Our first stop for the day was at Spanbroekmolen, also known as the Lone Tree Crater or Pool of Peace. It's a crater left behind after a mine explosion. The mine took six months to lay, and was one of 19 set off at exactly 3.10am on June 7, 1917. In actual fact this particular mine went off 15 seconds late, killing infantry who had been told to advance whether or not the mine had exploded. The blast from the mines was so loud that it was reported to have been heard in Downing Street and in Dublin. The land including and surrounding the crater was bought by a British lord in order to preserve it, and was eventually sold to a museum for a symbolic 1000 francs.
The next visit was to Hooge Crater Cemetery (nicknamed Huge Crater thanks to our very poor ability to pronounce words with an appropriate accent). This cemetery is the final resting place of Private Patrick Joseph Bugden, an Australian soldier who died aged 20. He was a posthumous recipient of the Victoria Cross. Private Bugden died in Polygon Wood, where we had been the day before.
From Hooge Crater we went down the road a little further, jumping off the bus on the side of the road and walking up a path, through the fields, finally arriving (after a quick llama/alpaca photo call) at a German medical bunker. As I noted about the road to Passchendaele from the day before, these bunkers are all over the place, left as they were in the middle of fields and whatnot. I think most of them are probably not overly safe to go into, but this one is a bit more of a tourist attraction, so I guess it's somewhat preserved. I've spent a lot of time reading and researching World War 1, given that I regularly teach poetry from the war, but I was completely unprepared for just how small and cramped this bunker was. It's not like I went in there thinking that it would be a full-sized hospital or anything, but it must have been absolute chaos to have casualties in there. I'm far from tall, and I struggled a bit with claustrophobia. There was literally no room to swing the proverbial cat. I assume it was just a clearing station for the front line, or at least I hope that's all it was - there's no way it was big enough for anything else.
We then made our way back over to Polygon Wood for a better look than we had the day before. We stood up on the butte and heard about its original use as a firing range, before moving down the steps and amongst the graves. We had to wait for quite a while for another group to finish up before we had a look at 5 graves of recently uncovered and identified Australian soldiers. They were the only graves that I saw all weekend that had a personal message on them.
Eventually we left Polygon Wood and headed for our lunch stop - a Tommy Tucker lunch. We ate at a cheese factory, featuring a globe that had the countries made of cheese. There were a few pieces of Australia missing, but Queensland was all there, so it was all good! Lunch was... interesting. We started with beef and ale soup (or beer soup as we called it), and this was followed by a kind of corned beef and vegetable pie. It was densely packed and very filling - I'm not sure that anybody actually got all the way through it. It's the kind of thing that the soldiers would eat during the war. They would often go days without a decent meal, so something like this was useful for them (but no so much for us after a big fry up breakfast!).
Our second last stop for the tour was probably one of the most poignant. We went to Langemark German war cemetery. The idea was to show us a different perspective of the war, and to be honest, it was a perspective that I'd truly never considered before. There was obvious significance in going to the dawn service, the Menin Gate and to Tyne Cot, but this was a place that really made me consider what I knew and thought about the war. The most striking thing about this particular cemetery is the stark contrast to the British Commonwealth cemeteries. All of those are open and light, with straight lines of upright, white marble headstones. Langemark is dark and gloomy, made so by the numbers of huge oak trees all over the place. As well as that, the headstones are a dark grey colour, and some are just flat square stones placed in the ground, whilst others are a vertical cross.
We walked through the gate and then stopped in front of a large square garden. Mark, our guide, told us a little of the history of the cemetery. Hitler himself walked through the gate that we had just passed through, and this certainly sent a shiver down the spine. The feeling grew worse as Mark explained about the garden in front of us. It's a mass grave, home to nearly 45 000 bodies (there are conflicting numbers on this - some say the mass grave has 25 000 bodies, others say the total number of bodies in the cemetery is 45 000 - our guide, smartest guide on Earth, says 45 000, and I'm sticking with that). Basically what happened is that during the clean up operation in the years after the war, the local people (rightly so, after so many years of occupation) didn't have a lot of respect for the bodies of the soldiers, and so threw them in whatever they could find and buried them all together. The Germans didn't begin to help clean up the area until at least two years after the war, so that was a long time to be collecting bodies. The bronze plinths that surround the garden give the names of the soldiers as much as possible.
Our final stop before going back to Ypres was at Essex Farm Cemetery. This place is home to two particular items of interest - one of the youngest British casualties of war (aged just 15) and the location where the famous "In Flanders Fields" poem was written by the army doctor Major John McCrae. The medical bunkers where he worked are still there, along with the original sandbags. I think they're smaller than the German bunker we went into earlier that day, but at least these were at ground level and therefore they had a lot more light and seemed to be more open than the other one.
Finally we headed back to Ypres for a little more chocolate shopping. By this stage we'd eaten so much chocolate that we couldn't imagine getting our own waffles, so we split one between the three of us! We also bought these peculiar sweets, but I have no idea what they're called (it's not like I've forgotten in the six months since I went and haven't blogged about them, I don't think any of us ever actually knew the name of them). They were these odd conical-shaped things, a dark purple colour. We asked if we could try one between us - our favourite chocolatier was selling them - but he gave us one each. We walked down the street nibbling on them, trying to figure out why we recognised the taste. Eventually I realised they were just like Allens red frogs! Massively excited, we went back and bought yet more from this guy. He was our favourite person by that point after all the free samples he'd given us!
Eventually the time came for us to board the bus and head over the border to Lille, ready to catch the Eurostar to London. It had been an amazing weekend, and we were absolutely shattered. The hardest part though was yet to come - going to work on the Monday morning!!
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