Day 32 – Fri 11 Jul 14, Ypres

July 11, 2014

Forecast: 15-18 deg C, showers; Listed distance: 0km; Actual distance: 40km; Cumulative distance: 1279km; Av speed: 14km/hr;

We awoke to the pitter-patter of rain on the windows, but seeing we've got a stopover it doesn't matter. We had the time to just lounge around in bed and wait for a 8am breakfast. The B&B we are staying in is an old converted three story mansion about 800m from the city centre. It is decked out beautifully, no expense spared, and our room is quite large. There are no soccer hooligan in this neighbourhood. Peter, who owns and runs the place, is also kept busy taking clients on battlefield or cycle tours. And the B&B is conveniently located opposite a brewery, location, location, location!

Ypres is the first city we've seen that really takes full advantage of the WW1 Battlefields story. There are plenty of places in France which could do very well out of the millions of foreign visitors who flock there every year to visit the cemeteries and museums. Maybe they think it's wrong to profit from such a thing? A coffee shop or two, a restaurant / snack bar here and there would be okay; we often hung out for a place to stop and refuel but found nothing. Some of the little isolated areas could certainly do with the employment opportunities.

Again, there were dozens of WW1 Cemeteries around Ypres we could have visited but we try to pick the most relevant or interesting. So after a good brekky, including freshly cooked bacon & eggs, we visited the In Flanders Field Museum in town which is an extremely modern museum with all the multimedia gizmos and gadgets, along with the normal stuff you would expect in such a place.
Greg then headed out, in the rain and on the bike, to Essex Farm, 2.5km from our B&B. (Wendy had a lay afternoon out of the rain). This is where the famous LTCOL McCrae wrote that moving poem "In Flanders Fields". We love this poem, it captures the whole essence of war. Once learnt never forgotten.
Time to remember it:

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 those who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

LTCOL John McCrae was a Medical Officer in the Canadian Artillery, and sadly died of illness in late January 1918.

The bunker where it is believed he may have written the poem is preserved near the memorial. While walking through the Commonwealth cemetery nearby (you are never far from one here) Greg found a headstone where a lot of crosses and some teddy bears had been placed. Then he saw why, the soldier buried there was 15 years old when killed; one of the many who had lied about their age. We have since found out that it is the most visited grave by school kids from England on the Western Front.
It was then onto the Yorkshire Trench & Dugout which had been re-discovered during some canal works in 1998. During excavation hundreds of remains and artefacts were discovered. It seems wherever you dig around here you'd find the same.

The Passchendaele Museum and Tyne Cot Cemetery and Memorial were next. Tyne Cot is the largest burial cemetery in the world with nearly 12,000 graves. Another 37,000 names of the missing are inscribed on the walls of the Memorial. There was also at least a dozen other "small" (less than 5,000 graves) cemeteries he saw either on the way out to Tyne Cot or while returning via a different route. Hundreds of these "small" ones don't even get a mention on the maps available at the Tourist Office. We think we may have seen sufficient war cemeteries for a little while.

Dinner was at an Irish Pub, Irish stew (beef cooked in Guinness) with mash and a beer of course. We walked back to our room with bursting bellies.