angle, and horizontal support bars reinforcing each pair of legs. Now, flip that imaginary table or sawhorse upside-down and imagine a set of planks laid down over the horizontal support bars to create a sort of catwalk with a hollow space underneath it.

That's the A-frame.  The water seeping up from the ground would pool up underneath the suspended floorboards, from which it could be pumped out as needed. Of course, miles of trenches filled with stagnant water still isn't the healthiest environment even when you aren't standing in it, but it was a massive improvement over the alternative that no-doubt saved countless lives from sickness, amputation, and death.

Leaving Hooge, we passed by an intersection that the British dubbed Hellfire Corner. It was an essential crossroads that the British forces had no alternative but to use. The Germans were able to lay in on it immediately, and Hellfire Corner became the deadliest and most-bombarded piece of land in the entire Ypres Salient.

Our next stop was the Hill 60 Battlefield Memorial. The name immediately brought back my earlier thoughts about the echoes between WWI and the Vietnam War, in which numerically named hills also played an infamous role.

Like virtually every other significant battlefield, Hill 60 was a slightly elevated piece of land compared to its surroundings. This meant that the ground was marginally drier and that any artillery placed there would be marginally more effective. And that meant that the generals on both sides were willing to spill as much blood as it took to either take it for themselves or render it useless to the other side.

Hill 60 was part of a larger range of elevated ground that came to be called the Messines Ridge after a nearby village. Messines was an especially tantalizing target to the Allies, but it was also especially well-fortified by the Germans. So, as a prelude to the Third Battle of Ypres---the muddy, bloody battle we'd learned about at Tyne Cot---the British decided to blow the whole thing up.

What resulted was one of the most intense tunneling and mining operations of the entire war.

Over the course of five months, British, Canadian, and ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand, forces dug miles of tunnels and planted hundreds of tons of explosives under German fortified positions. Tunneling and counter-tunneling had become standard practice by this point, and when the German and Allied tunnels crossed paths, the result was a nightmarish fight---often hand-to-hand and in pitch darkness. And that was on top of the constant risk of cave-ins that came with the job of tunneling through sopping wet mud and clay. Our guide specifically and emphatically recommended the novel Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks for a look at what it was like to be a British tunneler during WWI.

So many British and German dead were left in the tunnels that Hill 60 is officially designated as a war grave.

Somehow, though, the Allied forces ultimately managed to plant the mines successfully. And in the predawn morning of June 16, 1917, the Allies detonated them. In an instant, over ten-thousand German soldiers were killed, and Hill 60 was transformed into a crater. The explosion could be heard from hundreds of miles away, and it remains one of the largest non-nuclear detonations of all time.

Hours before the detonation, a British general joked to a group of journalists that regardless of whether or not the operation ended up changing history, it would most certainly change geography.

Hill 60 has been left in state since the end of the war, except for when it had to be fought over again during WWII. The ground is so wrinkled and pocked by the explosions that much of the path is on elevated walkways.

After crossing the rim of the crater, we saw the remains of a concrete pillbox that had been built by the Germans before the detonation. After being captured by Australian forces, they had to modify it so that the gun holes were facing the German lines.

As I mentioned above, this Battle of Messines was meant to distract and disorient the German forces as a prelude to launching the Third Battle of Ypres against German fortifications around Passchendaele a few miles to the northeast. But due to political bickering, the battle was delayed for seven weeks, largely squandering any advantage they had gained while the Germans regrouped.

Less than a year later, the Germans recaptured Messines during the Fourth Battle of Ypres.

Finally, it was time to visit the city of Ypres itself, the city whose tactical position was the reason for all of this fighting. Approaching the city from the east, the first thing you see is a moat, an old city wall, and the massive Menin Gate memorial.

Like the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing, the Menin Gate is dedicated to the missing British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the Ypres Salient and whose remains were never identified. The Menin Gate was originally meant to hold the names of all the British missing dead, but they ran out of room after carving the first 55,000 names.

The names are organized by division. And since the divisions of the British army were largely organized around the cities and counties that the soldiers came from, the memorial also gave us an indication of where each of the named soldiers came from. Having just been to so many of these places made it all the more powerful to the two us.

After touring the Menin Gate, we had about a half hour to wander the city before regrouping at the bus. Jessica and I made our way down the cobbled high street and soon found ourselves in the stunning market square.

The giant stone building that looks like a Gothic cathedral is actually the Ypres Cloth Hall, the city's medieval merchant hall and one of the largest commercial buildings in all of Europe. While most medieval cities were centered around castles and cathedrals, Flemish cities were centered around their market halls.

But as I mentioned earlier, Ypres was totally destroyed during the war. So how is it still standing now? The answer is as simple as it is incredible: After the war, the city was rebuilt, brick by brick. The reconstruction was extraordinarily expensive, and the money came from the reparations that Germany had been ordered to pay in the Treaty of Versailles. I don't know if rebuilding Ypres was worth instigating WWII, but they did a truly stunning job.

For reference, this is what the market square looked liked immediately after the war:

As I edit this now in the summer of 2019, the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris stands tragically gutted by a fire that tore through it on April 15. Watching the videos of the spire collapsing while smoke poured from shattered stained-glass windows made my stomach wrench. But as I think back to the wonder of Ypres, I feel a tremendous sense of peace and reassurance. As good as humans are at destroying things---either by choice or by negligence---we are also fantastically good at putting them back together again when we're determined to.

Our last stop of the day was at the Essex Farm Cemetery. It was small and peaceful compared to the larger cemeteries and monuments we'd seen earlier in the day---one of many that dot the countryside around Ypres.

During the war, Essex Farm was used as an aid station. Our guide told us about how the shortages of antiseptic iodine---true antibiotics wouldn't be invented until WWII---were so severe that nurses resorted to using boiled garlic water as the best alternative at hand.

At the same time, the brutality of the war also spurred tremendous advances in medical technology. Blood transfusions, prostheses, and cosmetic surgery all existed before the war, but the war provided an explosion of case studies and opportunities for innovation.

Essex Farm also holds the grave of the youngest known military casualty of the war.

Like many boys, Valentine Strudwick lied about his age so that he could join the army. And those many boys, the adult recruiters looked the other way and let him do it. He was fourteen years old. And almost a year later to the day, he was shot and killed in Flanders.

Essex Farm is also the site where John McCrae, a Canadian medical doctor and a lieutenant colonel, composed the famous poem In Flanders Fields. McCrae was there during the Second Battle of Ypres when the German army launched poison gas into the steadfast Canadian line. McCrae saw the effects of the gas firsthand, not to mention the more conventional horrors wrought by bullets and bayonets.

One of the boys who died was Alexis Helmer, a young officer with whom McCrae had become close friends. Helmer had stepped out his trench to go on patrol one morning when he was hit by an explosive artillery shell. What was left of him was bundled up in an army blanket and buried. McCrae lead the service himself.

Shortly thereafter, McCrae composed one of the most famous wartime poems in the history of the English language:

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.