#myvikingstory

After an intense 8 hours yesterday, today we’re back for more World War 1 history, this time on the group tour arranged by Viking, described below.

Incredibly, we had a private driver AND tour guide today, since we were the only Viking guests from the Magni (our ship) who’d booked the Bruges pre-extension. Kudos to Viking for not cancelling it. I imagine it has been an expensive few days for them, running a full slate of tours for just 2 people, but for us it has been unforgettable.

Today, because we were the entire “group”, our guide Marshall was happy to replace the small American Cemetery (not relevant to us) with visits to Hill 62, Hill 60/Sanctuary Wood, the Brooding Soldier Monument, and Crest Farm, all sites important to the 5 Battalions of Canadians who fought in Flanders.

But first, a quick photo op at a WWII memorial: the Canada Bridge.

Then on to our Western Front itinerary. First of all, we learned that “Western Front” was the German term for the area of Flanders and France in which the war was being waged (as distinct from the Eastern Front with Russia). Next we learned that all the fighting took place in Flanders, which is Belgium’s Flemish area, distinct from Walloonia, the French region.

Stop #1: Hill 62 (named for the number of feet above sea level it is on a topographical map – something new we learned!)

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Stop #2: Hill 60, which was an artificial hill created by railway construction in 1853. Today’s landscape is as it was during World War I, except that during the war all the trees were gone; as at Vimy Ridge, everything growing here now was planted after World War I.

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The newly planted elm trees here have cages around them with blue or red tops. The blue tops represent the location of the British front line. The red tops represent the location of the German front line.

It’s really easy to see how close the two lines were. At one point the two front lines were only about 100 steps apart.

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There were battles here for over three years, and the hill changed hands at least 7 times, with the Canadians involved in its final capture by the Allies.

Over that time trenches were dug in which the troops lived and from where they fought. Below those trenches was a network of tunnels, often containing mines laid by the opposite side, which could be detonated to wreak devastation in the tunnels and bunkers.

The Allied mines were buried in tunnels completed by the Australians, but begun by the Canadians. There is a monument to the Australian forces located at Hill 60 that bears bullet holes from the second world war.

This is one of the sites where the Germans first used gas warfare, and that in combination with the intensive mine detonation here between 1915 and 1917, means that there are still tens of thousands of soldiers buried beneath Hill 60. Over one three week period alone there were 3000 British casualties and 2000 German casualties here.

When 25 mines were simultaneously detonated here to stop the Germans’ advance under the direction of General Haig it was the largest man-made explosion to that date. The giant crator called Caterpillar was created in an area with a dense concentration of bunkers, all of which were destroyed when the mine went off. Because the water table is high here (the trenches must have been miserable), the crater has partially filled with water.

Six of the 25 mines did not explode. In 1955, lightning hit a tree in the area and the old mine underneath it exploded, creating a huge new crater. The rest of the unexploded mines are assumed to have deteriorated, since the cans holding the Ammonal explosive should now have rusted through; once Ammonal gets wet it is no longer explosive – everyone hopes.

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Stop # 3: Essex Farm. This is where Dr. John McCrea arrived, on the day of the German gas attack, as the only doctor assigned to a battalion of up to 1200 men. On that same day, his close friend in that battalion was killed in action. It was after burying him that MacRae wrote the famous poem In Flanders Fields, which our guide read to us while we stood beside the remains of the field hospital.

The field hospitals of World War I practiced triage, a term for 3-level assessment that may already have come into use during Napoleonic times. There were 3 categories of treatment options: those soldiers only slightly injured who could be redeployed to the front; those with a “blighty” injury who would be sent home, and those so severely wounded that the only thing that could be done was to ease their pain with morphine and allow them to die. Although this sounds cruel, have to remember that this was pre-penicillin, and pre-antibiotics, and most soldiers with severe wounds would die of infection.

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There is a small cemetery at Essex Farm as well,which was common near a field hospital, since those who died needed to be buried quickly.

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Stop #4: The Brooding Soldier monument.

On the 22nd of April 1915, the Germans used chlorine gas against the French troops positioned not far down the front line from the Canadians, and the French retreated. Two days later, on April 24, 1915, the Canadian troops – who had seen the devastation of their French allies – were also gassed, but did not retreat.

While the monument is incredibly moving, our guide explained that historians will notice an “error”: the soldier wears a helmet which did not exist in 1915. That’s because this monument was created as a scale model for an entry into the contest to design the Vimy Ridge Memorial. It came in second place, and was instead used here.

Stop #5: Passendale (Flemish spelling)/Crest Farm / Canada Gate, where 14 days of fighting resulted in 16000 Canadian casualties.

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Stop #6: Tyne Cot Cemetery with its 12,000 headstones and 35,000 engraved names of the missing or unknown dead Commonwealth soldiers.

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Stop #7: Lunch in Ieper/Ypres.

Stop #8: After our wonderful lunch, we headed in to the Flanders Museum. I was really impressed by the video reenactments of individual soldiers and personnel on both sides of the conflict reading from their actual wartime journals and letters, but beyond that Ted and I both felt that the museum was too dark and too labyrinthine. We got SO much more from our tour guides.

Stop #9: Ieper/Ypres Cathedral, which was destroyed during the war, along with the entire town, but reconstructed over a span of just 8 years.

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Stop #10: Return to Menin Gate in daylight.

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And so, leaving the Menin Gate, we ended our second day in Flanders Fields, never again to be quite the same as we were before visiting Belgium.