The Great War began a century ago and in the Belgian town of Ypres, it sometimes feels like it never ended.
In the battlefields-turned-farmland, grenades and shells can still be plucked from the ground like the plants they’re buried amongst. Local farmer Dirk Cardoen has a barn full of reasons to remember the war.
“I ploughed, I planted – nothing,” says Cardoen, whose property is littered with lead bullets. “And now when I walk through the field, I found it.”
He’s uncovered machine guns, helmets and other relics of the war that tore through the tiny Belgium town and the surrounding area between 1914 and 1918.
In the neutral nation of Belgium, Ypres was wedged in the way of the German assault on France. In the Ypres Salient, as the region is known, Canadians first saw the horrors of chlorine gas, and later in the war, the muddy Battle of Passchendaele would result in about a half million casualties.
“Here are recorded names of officers and men who fell in Ypres Salient but to whom the fortune of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death,” reads a plaque in the Menin Gate, a structure built to honour those who lost their lives without a proper burial.
The curved walls are lined with the names of more than 50,000 dead men from the British Commonwealth forces. Under the archway, the war sits vividly in the minds of those who have gathered each evening at 8 p.m. since 1927. The Last Post, a British Infantry bugle call, has been heard every night for almost eight decades, save for the time Ypres was occupied by German forces in the Second World War.
“No matter where you go here, every corner, every farm, every street, every route -- it all has its own story,” says military historian Franky Bostyn.
Each year, the remains of about a dozen soldiers are unearthed in the area. With tens of thousands still missing, the story of Ypres is still very much alive.
With a report from CTV’s Daniele Hamamdjian
