In Flanders Fields, the Poppies Blow -- Ieper, Belgium

I’m aware I have yet to write about Oxford, but this weekend was just... one of those weekends and I have to write about it now. Meanwhile, I’m listening to the 5^th Season of Doctor Who soundtrack and it just makes me want to go on more adventures.

Anyway, this past weekend I went to Ieper, Belgium with my WWI/WWII class, on a field trip. (Yes, you wish your field trips were this awesome.) We got up at the crack of dawn to leave Harrington Gardens for a 9:30-ish ferry across the English Channel to Calais, France, where we took a bus into the Belgian countryside. We checked into our little hostel on the edge of the city and from there... it began.

The reason for going to Belgium in this class was to see Flanders Fields, where a great deal of WWI was fought between 1915 and 1918. And by a great deal, I mean most. Ieper was a town that happened to be on the edge of the farmland that was used as the battlefield, and was utterly demolished by bombs and shells. Completely and utterly flattened, without even a tree left standing. The city was rebuilt, brick-by-brick, by way of German money, years and years after both world wars had ended, but it was eventually re-built to it’s former beauty.

And what a beauty it is.

We went into a museum dedicated to the battles of WWI, where we followed along the chaotic footsteps of the Great War. It had recreation trenches, fake bombs exploding, and there’s one room where the floor lights up, and you’re standing just inches above body parts, barbed wire, mud and poisonous gas. All fake, of course, but I jumped when I saw a hand poking out at me. It was a beautiful and sobering museum, and my entire class wandered it’s halls in a sort of awed silence at the photos and the stories we were witnessing.

Afterwards, we went to the Menin Gate, which is their Korean Wall, except about seven times as big and about a zillion times more depressing.

This is probably about 1/25th of the entire thing. And there are four of these in the entire city.

They have a ceremony to remember all the people who went missing during the first World War, where they play the European version of Taps and lay poppies everywhere. The entire town shuts down for a few minutes and there’s so much quiet you can hear the canal lapping even though there’s no wind to move the surface. It was amazing.

Afterwards, once we were properly depressed, we engaged in the local culture by drinking Belgian beer and engaging with Belgians. We had eaten a nice, fattening dinner of pasta and cheese at a local restaurant, where pasta was the only thing we could decipher on the menu because it was in Italian as opposed to being in Ducth like everything else was. I’m somewhat convinced Dutch is just a made-up language because it seems to make absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Someone just mashed a keyboard and called it language.

After a very strange night involving Jack the American, fruit-flavored beer--

Sinfully delicious. And cheap.

--and coaster maps, we went on a tour of all the cemeteries dedicated to the fallen during WWI and the battlefields that remained. We were one step ahead of big tour groups, which was thankful because they were slow-moving whenever they caught up with us. We went to a British graveyard, a German graveyard, and an Allied graveyard, all three of which had gigantic monuments and meticulously cared for gardens and greens. We went to a bio fuel plant where, smack dab in the middle, was a preserved trench from 1915, nearly exactly how it was save for the sandbags being made out of concrete for preservation reasons.

 

It smelled horrendous, it was cramped, short, awkward, and around every corner I expected to see a rat or something. I can’t even begin to imagine trench warfare, and I’ve now been inside the very same trench many men’s lives depended on.

The most amazing place we went to, however, was the last cemetery we went to, the Allied cemetery of Tyne Cot, all the way out in the cornfields. It had once been where the Germans were stationed, and where they gunned down hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers over the course of three years, turning the beautiful fields to blood and dust.

It was one of the most incredible sights I’ve ever seen.

And every single time I saw a headstone that said “Unknown Soldier”, I thought of the Menin Gate, and how that soldier’s name was probably chiseled into the wall, never to be placed with a body.

There were several times I thought I was going to cry. You learn about these wars over in the States and they’re a very popular topic to learn about but, seeing it first-hand, in the place it was fought... it’s something else. Standing someplace and looking up at the buildings and thinking “none of this was here near 100 years ago” is kind of terrifying. A city hundreds of years old, built over centuries, developing culture and language, turned to rubble in mere days over what, exactly? It’s the same with seeing remnants of WWII; London has many buildings still damaged from the Blitz of 1940, and the Second Great Fire of 1944.

All in all, Belgium was an amazing experience, and I’m so thankful that this class exists, because I’ve never learned so much about that time period in our world’s history in my life. Ik zal terug zijn, België.

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. -John McCrae, 1915