Today we visited the Passchendaele Memorial Museum in
Zonnebeke, Belgium. It was quite well
done covering the conflict and you finish by coming out in the trenches. We visited the Hooge Crater Cemetery and then
went into Ypres and saw the Menin Gate that has 54 000 names of unrecovered
bodies. We visited the new Flanders
Fields Museum in the Historic Cloth Hall that was quite good and used technology
well.
After lunch we visited the Buttes New British Cemetery, the 5th
Australian Division Memorial, and the Polygon Wood Cemetery. It was on then to the German Langmark cemetery.
It was then back to Ypres for some Flemish stew and for the Menin
Gate ceremony at 8PM. Today they are commemorating the 70th
Anniversary of the end of WW2 so it is a special ceremony that the Princess
Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry was present and had been given the freedom
of the city that is quite unusual. A
Canadian police band provided the music as it echoed underneath the Menin Gate.
It was a very special day and quite moving seeing so many headstones and
strangely enough there are so many others that should have been there but their
bodies were never recovered.
No comments:
Post a Comment