The Five-Month Pub Crawl: In Flanders Fields; Or, Belgium Interruptus

By now, the world knows what occurred in Paris on Friday.

Ypres in the rain -- many thanks to
Kamrun for all her great photos

We just happened to be in Ypres, Belgium, at the time with nine of Phil's students. This was a long-planned trip to visit the World War I battlefields and sites around Ypres, which was the place where trench warfare was made still more miserable by a sea of mud in which thousands of soldiers died, some by drowning, and where the front line stayed almost unchanged for three years as the Germans tried to reach the port towns on the coast. The town itself was completely destroyed, as was everything around it, but it was rebuilt with meticulous accuracy, often using the same materials that had been used in the original buildings.

We arrived via Eurostar from London at Lille, France, on Friday morning and caught another train across the border to Ypres. After settling into our hotel, Phil and the students took taxis to the

barbed wire at the Passchendaele

Passchendaele Museum, a few miles from town. The museum features a 100-meter long reconstructed trench and subterranean quarters where officers and men retreated for safety and planning, as well as a lot of information about the battle of Passchendaele, or the Third Battle of Ypres, fought from July to November 1917.

fondues fromages

After the museum, the students gathered in our large and comfortable hotel room to sample some of the delicacies of the region. These included products made by Trappist monks, which led to a spirited discussion of hops. Almost none of them had been to Belgium before, and it was a pleasure to introduce them to the country and its specialties. We went on to dinner in the Grote Markt, the main square, where we ate fondues fromages and carbonnade a la flamande, two of our all-time favorites.

Then we walked to the Menin Gate at the edge of town, which was erected to honor the more than 30,000 Allied soldiers whose bodies were never recovered, and whose names are engraved on the edifice. Every night there is a solemn and beautiful ceremony commemorating the soldiers who lost their lives at Ypres. Each night the ceremony is different, with songs, poetry readings, and other performances, but it always includes trumpet music and
the laying of wreaths. There were many hundreds of people there, and we were told that it is always that crowded -- every single night of the year.

We were pretty tired, since we'd been up before six to catch the train, so we planned for an early night. But when I turned on the TV, we saw the news that terrorists had attacked Paris. It was only about ten minutes after the attacks had happened, and we watched with growing horror as details flooded in. At the point that President Hollande closed the French borders, we realized that we had a problem: we were stuck in Belgium with nine students who were supposed to go back to London the next day and whose train tickets took them through France.

Acting on the assumption that the borders would be closed indefinitely, I found out that our hotel was fully booked for the next several days, but I located a nearby place that had rooms available. We decided not to book the rooms until the morning, though, hoping that the situation would turn out to be less dire and that the return trip would be possible -- though as we watched the news, it looked pretty clear that our hopes would be in vain.

In the morning, after a more or less sleepless night, we learned that the borders indeed had been reopened, though the descriptions of events in Paris were ever more dreadful. A flurry of emails with administrators helped us decide that we'd go ahead with the day's activities as planned, and then in the late afternoon we'd accompany the group to Lille, where they would catch the Eurostar and we would pick up a rental car to return to Belgium and visit friends in Gent. The students were all fine with this; though they were shaken by events, they realized that they were probably as safe in Ypres as they would have been in London.

We had booked a 4-hour battlefield tour with Salient Tours, based on my Internet research, and we met with our tour guide, Lucas, who piled us into two vans. Our first stop was a cemetery where John McCrae, the surgeon who wrote the poem "In Flanders Fields," had tended to the injured. Lucas gave us a remarkably cogent and thorough ten-minute explanation of the reasons behind the start of the war, and he recited the whole poem from memory.

We've been on a lot of tours, and it was clear from the start that Lucas wasn't an ordinary guide. We learned a lot about him as we drove around the Ypres Salient (a salient is a battlefield with a slight rise that is surrounded by the enemy on three sides). He has an advanced degree in history, has written a book about World War I, and has been obsessed with the war since he was a young child.
His tour, which stopped at the German Langemarck cemetery, the Canadian Brooding Soldier Memorial, Passchendaele Ridge, Tyne Cot Cemetery, and the Hooge trench and crater, was thorough, passionate, and packed with information that I doubt we would have gotten elsewhere. (It didn't hurt that he was not unattractive, though that had absolutely nothing to do with why I decided to sit up front in the van. The seats were simply more comfortable there.)

Among the fascinating bits of info he gave us:

German cemetery tradition emphasizes the collective rather than the individual. Both cemeteries include mass graves, but rather than regretting this, the Germans emphasize how lives were lost for a collective good.
The plants in the Canadian memorial have symbolic significance: the evergreens are clipped in the shape of artillery shells, and the ground cover is meant to replicate the creeping advance of chlorine gas along the earth.
An enormous 40-foot-deep hole in the earth -- once a favorite place to photograph newlywed

giant detonation hole in the ground

couples -- is actually the site of one of seven gigantic underground Allied explosion that vaporized the enemy troops in the trenches above. There is still a site where one of these explosions was planned. The ordinance lies beneath a farmer's field, but it is too dangerous to try to remove it.
Every day local farmers still dig up rusted shells and bones. They place the artillery pieces beside telephone poles along the road and call the office in charge of pickup. We saw a chlorine gas canister leaning against a pole as we drove along. This would be picked up within 24 hours, according to Lucas, as it was very dangerous. The last casualty resulting from one of these finds was the previous March, when a curious construction worker unscrewed the fuse cap from a mortar.

I've placed more photos of our stops with explanations at the end of this post if you're interested.

As we moved from place to place on the tour, the skies grew darker, the air colder, the wind harsher, and it began to rain. Some of the group had dressed for this possibility, but I'd trusted in weather.com and was wearing a jean jacket. Eventually the temperature got down to about 40, and my shoes soaked through completely. Though we were absolutely freezing and wet as could be, the conditions added to our understanding of the misery the soldiers experienced during their years -- years! -- in the muddy, cold Salient.

After the tour, we had hot chocolate in an attempt to stop the shivering. As we sipped our cocoa ("I don't think they make this with water and a mix!" said one student) and watched CNN, we could see on the faces of the group the realization that the world we live in is still as frighteningly unstable and violent as it had been a hundred years earlier. But the students also confirmed what we'd hoped: they'd had a rich, illuminating experience seeing war sites in Flanders after reading so much about the conflict, and were delighted at their two-day immersion in Flemish culture (and also delighted by their comfy hotel rooms).

Phil and I bought beer and chocolate and sent dozens of emails to administrators and parents explaining that all was well. At about 4:30 we set off for the train station.

Students' phones started to ring around that time. Everyone had checked in earlier with family, but parents were calling in concern. Fordham administrators began phoning and emailing. We tried to reassure everyone -- we were all fine! We were taking the students to the train! -- but the calls continued. By the time we changed trains at Kortrijk, the university president was expressing his desire that Phil and I accompany the students back to London.

At that point, it was clear that this was something we had to do. In Lille, I exchanged our Eurostar tickets for tickets leaving on the students' train. I cancelled our hotel and rental car, sent emails to our friends. I won't say we weren't annoyed. I won't say that words like "overprotective" didn't pass between the two of us. But we didn't have all the information, it turned out.

At about 4:30 or 5, the news channels had begun to report that three people had been caught at the Belgian border in a car used in the Paris attacks. A traffic ticket in the car linked them to other Belgians. Arrests were made in a Brussels suburb. And the Eurostar train the students were to take originated in Brussels. I suppose we weren't told this because those in charge thought we might panic, or that the students might. But they wouldn't have. All the students -- Gabrielle, Mary Kate, Kamrun, Kelsey, Jungsuh, Kristen, Austin, Dominique, and Siena -- were exemplary, mature and calm in the face of what must have been for them a new and terrifying reality.

In the words of one of our Belgian friends, "There is no doubt: Paris November 13 is our 9/ll. Nothing will be the same anymore."

In the Ypres Salient: