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Bargain Travel Europe guide to Europe on a budget for unusual destinations,
holiday travel tips and secret spots missed by travel tours.

 


PASSCHENDAELE 1917 MEMORIAL MUSEUM
Battlefield Tunnels and Tyne Cot Cemetery

Robt Kelly Pollin Headstione photoRecently a stone was discovered in a river in Northern Ireland. It had a unique inscription on it, causing a stir of mystery and wonder. The stone was a marker for a soldier, one Lt. Robert Kelly Pollin, who died in World War I in the battle of Passchendale. The mystery – how did it get to Ireland from the fields of Flanders in Belgium was featured in a BBC documentary series "The Soldier and the Stone". The stone marker has been returned to the Passchendaele battlefield site museum rejoining his fellow soldiers, many still anonymous with no names, resting in the solemn ground of the nearby Tyne Cot Cemetery.

British WWI Uniforms Passiondale photoThe battles of World War I continued in West Flanders around Ypres for almost the entire length of the war. The small villages of Zonnebeke and Passchendaele are just along the road to the north of Ypres (Ieper), where the British Commonwealth forces fought a counter attack against the Kaiser’s Wehrmacht. For one hundred days in 1917 a half-million British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and South African troops perished in the fighting to gain 5 miles against the Germans. The battle and its location acquired the more Anglicized Passiondale, and came to symbolize the senselessness of that brutal incomprehensible war.

"Passiondale" 1917 Memorial Museum

Chateau Zonnebeke photoThe museum is housed in a former noble’s manor, the Zonnebeke Castle, tells the story of that long struggle with images, historical artifacts, movies, uniforms and weapons, of both the allied and German sides in life-like dioramas, with the second largest collection of WWI memorabilia in Belgium (see Brussels Royal Army Museum). Of particular interest are the exhibits of the use of poison gas as it developed over the course of the war, first chlorine gas delivered by bomb shells, blown by the drifting prevailing winds across the battlefields, first with no defense, then the changing development of gas masks, made largely ineffective against the later “Mustard” gas, which would permeate the skin as well as the lungs.

Tunnels

Dugout Tunnel Passchendale photoThe museum’s most noted feature is its replica of the underground network of tunnels where much of the British forces, like Lt. Pollin, lived like moles as the land above was decimated and churned by near constant bombs and artillery barrages. The dugout tunnels, connected by timber-lined passages and chambers, include a communication room, medical dressing post, workspaces and cramped dormitory bunk rooms where the soldiers might often find themselves trapped in total darkness as the earth shook around them.

Tyne Cot Cemetery

Missing Memorial Tyne Cot Military Cemetery photoJust about a mile from the Passchendaele Museum is the largest British Commonwealth military cemetery from the First World War, Tyne Cot Cemetery, with 12,000 marked graves in neat rows across the slighting rolling field where much of the fighting took place, churned earth now hallowed ground. The most striking feature of the Tyne Cot Cemetery is that by far the majority of grave markers have no name, simply dedicated a “Soldier of the Great War”, some with the Regiment listed. The anonymous stones stand with planted flowers side by side with those of the identified dead. Often, groups of mostly English visitors can be found among the rows, looking for a lost relative, a hoped for memory. A visitors book is deposited in the gate of the cemetery to leave a name and at the far end of the grave rows the “Memorial of the Missing” faces in the direction of the battle front.

Tyne Cot British Cemetary Inniskillen Headstone photoIf looking for the story of a particular soldier in the war, or researching the particulars of the participants, the museum has the Passchendaele Archive Project, placing faces and stories with the names of the dead and the missing, through photographs, family letters, documents and military source information. A guide can be also be arranged at the Passchendaele 1917 Museum to visit the site of the German trench lines in “Bayernwald” and the strategic points of Gravental and the Polygon Wood along the Menin Road.

War Memorials

American 1918 Ypres_lys Memorial photoPasschendaele and Tyne Cot are monuments for the British Commonwealth, but Americans fought on the same ground. On the road from Ypres to Zonnebeke, at the edge of the field now grazed by cows producing the milk for the nearby Passchendaele cheese dairies is the Mount Kemmel American War Memorial commemorating the 27th and 30th Divisions of the American Army who fought beside the British in the Ypres-Lys Offensive of August-September, 1918. Not a cemetery, but a marker with a description of the battle where over 2,000 were killed (most of them buried in the Flanders Field American Cemetery near Waregem). Nearby, the road signs point in nearly every direction to war memorials, to the Canadians, New Zealanders, all under ten minutes by car from the center Ypres with its Menin Gate Memorial, the Flanders Field Museum in the town hall, and the St George Memorial Church dedicated to the British Soldiers who fought in Ypres Salient during the not so “Great War”. © Bargain Travel Europe

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Passchendaele Museum

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SEE ALSO:

ST GEORGE’S WWI MEMORIAL CHURCH - YPRES

OUDE KASSMAKERJI - CHEESE MAKING - PASSENDALE

GRAVENSTEEN - COUNT'S CASTLE - GHENT

DURBUY - PRETTIEST TOWN ON THE OURTHE

MAGRITTE MUSEUM - BRUSSELS

BRITAIN’S UNKOWN WARRIOR REMEMBRANCE TOUR