I went on a guided tour with a group called Marnixring that my friend, Sebastiaan, parents are a part of. The tour involved going around and seeing the
Passchendaele Museum, viewing a few memorials, and touring some reconstructed trenches. It was a really good experience and a great tour to learn things about the war.
The first part of the tour was the museum. At the museum, there was first a tour of the grounds around the museum. These grounds are actually a public park now, but it had a long history before that. The guide explained how the whole area used to be owned by one man, and how everything was pretty much destroyed during the war. The guide showed were the abbey used to be before the war. He also explained many things about how the grounds were kept and the struggles of keeping it looking good since it is a public park.
Towards the end of the tour of the park the guide showed us the fairly new
poppy gardens. There are currently seven gardens that represent one of the countries that fought in the battle. Each garden gets decorated by the country it represents. The Canadian one contains separate sections for each of the ecosystems in Canada.
Photo of me at the Canadian Garden
Shortly after the poppy gardens, we entered the museum to tour it. In the museum, the guide explained how and why the war started. The causes of WW1 are quite complicated so instead of recounting them I have included a link to the very long Wikipedia article in case anyone wants to read it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_I. After that introduction, we saw the exhibitions that recount what the war was like.
They explained what each soldier got to eat (what a German, British, or French would eat was different). There was also a place where you could smell what the food smelled like. Uniforms from the different soldiers were also on display. There was also a place where you could smell the different gases that were used as chemical weapons. The best exhibit, in my opinion, that showed how it was in the war was a recreation of a dugout. The ceiling was low enough that even I had to slouch sometimes, and almost everyone else seemed to be slouching all the time. There was also a pump because during the war someone always had to be pumping or else the tunnels would flood.
In the museum there was also exhibits about the battles fought in this area, and the guide also talked about them. The Second Battle of Ypres was talked about around the gas exhibits. It was the first time during the war that gas was used as a weapon. When it was used the French troops, who got the brunt of the first attack, fled but the Germans were not immediately ready to take the territory. By the next day, Canadian troops had taken over the space left by the French troops. During the next 48 hours, 2000 out of the 18000 Canadians died, but they did not give up the line. There is a memorial to commemorate this battle that I talk about later.
There were also exhibits and talk about the
Battle of Passchendaele. This was a very bloody battle, with at least 200,000 were casualties for each side. The number of people who died for each meter of land gained numbered in the thousands. A group of forces was stationed here until such time their army was exhausted then a new group took over. It was the Canadian Corps who were the group who finally captured Passchendaele.
After this tour everyone went to get lunch. While waiting for lunch Sabestion, a Marnixring member, and I went to go visit one of the graveyards the Canadian memorial called the
Brooding Soldier. The memorial commemorates the participation in Canada's involvement in the second battle of Ypres. There are graveyards just like the one below, that I visited, all around the Ypres area. They are mostly soldiers from Commonwealth countries.
A photo of the memorial
Sebastiaan and I at the memorial
A photo of the graveyard
Some photos of headstones from a different graveyard
A headstone for a Canadian soldier
Headstone of a German soldier. This headstone is unique in that it was the only non-commonwealth grave at that graveyard.
The grave of an unnamed soldier.
After seeing the memorial and the graveyard, and eating lunch the tour went to some of the further away places. There was a location where German trenches were recreated. We got to walk around in them and learned more about tunnelling activity. The guide explained that the Germans knew the British were tunnelling because of large mounds of soil by their trenches. This gave the Germans the idea to spy on them by building their own tunnels and listening for the British. During the next part of the tour, we learned about something the British used those tunnels for.
Photos of the recreated trenches
The British planted many mines and fired them under the German trenches (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_in_the_Battle_of_Messines_(1917)). During the tour, we saw some craters left by the mines, and the guide explained some of the more interesting ones. One that I found really interesting was the one that never blew up and now is underneath somebody's farmhouse.
The last part of the tour was seeing the
Last Post at the
Menin Gate Memorial. There was a lot of people there to see and hear the sounding of the Last Post. The Gate itself is quite impressive too. It contains all the names of the soldiers who were not found during or after the war. The amount of names listed there is enormous.
Photo of the gate
Inside the gate during the Last Post
A photo of one of the plates inside the gate
It was a very good tour. Thanks to Sebastiaan, his parents, and Marnixring for letting me come along.
