Our last day part 1 - Fromelles and Passchendaele

We use the quiet time after breakfast to pack our suitcases given we travel home tomorrow and it will be late by the time we return tonight. The phone rings and it is the tour operator with a questionable story about not being able to take us today. Her car is not safe, and a tyre needs replacing, and it will take several hours, and, and... Fortunately another battlefield guide has agreed to absorb us into his group at the last minute. The operator promises to call me at lunchtime to make sure everything is going okay... it's a call that never comes.

After Ken's quiet and measured delivery yesterday, it is a bit of a shock to the system when we meet Phil. He's loud, extremely ocker and very much a showman. It's a bit grating at first but he proves himself just as knowledgeable and has amazing energy to look after such a big group for what turns out to be a 12-hour day. Yesterday our group of four spread out in an 8-seater van. There is no such luxury today. The van is the same size but it is full so we are squeezed uncomfortably into the back and must clamber in and out over seats all day. The car is followed by a coach with three generations of an Australian extended family. At every stop our group swells to around 20 people so it gets a bit noisy and crowded. 

It is a full day, we cover plenty of ground and familiar place names and events finally assume greater meaning as we witness the landscapes for ourselves. Our first stop continues on from the sites in the Somme that we saw yesterday. At the Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial, the trench lines and battlefields have been preserved. Unlike elsewhere in the region where the ground has been filled in and levelled, the extreme undulations from artillery bombardment are still evident even though the forest is reclaiming the ground. 

Pockmarked earth is all that remains of this WWI battlefield

It's still possible here to see just how close the enemy lines were. I expect to feel misery, hurt or some other lingering negative presence from the hell that happened here, and yet surprisingly there is only peace. It's a feeling that pervades all the sites we visit and is what I end up taking away with me from these two days touring battlefields. Perhaps it is the great deference with which the dead are remembered and tended, or the way Nature is reclaiming all of these sites, but there is only peace now. In the morning sunshine, the trench remnants now dance with only wildflowers and butterflies.

The earth doesn't entirely forget though and there are still plenty of reminders of WWI littered across the landscape, even though a century has passed. Phil stops the car near a paddock and we walk across the ploughed field to what is left of a concrete bunker. As we see throughout the day, the landscape is littered with concrete bunkers, old field hospital sites, overgrown tracks and shrapnel. Apparently millions of unexploded munitions still remain buried in the soil here. Constantly ploughed fields have largely been cleared over the decades but new machinery digs deeper and in recent years close to 300 tons a year has been unearthed. Farmers have become blasé about it and accept it as part of farming in this region, but there are still fatalities every year from unexploded WWI bombs. You can read more about the lethal relics of WWI here.

At the Pheasant Wood Cemetery

We continue the drive north and stop at the Pheasant Wood Cemetery near Fromelles. It was here in July 1916 that British and Australian forces attacked a German stronghold in the hope the 'diversion' would stop the Germans sending reinforcements to the Battle of the Somme. It failed dismally and German machine gunners wrought terrible devastation. The Australian Fifth Division suffered over 5,500 casualties in a single day. For what? The Germans continued to supply the front lines in the Somme unimpeded.

In more recent times, in 2007, an amateur Australian historian discovered the burial sites of 250 mostly Australian soldiers in Pheasant Wood. They were reinterred at the cemetery. Now more than half have been identified and have a named headstone. Hopefully the others will soon find their names too. 

'Cobbers' by Peter Corlett

We travel to VC Corner where 410 lie buried in two mass graves, and the names of the Fromelles dead with no known grave are etched onto the wall. At the adjacent Australian Memorial Park, stands the beautiful bronze statue, 'Cobbers'.

It commemorates the days right after the Battle of Fromelles when hundreds of Australians lay wounded in no-man's-land. Their mates risked their lives to retrieve them, often carrying them back behind the lines on their shoulders. Sergeant Simon Fraser was one of the soldiers who heard a man cry out, 'Don't forget me cobber' on one of these missions. He went back out again to rescue the man.

Our lunch keeps getting pushed back because Phil learns that there is another tour group at the cafe, and so we visit a couple more sites. We see the site of the famed Christmas Truce of 1914, when the war was supposedly 'going to be over by Christmas'. For a few hours at least, everyone put down their weapons and there was a friendly game of football, Christmas carols and goodwill.  

In a small unobtrusive clearing I find a poppy - that enduring symbol of remembrance. And what a perfect place for it.

We also get the chance to walk through Polygon Wood, where Australian forces fought and died, again in heartbreaking numbers, during the Battle of Passchendaele. On our way there, the van pauses near a locked gate. Here on private property is the entrance to an underground bunker, which served as a field hospital for Australian soldiers fighting in Polygon Wood. One member of our tour group, a lady from Queensland, is following the story of her ancestor. It's believed he was treated here when he was wounded. Phil tells us we can't really venture onto somebody's land and in any case the gate is locked... but then Ross notices the padlock hasn't actually been secured. In a flash, Phil and the lady discreetly enter the site and take some photos inside the bunker. It's a moment of profound meaning as she gets to bear witness to his final journey a hundred years later, and she is very appreciative.

Australian Fifth Division Memorial near Polygon Wood

Polygon Wood is eerily silent. This area was razed to the ground a century ago but now it is dense and forested. Yet no birds sing. The fighting was heavy here and at one point, there were 11,000 Australian casualties in a week. Once through the wood, we stop briefly at the Australian Fifth Division Memorial before rejoining the van. 

It is nearly 2pm by the time we pull up at the cafe. It is rustic and confusion abounds while figuring out what every member of our 20+ person group wants to eat. The food, when it does finally arrive, is very welcome!

The rest of the afternoon is very much about Passchendaele. First we witness the aftermath with a visit to the Tyne Cot Cemetery. We have seen so many cemeteries in the last two days. There are literally thousands dotted across the region - the uniform white headstones marking out the Commonwealth dead, rows of neat white crosses for the French, and the unadorned black crosses marking the mass graves of German soldiers. Tyne Cot is in a whole different league. It is the largest Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in the world and it's impossible to fully grasp the sheer numbers that lie buried here. Row on row of headstones - 12,000 in total, of which 8,000 remain unidentified. 

Tyne Cot Cemetery

The location was originally a nursing station and the graves near the centre are quite ad hoc unlike the neat rows that radiate outwards from there. These were the burial sites of the men who died of their injuries at the hospital. After the Third Battle of Ypres, which became known as Passchendaele (after the village that was its final objective), the cemetery grew exponentially. And after the war, burials from many smaller surrounding cemeteries were relocated here.

The Tyne Cot Memorial sweeps around the boundary and bears the names of 35,000 British and New Zealand servicemen who have no known grave. There are so many headstones bearing the inscription, 'Known Unto God' but they are looked after just as well as their fellows. Vibrant roses grow between the headstones, planted with a frequency that ensures that every grave is touched by the shadow of a rose at some point each day.

Tyne Cot Memorial

A simple but thoughtful gesture - roses at the grave of an Unknown Soldier

Our final stop for the afternoon is an old chateau that has been transformed into the Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917. It's an extraordinary and necessary collection of military memorabilia and stories, and includes a reconstructed bunker and network of trenches. In summer 1917, desperate to force a break through the front in Flanders, the Allies launched a major assault. But in 100 days of fierce fighting, nearly 500,000 soldiers died for a territorial gain of only 8km. We have heard so many numbers in the last two days - casualties and death tolls. We saw the 12,000 graves at Tyne Cot and yet all that pales in comparison at the thought of half a million dead in only three months. 

Reconstructed trench - much more sedate than the real thing 

Over the parapet. Visible on the right is one of the posts used to hold up barbed wire. The cork-screw tip meant they could be twisted into the ground rather than hammered in. As they generally had to be put up in a hurry at night, hammering would have given the position away to the enemy. 

Passchendaele is still symbolic of the utter futility of war and of a massive waste of life for little, if any, gain. And yet, it is also considered decisive in the outcome of WWI. Although the German defences had seemed solid, the sheer magnitude of losses on their side as well meant that they no longer had the resources to advance against the French who were, by that stage, completely defenceless.

When we leave the Memorial Museum, the sun's rays have lengthened and there is a tinge of red atop the trees. We are not far from Ypres now and so we pile back into the van for the short journey to our last stop for the day.