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SASKATOONEXPRESS - May 19-25, 2014 - Page 1
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Volume 11, Issue 19, Week of May 19, 2014
Saskatoonʼs REAL Community Newspaper YPRES, Belgium — The birds are singing. In the distance, a tractor chugs around a field. In the centre of this historical town, troops of high school students armed with pens and notepads listen to tour guides talking about death. Column We’re in Belgium in the small city of Ypres, or Ieper (pronounced eeper) as it is called today. Alive with the giddy voices of youngsters and bustling sidewalk cafes crowded with visitors, this small city in rural Western Flanders reflects on its darker, tragic past. A century ago, this region, locally called Westhoek, was ground zero for young soldiers not a great deal older than the bright-eyed teens who today are discovering how fortunate they are to be visiting Ypres now, and not then. This is a place you would have done well to avoid 100 years ago, when The Great War entered into our vocabulary. The ensuing four-year-long calamity would steal a generation of the world’s young. Many of the hundreds of thousands of lives that ended in Flanders were to find their final resting place within a 10-kilometre diameter around this Belgian town. One hundred years later, Flanders is commemorating the victims of this war and condemning the senseless violence. A four-year remembrance project was set up by the Flemish Government called The Great War Centenary. In the summer, groups of high school students from across Canada will join the expected surge of visitors to this land where so much of their country’s blood was shed. Finding the necessary cash from creative fundraising efforts, along with help from generous parents, they will make their own way to this place to discover on a personal level the sacrifices made by other young Canadians so long ago. There are 150 military cemeteries here; some are small, with just a few hundred graves, and others have so many headstones criss-crossing the finely manicured grounds your head will spin. Not everyone who died here has a grave marker. Built in 1927, the Menin Gate war memorial in Ypres is dedicated to other British and Commonwealth soldiers who were killed in the Ypres Salient during the First World War. Its walls are etched with 55,000 names of those whose graves are unknown. With the exception of Second World War German occupation, there has been a Last Post ceremony performed at the memorial gate every evening since 1928. A blood bath it was. During the third battle of Ypres in 1917, the combined casualty count for German and allied forces exceeded 500,000 when British and Commonwealth forces captured a ruined village and a few kilometres of shellchurned mud. Evidence of the carnage can be found at the Tyne Cot Cemetery at Zonnebeke (near the village of Passendale), where 12,000 Commonwealth soldiers are buried. Also buried here is Private James
PETER WILSON
Tyne Cot Cemetery is the final resting place for 12,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers (Photo by Peter Wilson)
In Flanders Fields A century after The Great War
Peter Robertson, a Canadian awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery. He rushed a machine-gun emplacement and rescued two men from under heavy fire. A screen wall at the back of the cemetery lists the names of a further 35,000 missing soldiers who died after Aug. 15, 1917. These now - tranquil places have become a sacred destination. It’s a place of pilgrimage - first for the families of the dead, including the mothers and fathers who had been scarred by their unspeakable loss, and later by new generations who felt the urge to somehow connect with those who had died.
Ypres is the gathering point for the many thousands who come to Flanders each year. Many more are expected now that the centennial anniversary has arrived, including this latest contingent of students who have enthusiastically descended on its cobbled streets during my visit. The school children are all around me as we enter through the doors of the In Flanders Fields Museum, which tells the story of the First World War in Flanders. The magnificent, ornate building was once a 13th-century Cloth Hall, the medieval focal point of the region’s flourishing wool industry. Destroyed by German bombardment in the early stages of the
war, it was rebuilt, like much of the city, in the 1920s. The museum’s exhibits provide a portal into the past. It is here visitors connect with the mud, violence and misery of those terrible days. It’s a sober reminder of what the now, tranquil farmlands and scattered villages surrounding it once looked like to the people who fought here. We find out that five million British and Commonwealth soldiers passed through this town during the war. We travel back 100 years to see how Canadian soldiers lived and died alongside their allies as the tragedy unfolded. (Continued on page 4)