Day 22 Thursday 10th June:
Woke, breakfasted and away by 8.00 am. Drove to Iepers in Belgium. Parked next to St Martins cCthedral and the Clothhouse. Toured the Market Square and visited the Flanders Museum. Fascinating – showed the development of the town from a medieval cloth making centre to its total destruction during the Great War (WW1). It is unmanageable how the people put it back together again.
Next stop - Passchendaele and the Tyne Cot cemetery . The Tyne Cot cemetery is the largest British Commonwealth War Graves in the world. High profiled in the info centre is the Tasmanian Victoria Cross recipient
Sgt Lewis McGee whose grave is at Tyne Cot. A very moving place – over 500,000 casualties here alone!
Tyne Cot was a bunker on the German lines in October 1917 which the Australians attacked and captured, and in doing so altered the course of the battle of Passschendaele. The cemetery is built around this bunker.
Through to Zonnebeke and back to Iepers.
Cooked dinner in time to experience the “Last Post” at Menin Gates in Iepers. This is played each night at 8.00 pm. Menin Gate memorial has the names of 54,000 young men who were reported as missing in action. We thought, being a week night, not many would attend – how wrong – there must have been over three hundred present. The Menin Gate is built at the location of an old medieval gate to the city – destroyed during WW1. A very moving place.
Back to the van and drove a few kms to the Hill 60 memorial. Took a walk around the site ( it doesn't get dark until 10.30 pm) and discovered that it has intentionally been left very much as it was left after the big explosion in 1918 – except for the regrowth of the trees shrubs and grass.
Next to the site is a railway line where a plaque tells the story of two French resistance fighters were executed by the Germans for having been caught near Lillee with a truck load of explosions. Their home village was La Madeleine!
Wherever we travelled in this area we were confronted with military cemeteries. The huge cost in life is unimaginable.
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