June 22 - Lille to Ypres (Ieper), Belgium

 June 22 - Lille to Ypres (Ieper), Belgium 

Arriving early in Ieper, we managed to dump our bags at the B&B and took off exploring. 

Ieper, the Flemish name for Ypres, is best known as the site of three major battles of WWI, the most famous being Passchendaele. Because of this we knew there was going to be no shortage of interesting war sights to visit. 

Our first port of call was to the ‘Cathedral’, a.k.a St Martin’s Church (for some reason it stopped being a cathedral in 1801!).  Originally built in the early 14th century it was then totally flattened during the battles of World War I. Post-war however it was completely rebuilt, and only taking 8 years to complete, a fantastic effort. A beautiful building, it has some magnificent stained glass windows and a particularly ‘speccy’ rose window.   

Our next stop was to the St George’s Memorial Church. Built to commemorate the over 500,000 British and Commonwealth troops who died in the three battles for Ieper during WWI, it’s absolutely full of plaques of remembrance from all sorts of towns, schools, armed forces, etc worldwide. This was a very moving experience reading these memorials as, seeing the numbers that died from such small communities, it almost made them seem personal.  Just 2 examples of the many were a school in Edinburgh that had 2000 ‘ex-boys’ alive pre-war, at the end of hostilities 900 of those had been killed in action.  The second case was a college in Buenos Aires where 140 boys signed up for action and 14 were killed. Just horrible and such a waste of life!  The whole experience reminded me of a Primo Levi quote I once read at Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, “One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered like she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live”. St George’s is definitely worth a visit.   

To change the tone a little we took off for a walk alongside the river and up on the old city walls and ramparts that sit on the edge of town.  With loads of birdlife, people fishing, this was just an idyllic place for an afternoon wander.  

However, we soon learnt that you don’t have to travel far around here to get a reminder of WWI.  Our first of these reminders was discovering one of the many cemeteries scattered around the town and surrounds.  This one, Ramparts Cemetery, the only one within the ancient walls of Ieper, is the final resting place of about 200 Commonwealth troops, one of the smaller burial grounds in the area.  This was another emotional experience, especially when looking at some of the ages of those killed, just far too young!

Our next reminder was one of the more well known Commonwealth war memorials, the Menin Gate. Built to commemorate the thousands of soldiers who passed through the gate on the way to the front, it displays the names of over 55,000 soldiers who went missing during the outbreak of the war and August 1917.  A very sobering experience looking at all these names, especially when being told that the gate was too small to hold the names of all the missing and that a further 34,000 had to commemorated elsewhere (at the Tyne Cot Memorial  in Passchendaele).