We weren't able to catch the Metro back into the city--one line was drastically overcrowded, the other was utterly deserted. So we walked around the area close to Gare du Nord---not a very prepossessing area, it must be said. These photos give an idea of the buildings in the area.
One thing of note was the bicycle hiring scheme. We had noted people riding bikes that were identical. It appears that you can subscribe to the scheme and pick up a bike at any one of the many parking points that are scattered around the city. When you are finished with it, you simply park it where you are, enter your account details, and sign off. Pretty nifty!
After our rather disappointing weekend in Paris, it was a relief to find ourselves on our way to Ypres in Flanders, in the northwest area of Belgium. We were promptly picked up by Christian, one of our hosts at the Camalou B&B, where we were booked in for 3 nights and a 2 day tour of the battlefields. Camalou is pictured below.
Christian's wife Annette is a qualified war graves guide, and we had arranged for her to take us by car each day to the places we wanted to see.
We arrived well after dark for this first night, and so decided to venture no further than the village tavern, Tommies, for our evening meal. (The picture shows Tommies taken the next morning.)
Here we were not only fed well, but were feted by one of the locals who held Australians in high esteem due to the Australian soldiers saving his family’s farm from German advance in World War I. We were each presented with a drink, compliments of our grateful Belgium friend. We were quite surprised by this, but over the next two days we were to find this gratitude towards Australians replicated both in the Ypres and the Somme areas.
Here is our guide, Annette.
Annette is a Belgium woman whose grandfather had fought in WW1, and who used to take her around the battlefields as a child and explain their significance to her. (She was a fabulous guide for us to have!) On the morning of our first day with Annette, she produced a little Australian flag and fluffy kangaroo for Elizabeth to hold in the pictures as this is apparently what most Australian tourists want. This is why in many of the photos which follow, you will see Elizabeth rugged up to the eyeballs (it really was bitterly cold) clutching a fluffy toy kangaroo and a little flag as she stood behind the graves of her various relatives.
Our first day started by visiting the grave of Hunter Sinclair, a relative of Elizabeth. Hunter was the brother of three “aunts” that Elizabeth remembers with great fondness -- Jen, Aggie and Marion Sinclair. Here is a picture of them taken in their home at Newcastle, with Elizabeth's grandmother, when Elizabeth was visiting them as a small child.
Though these aunts were strictly cousins of Elizabeth’s Sinclair grandmother, Elizabeth visited them regularly during her childhood with both her grandmother and her mother, and was anxious to visit their brother’s grave on their behalf.
Very few Australians could afford to visit their beloved ones graves after the war, and it is only in fairly recent times that visiting relatives that died in the Great War has become more commonplace. While Elizabeth was not Hunter’s first visitor (his nephew Dick Engel had been to his grave some years ago), this was an important moment for her.
Dick had shared all of Hunter’s letters with John and Elizabeth in the course of their family history research, and Hunter had become a real personality to both. We found his grave and paused.
To add to the pathos, poor Hunter had actually died of disease after the Armistice had been signed, which was dreadful luck – though his family at the time blamed the army, for giving Hunter contaminated water to drink.
Our next stop was the Passchendaele Memorial Museum at Zonnebekke, which gave an excellent overview of the Ypres battles.
The best part of this museum though, was a reconstruction of an actual WW1 dugout that had been made in the bombed (and therefore ruined) church of Zonnebekke.
Complete with sounds and props (though fortunately no smells) it gave a realistic experience of what underground life was like for soldiers in the war.
We then drove to Tyne Cot Cemetery, which was established on the site of the October 1917 battle at Passchendaele. The visitor's centre looks out over the fieldfs where the famous, disastrous battle of 1917 took place.
(...there is some overlap on the edges of these three pictures...)
It was drizzling with rain and it was a bitterly cold and windy day, as we walked about the graves (many unnamed) and inspected the memorial and remains of a bunker.
It is probably worth pausing here to explain why on earth we were wandering around battlefields in the northern hemisphere at this time of year. The timing was somewhat imposed on us by our schedule and other commitments in the UK. Having said this, we quickly realized that it was a very evocative and atmospheric time to see the battlefields:
The wind, rain, cold, mud and grey skies conspired to heighten our sense of the difficulties faced by the men who fought in these conditions so many years before. Just look at that mud......
The other advantage was that not many tourists venture here in early winter, so we had a lot of the sites to ourselves and were not competing with crowds.
Lunch was back in Zonnebekke, which I only mention as it consisted of genuine Flemish stew and mushroom soup. Over lunch, we learned from Annette that the parish church (seen in the next photo) had been bombed early in the war, and a point of contention had been that the Allied troops had used the foundations as the base for an underground dugout centre. Was this the right thing to be doing in consecrated ground?
One of the questions that ran through our visit to the battlefields was the interplay of religious and civic motifs. Particularly striking was the way that the cross was depicted in the military cemeteries; the crucifix form had the military sword superimposed upon it to create a symbol which had a resonance of sacrifice in it. This was called the Cross of Remembrance. A thought-provoking symbol....
We have other graves and memorials to visit, so we continued on, across the border into France. (But no need to show passports...with Annette at the wheel, we simply drove along a country lane, into a new country!) The next post or two will track us as we visited more sites connected with WW1.
No comments:
Post a Comment