The Ypres Salient...

While the girls were in California, I met Jimmy down in Brussels while he was on a business trip. He was happy to be able to show me some of his favorite restaurants and the public areas of his office. Over the weekend, we headed out to learn more about World War I in Ypres, where some of the biggest battles of the war were fought with approximately 450,000 military deaths between 1914-1918. The city itself was fully destroyed. The buildings on the main square was rebuilt as close to the originals as possible. We took a 4-hour minibus tour with Salient Tours, which was very informative. We stopped at the Yorkshire Trench, which is a reconstruction along the path of the original trench.

We stopped at several British cemeteries, including Tyne Cot Cemetery, the Commonwealth’s largest military cemetery in the world with almost 12,000 soldiers buried. Amazingly, there were several fresh graves as some bodies were recently discovered at a construction site. Whereas the families of US soldiers could request the fallen to be repatriated, the Commonwealth always buried their fallen near the battlefield. You can’t tell from this photo, but the grounds were quite lovely, intentionally designed to look like an English garden.

We visited one of the smaller cemeteries, where one of the men on our tour was able to find the grave of his great-grandfather. Our timing was good because there was a wreath-laying ceremony. The memorial says: Their Name Liveth Evermore.

Our  most unusual stop was at Landemarck, one of four German cemeteries in the Flanders region. It was very stark (notice the black grave markers as opposed to the white in the British cemetery), yet peaceful with lots of trees. At one point, bodies were exhumed at 18 other German cemeteries in that area to be consolidated here for a total of 44,294 dead, 24,916 of which are unidentified and in mass graves. After the tour, we grabbed some lunch and visited the new In Flanders Fields Museum. Not exactly an uplifting day, but we were glad we went.