bub

This week I've visited the WWI Museum located in the cloth hall of Ieper (Dutch)/Ypres, one of the major battlefields ever (over 700,000 killed around this 34,000 inhabitants town during the 3rd battle of Ypres)

The exposition was simply great. Unlike most other museums, it was not just an exhibition of anonymous old uniforms and helmets.

On the contrary, they stressed on the personnal stories of a few dozens of the millions of soldiers who have fought and often died in Flander's Fields: many pictures, portraits, along with short descriptions.

Example: "Soldat x, born in x village in Russia, in 1887. Shoe maker, he was forced to join the Russian imperial army in 1915. After the revolution, he reached Flanders to keep on the fight against the German Empire. Died on April 17th in Paeschendaele, killed by mustard gaz."

I can assure you that when you see a picture of the guy, his helmet, personal letters, pictures of his wife/kids, and then read that, you really feel disturbed.

There were dozens of profiles like that. They were sorted out by nationality. Did you know that there were thousands of Morrocans, Senegaleses, Viet-Nameses, Native Americans, Philipino, Chineses, Ghurkas, New-Zelanders...who fought in Flanders??

There were also many quotes (some funny, some horrifying) like these:

"We think nothing of schrapnel now, if we can get trenches - it is beastly in the open.
Usually the men are lazy about digging at first, but after a little shelling they are all the other way, and it is most important that you prevent them from digging the trench so deep that they can't fire out of it" (Captain Colwyn Philipps, Royal Horse Guards, Klein-Zillebeke, November 1914)

""I'm afraid all the cavalry traditions are for ever ended, we have become mounted infantry pure and simple, with very little of the mounted about it. Our men look funny sights trudging along with spades and things on their backs, and when they are mounted they look funnier still: if you see a man carrying lance, sword, rifle, spade and pick, he looks just like a hedgehog" (Lieutenant Francis Grenfell, 9th Lancers, October 1914)

"There was not a sign of life in any sort. Not a tree, save for a few dead stumps, which looked strange in the moonlight. Not a bird, not even a rat or a blade of glass.
Nature was as dead as those Canadians whose bodies remained where they had fallen the previous autumn. Death was written large everywhere.
Where there had been farms there was not a stick or stone to show. You only knew them because they were marked on the map. The earth had been churned and re-churned.
It was simply a soft, sloppy mess, into which you sank up to the neck if you slipped from the duckboard tracks

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bub

Cloth Hall. The museum is inside. The building, like the whole town, was totally destroyed and had to be re-built after the war.


Menin Gate





Some of the names of those whose bodies were never found

bub

some more names (there are thousands of them, and it looks like most of the times the whole battalion has simply disappeared)