Belgium Travel Stories
In Flanders Fields - Ypres, Belgium
 After lunch we finally crossed over to Belgian territory. I was eager to start tasting my family roots again, as I had done so many times before in trips to Belgium with my family. I remember visiting my great grandmother and uncles and aunts, and stealing sips of strawberry beer from my dad’s glass in restaurants, and having sausages with boiled cabbage for lunch (which I hated at the time), and visiting the beautiful old cathedrals that Belgium is so famous for.
As I looked out the window at the perfectly green pastures and the well cared for villages houses and squares, it felt good to be back in Flemish soil after so long. The good thing about having a double nationality is that you always have a second home to go to. But our destination was a town I had never been to before: Ypres (or Ieper in Flemish), where my grandfather and his 3 siblings had been born and raised.
As we entered Ieper’s Lille Gate, crossing the deep green colored River Yser through a large stone bridge, we marveled at the beauty of this old town. The buildings and cobblestone streets were lined with enchanting brick buildings, bearing the typically steep Flemish roofs. It was incredible to think that this lovely ancient town was razed to the ground during the war. For the Germans, Ieper had been important because they planned their raid through Belgium and into France through it. This tough little town had been used to bloody battles since Roman times, hence its heavy fortification. But this time around, there was nothing that could be done against German shelling. Belgium had sustained her neutrality during the war, but the unjust German invasion of her lands was what brought the British Empire into the war.
While the Germans bombarded Ieper, the Allied forces defended her in the First Battle of Ypres in 1914. The Belgians did their share to defend their land, and while their town was being demolished, they opened up the compartments of the River Yser to let the sea in and prevent further German advances.
On November 22 (my birthday), hostilities between the Allies and the Germans ceased due to the incoming winter, but the battle was forever immortalized as one soldier put it: “a man was not a soldier unless he had served on the Ypres front”. Two more similar battles followed in Ieper involving British, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, and South African troops which engaged Germany’s Imperial Army, yielding dreadfully high casualties.
After the war, Winston Churchill had recommended that Ieper be left in ruins as a monument to the sacrifice of the British forces. However, the locals rightfully ignored the British premier and began to rebuild their homes and their lives with the help of United States funding. An emotive poem bearing witness to the events in Ypres was written by a Canadian military doctor, Major John McCrae in 1919 continue...
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