Today was another day of visiting the Belgian War Memorials around Ypres.
In numbers, very stark numbers, 200,000 Commonwealth men (it’s almost exclusively men) lost their lives in the 1914-1918 war in Belgium. A further 500,000 were lost in France and of all those 700,000… 300,000 have never been found, let alone a name put to a body.
We started the 2nd day of Cemeteries and Memorials by heading to Buttes and Polygon Wood, and then in the afternoon onto Tyne Cot .
The whole round trip took us about 6 hours, with a coffee stop in Zonnebeke, and about 11 miles of biking.
Cycling in this region is a doddle… flat landscape, well delineated cycle sections on the roads and even dedicated cycle ways off the main road network. care needs to be taken when you encounter the be-whistled cycle clubs though. They hurtle down the cycle paths but snap into single file at the sound of the leader’s whistle! Hilarious!
Brothers in Arms
Just before we got to the Buttes and Polygon Wood sites, we came across the Brothers in Arms Memorial.
This seems to have been inspired by the Dire Straits song of the same name with a very poignant statue set in a field depicting two soldiers.
Scotts Bunker
We actually came into the Buttes site through the woods and so took a slight detour to see Scotts Bunker. Still standing, but not for want of trying. They’d used the bunker as a dump for still live munitions after the war and repeatedly detonated the dump to get rid of them, but the bunker remained mostly intact.
Buttes War and Polygon Wood Memorial and Cemetery
We approached the Buttes site from the unconventional direction of the woods (the guy in the Ypres CWWGC office recommended this).
The scale of these places is so tragic. So many lives lost. We wandered around both the Buttes Memorial site and the site just outside the wood that is dedicated to the New Zealanders that fell in the area.
After wandering the site for probably 45 minutes, it was time for a bit of lunch at the Buttes site.
We saw just a few other visitors at the site and the peacefulness and serenity seemed fitting for such a sombre place.
Tyne Cot
As if we hadn’t had enough of the epic’ness of all these memorials, we headed to Tyne Cot for the afternoon, after a quick coffee in Zonnebeke.
Tyne Cot is the largest of the CWWGC cemeteries and memorials. There are 12,000 servicemen buried in the graveyard and 35,000 memorialized on the panels surrounding the top of the site. It’s very difficult to get your head around the scale of what’s presented in front of you as you wander from the visitor’s centre to the bottom of the cemetery. The memorials are so peaceful, and I think the only way to appreciate them is to stand in front of it all for a few quiet minutes and imagine the horror, pain, grief and loss of it all. Such a devastating waste of life. Absolutely, for something noble and selfless, but none the less such a waste of life.
Only 30% of the graves carry names, with the remainder often just carrying the inscription “Known unto God”.
We wandered the cemetery with many other people, taking in the solemnity of the site. We searched for some family names, Heyes (4 on this site), Martin (many many on the site) and Franklin. As we walked the panels, we sought out the 4 Heyes’ remembered there. There were Martin’s everywhere, who knows how closely they may have been related?
And so after another sombre day we headed back to the campsite.
On the way we stopped at a small hotel next to our campsite. In the garden was a walk around some (possibly) fake trenches. But the pond was the remnants of the Hooge Crater we saw all about at the museum the previous day.
And that was it for another day. We’re leaving this area tomorrow, but so glad we stopped and spent some time here.
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