Bruges-Ypres tour about WWI

A nice warm sunny day and we took a tour of WW I cemeteries and monuments. It was a small tour with 14 people and the tour guide was excellent and made the history come alive. She stopped frequently and explained what the countryside looked like in WW I so you that you saw what it was like then instead of the beautiful lush farms with dairy cattle that is there now. You felt like you were back in time in mud, with no trees or vegetation left and the shooting between the Germans at the British, Belgiums, New Zealanders, Canadians, and other allies.

There are many cemeteries and they are kept in pristine shape. There are thousands of crosses in each cemetery some with multiple names and many without names.

We went to several cemetaries and they were all pristine

We stopped at a farm of a friend of the tour guide and she showed us some of the artefacts that had been found when the owners had plowed new fields, which included many bombs. There is constant risk of bombs for farmers when they work on the fields and they have to use metal detectors before plowing new fields. The bomb squad is huge and removes thousands of bombs every year and some of them explode and wound and kill people every year.

We went to the Memorial Museum on Passechendaele, which is small but had diorama’s of the war and a lot of artefacts. There are 35,000 names of missing soldiers on the names on the walls of Passchendaele cemetery. We went to the Menin Gate with 55,000 names, which was erected on the spot where the soldiers left the city for the front line. We saw the medieval restored town of Ypres.









One of the facts we found fascinating was that Hitler and Churchill both served in Ypres in WW I within a mile of each other. Hitler was a messenger that delivered messages to the front lines and most people doing this job were killed within 4 months and Hitler lasted 4 years, he was shot twice too bad one of them was not fatal and millions of lives would have been saved. Poison gas was first used in this war and thousands died a horrible death before there were gas masks and Hitler after seeing first hand what chemical warfare was like refused to use it in WW II.

We went to an area called Polygon Wood that has been preserved the way it was in WW I with huge craters from bombs and bunkers at that had been German and then British.

Bunkers

We went to a dressing station beside a cemetery. Medicine was fairly primitive in early 1900’s and supplies were very limited so what the doctors could do was very limited and the mortality rate from injuries was very high.

Infirmary

Then we went to an industrial area where there some dugouts /trenches have been saved. They are very narrow, small, and wet in the bottom. It is sad to think of the thousands of lives lost in 4 years of fighting back and forth to hold a few miles of land. It was a very fascinating and informative day, probably the best tour we have ever been on.