Day 7 (Sat 8 Sep} Museums, Relics and Tourists

We had planned to visit Poperinghe, where much of the out-of-the-usual and some of the ‘darker’ aspects of the history of the combatants in The Great War can be found.  Talbot House, the catalyst for starting the widely-reputed Toc H movement is there, preserved ‘as was’.  The cells where those who’d been tried and were awaiting the firing squad may be found, as may the site of the hospital where wounded German prisoners of war were nursed by some German nurses brought ‘across the lines’ for the purpose.  Yet to be confirmed by a site visit, of course.  We also planned to visit Lisjenhoek which had been the location of the 1^st 2^nd and 3^rd Australian Casualty Clearing Stations at one time or another.  The CCS was the first point in the evacuation chain where the casualty would encounter a nurse, and Helen had made some study of the role, and activities of Australian nurses in the 1917 Flanders campaign.

In the event, after intensive site-visiting for the past couple of days, we decided to turn ourselves over to the museum side, Doug says it’s his less-favoured pursuit because the souls of the people are not there.  So, we were back on the bus for Zonnebeeke to take on the very detailed exhibits there.

As a digression, because the bus dropped us there, we took the opportunity to visit the unusual church at Zonnebeeke.  Like every other building in the town, it had been flattened to a brick by 1917 and had to be rebuilt.  In most other places, the people had their say in replacing things exactly the way they were, and the church spire, most prominent point in most of the villages to this day, was restored to its (neo?) gothic needle point.  In Zonnebeeke, the architect put to designing and supervising the rebuilding of the church, managed to prevail in his strong belief that the ‘new’ town should be truly new, so he set about building a (then new and all the rage) art deco piece.  See the pictures – clean, geometric lines must have been a shock to some.  

They certainly seem to have been a shock to the priest, who refused to live in the house built for him because it had a flat roof.  He demanded that a ‘real’ roof be provided before he would move in.  The adjacent building, which is now the research centre for the Military Museum, is clearly the work of the same architect and, we think, could have been the first house offered to the priest.

The bricklayer’s art is well-demonstrated here.  Speaking of bricks, I found very little use, in restored buildings in this homeland of the Flemish people, of the fabled Flemish bond, a high-skill pattern of laying bricks that creates one of the strongest bonds (and avoids such things as a ‘pig-in-a-poke’ google please).  The assumption is that the bricks were strewn all over the place, skill levels had diminished, and everything was needed in haste.  The haste certainly showed up where you could see the interior surface of exterior walls.

But on to Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917.

A daily necessity - coffee (in this case at the Museum Café) to raise alertness to the level where we would not miss anything for the day to come.

There was no photography allowed in the museum so we are left with inadequate verbal description.  The things that impressed most were the variety and scope of artefacts reflecting the breadth of activities in this part of the theatre over the whole time from 1914 to the end.  Being in Australia and mainly used to seeing representations of just the part played by Australians, it is possible to miss much of that breadth, from the horse-mounted charges attempting to outflank the mixed Belgian, French and British defenders, fire support heavily reliant on direct-fire over open sights, through the multi-coloured uniforms and absence of steel helmets on all sides, to the comparatively drab appearance of a landscape dominated by the trench, the machine gun and the artillery barrage.  Doug particularly liked the treatment of the artillery, which reached the peak of its power in the ‘Third Ypres’ campaign.  All manner of things, including the colour coding of shell, and ‘technical’ aspects such as fire direction instruments were dealt with and explained.  Helen was brought to some understanding of what it must have been like to have spent part of a life in the major dugouts and the trenches, which are graphically and realistically treated here.  The job of representing the past as a basis for lessons for the future is very well done here, and Steven VandenBussche and Evy Van de Voorde are to be commended.

After a concentrated period getting the best out of a very interesting display, We returned to Ieper for a nap and recharge (after the obligatory waffle and Ice Cream Lunch).

Recovered, we decided to continue the museum theme and paid a visit to Flanders Fields Museum, located in the famous Cloth Hall in the main square at Ieper – a very much bigger operation than that at Zonnebeeke, with much more floor space.  They too, had some great displays and we were constantly learning about day-to-day functions that had to be carried on and are so easily over-looked in the mesmerising sweep of grand strategy, the enormous casualty lists and the devastation brought to the landscape.  Again, no photos were permitted inside.

Speaking of devastation, we went on to have a look at St Martin’s Cathedral, in the near vicinity of the Cloth Hall, and which suffered equal devastation at the hands of the artillery over four long years.  The interior of the building has been subject to extensive, painstaking restoration, so much that it is difficult to believe that people had the patience to do such a thing.

Photos of w-i-p on St Martins to be added from Laptop

It having been a fairly heavy day of archaeology, we decided to have a very informal dinner ‘at home’.  We’d managed to find a high-quality purveyor of stuff that didn’t deserve the trivial nomenclature of ‘small-goods’ and we thoroughly enjoyed some paté, cheeses, sausages and the like.