Day 4 Sunday 15th June
After a hearty breakfast, we checked out of the hotel and met Iain in Reception for our short walk to the museum in the Grote Markt. In Flanders Fields Museum is located in the Lakenhallen (Cloth Hall). In 1998 the original Ypres Salient Memorial Museum was refurbished and renamed In Flanders Fields Museum.
The consequences of war as felt by the civilian population is a major theme of the In Flanders Fields Museum. All around Ypres there’s a unique public art project called “The Lost Key” (De Verloren Sleutel) which commemorates civilian victims of WW1. Bronze keys, each engraved with the name, date of death, and age of a civilian casualty, are placed on the streets in locations significant to their deaths. The project aims to make these civilian victims visible in the memorial landscape of Ypres.
You are asked to question yourself about why you are visiting? I firmly believe in remembering the good and bad about the past – the bad as a way of trying to ensure we don’t go there again! Hence my trips to Krakow, Normandy,…
The museum focused on the stories of individuals within the larger picture of the Great War. These personal stories are told through many and varied objects on display, interactive installations and life-like characters such as the personal description of the Christmas Truce told by a Belgian, British, French and German soldier (holograms). The life of the medical corps at the front was related through holograms as well. The plight of the “shot at dawns” which I hadn’t heard about till yesterday was explained. Desertion, or absence without leave, was considered one of the worst offences possible as a member of the British and Commonwealth Armies during World War 1. As such, it was punishable by death. 306 men, many of whom were still teenagers, were shot at dawn by their comrades between 1914 and 1919.
I was fascinated by the journaling many of the soldiers did on their breaks from fighting. This included writing, drawing, mapping often in very fine detail.
Our time in Ypres was almost at an end. How could I go home without sampling a roadside beer, a local street delicacy, a sausage roll and sitting to watch ladies semi finals in beach volleyball.
I retrieved my case from luggage room and hit for the Menin Gate one last time, this time to meet the coach for the trip to Brussels.
A long wait for flights was probably the only thing I would find fault with on the holiday!
