A long way from home

After some much needed banjo practice and revision in the morning we picked up Danny at Ieper station and set out to give her an unofficial mini-tour of the battlefields.

First stop was the Carrefour des Roses, a tiny garden that commemorates the first use of poison gas in WWI. The release of the gas was a very hit and miss affair - if the wind changed it could overcome the person who released it - so it was just by chance that the first unlucky recipients were some soldiers from Brittany. I didn't get a legible photo of the inscription, but I found one here.

A couple of miles further on is the big German cemetery at Langemark. Many thousands are buried there (the majority unidentified), including the 'Student Battalion'. The gravestones are black and the cemetery is full of huge oak trees (presumably no more than 90 years old). Very peaceful but oh so dark and sad.

A couple of miles further yet and we were at Tyne Cot- another huge cemetery, very different in character with its white gravestones and flowers, but equally sombre. Those buried with gravestones are dwarfed in number by the lists of names on the wall at the top of the cemetery; around 35,000 names of some of those whose bodies were never found.

This gravestone is for T.J.Histen who came from the Canterbury area of New Zealand - the other side of the world. Like many of the others in Tyne Cot and Langemark he died in the hell that is known as the battle of Passendale. Although I read that the Allied/NZ forces took the 'ridge' on 4th Oct 1917, so he probably died of his wounds. You can get an impression of the height of the 'ridge' they died for if you look past his gravestone and see how the land slopes gently away.

After this we were feeling overwhelmed so cut our planned tour slightly short and returned to "Wypers" for a pintje and some delicious stoverij - an option not available to the poor bloody infantry on either side during the Great War, however overwhelmed they felt.