Day 27 The Iron Harvest

With both of us having paternal grandfathers who served and survived the Western Front it was natural that our time in Belgium would involve a visit to Ypres. After a two-hour train journey from Brussels North we arrive at Iepes and nearly missed the station as the Flemish spelling confused us. Our visit to this town was nothing short of amazing. Within a 10 square mile radius of this famous town nearly 1,000,000 men in WW 1 perished. We visited the famous Menin gate where every night since the 1920s a service, which includes the playing of the Last Post, has been held in honour of the British and Commonwealth forces that died defending the town. The town is a delightful old town, but is actually a complete fake. The huge Gothic Cloth Hall, the largest secular Gothic building in Europe is in fact a recreation, as the tower and indeed the entire town, was obliterated during WW1, rebuilt, and then significantly damaged in 1940 by the Germans and again in 1945 by the liberating Polish.

In the afternoon we booked into a three-hour tour to visit WW1 sites. We visited the infamous Hill 60 and Caterpillar and sensed what it was like to leave a trench to hopelessly try and storm an enemy hillside position.
We were told of the incredible heroism of the Australian tunnellers (NB Richard’s grandfather was an Australian tunneller) who dug underneath enemy lines to lay explosives. We visited a crater caused by the largest of these explosions which our guide described as being an explosion of nuclear scale which caused an earthquake that was registered in the UK. This huge crater now contains a peaceful lake (which is 25 metres deep) is the most visible sign of this incredible devastation. We were hushed as we visited a Commonwealth gravesite and as our guide took us to a young man’s grave. We wept as we were told that after twenty months service on the Western Front and after being wounded a number of times he had cracked and tried to escape only to be tied to a post and shot by his commanding officer.

Later we met a tourist excitedly carrying a shell that he had just found. Our guide shocked this man, and us, when he told us that 7 people this year in Ypers alone had died as victims of unexploded WW1 ordinances. It seems that if you find a shell or grenade on your property you simple leave it outside your property… household garbage on the right, WW1 live ordinances on the left. Apparently the authorities will pick these things up within a few weeks and explode them at a special range. However if you find a left over gas shell they will add it to their 25-year backlog of gas shells that still need to be defused. They call this the ‘iron harvest’.

The futility and foolishness of war, and the longevity of the cost has never felt so real.