War and peace

APRIL is the cruellest month, wrote T S Eliot in his poem The Waste Land. It certainly is an evocative month for visiting Flanders, where the flower of European youth died in a morass of mud and blood in the First World War.

April is ploughing time for the Flemish farmers and the brown furrowed fields dominate the landscape. Sometimes the plough unearths a rusting artillery shell. About 12,000 shells and similar items from the Great War are recovered each year.

The lowlands around Ypres, a medieval walled town that grew rich on the wool trade, were the original killing fields, where between 1914 and 1918 war became mass slaughter on an industrial scale.

Ypres, with its majestic 13th century Cloth Hall and cathedral, was reduced to rubble by artillery as the Germans tired to prise the town from the grasp of the British.

After the war Winston Churchill argued that Ypres should be left in ruins as a memorial to the fallen. But Ypres was rebuilt in the 1920s and today tells adults and children alike about the suffering of war.

The rebuilt Cloth Hall houses the impressive In Flanders Fields museum, which gives visitors an idea of what life must have been like in the trenches. It has just opened dead.lines, an exhibition that looks at how the media covered conflicts in the 20th century.

Another focal point at Ypres is the Menin Gate. Designed by the British architect Sir Reginald Blomfield, it looks like a Roman triumphal arch. But it does not commemorate battles; instead, on its towering walls, the names of 54,896 Commonwealth soldiers are carved with pride. They fell before August 16, 1917, and have no known grave.

At 8pm each day traffic is stopped from going through the gate and a crowd listens as up to six Belgian buglers sound the Last Post as a tribute to the fallen. This simple but eloquent ceremony has been performed more than 25,000 times.

The Belgians take great pride in the Menin Gate. They regard it as a symbol of peace and this was reinforced when Pope John Paul II visited it in 1985.

Ypres carpenter Ivan Sinnaeve, known as Shrapnel Charlie, is paying his own tribute to the fallen.

Confined to a wheelchair after an accident at work, he uses the lead shot from First World War shrapnel bombs to make hand-painted lead soldiers. So far he has made more than 5,000. His aim is to make 54,896 figures - one for each name on the Menin Gate.

Another memorial to the missing can be found at Tyne Cot cemetery where 11,956 Commonwealth soldiers are buried. The wall at the back of the cemetery displays the names of 34,957 missing soldiers who fell after August 15, 1917.

The Royal Northumberland Fusiliers called this area Tyne Cot because they thought that three German pillboxes guarding the hill resembled Tyneside cottages. The pillboxes were captured with great loss of life in October 1917 during the advance in atrocious mud on Passchendaele.

Allied soldiers of all ranks found rest and relaxation in the town of Poperinge, several miles west of Ypres.

Talbot House, widely known as Toc H, was founded as an "Everyman's Club" in 1915. It became a centre of Christian inspiration thanks to the tireless efforts of Philip "Tubby" Clayton, an ebullient army chaplain.

Thousands of British Tommies passed through Toc H on their way from or to the frontline. Many took their first, and last, Holy Communion in the atmospheric attic chapel.

Others were shot by military firing squad for desertion in the courtyard of Poperinge's prison. Graffiti written by despairing men still adorns the walls of the two "death cells".

Langemarck, the only German military cemetery on the Ypres Salient, has 44,292 bodies buried among oak trees. Four impressive figures of mourners by the Munich sculptor Emil Krieger watch over the graves. I noticed a wreath from Year Ten, Millthorpe School, York.

This cemetery, with its rosy sandstone entrance, is more melancholy than the colourful Commonwealth military cemeteries with their flowers, green manicured lawns and white headstones hewn from Portland stone.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission expected interest in the First World War to wane from the 1960s as the numbers of those who fought in the "war to end all wars" declined. Yet interest in the Great War has never been greater.

The war dominates the lives of an enthusiastic band of amateur archaeologists known as the Diggers. Every Saturday, armed with spades, they seek war artefacts and the remains of soldiers. It is a race against the bulldozers for industrial estates are being built on the outskirts of Ypres and there are controversial plans to extend the A19 motorway along Pilckem Ridge where the German army used gas in 1915.

Retired teacher Aurel Sercu, a spokesmen for the Diggers, denied they were battlefield scavengers. He said: "Our aim is to rescue what is left. We don't want the bones of dead soldiers to be tossed about by bulldozers."

At Boezinge, about three miles from Ypres, the Diggers have uncovered a German concrete bunker. Artefacts recovered from the site while I was there included a rusty bayonet and an ink bottle, which reminded me that the First World War inspired great poetry, including In Flanders Fields.

Lt Col John McCrae, who served as a doctor in the Canadian army, wrote this poem, which made the red poppy a durable symbol of self-sacrifice in war.

A German-built bunker still stands next to the Essex Farm Cemetery (1,185 graves). It was used by the Allies as a dressing station and McCrae composed his poem there after a friend was killed and buried beneath a temporary wooden cross where poppies were blooming.

McCrae succumbed to pneumonia and meningitis in 1918, aged 46. He was one of a million men from the British Empire who died in the First World War.

FACT FILE

Rail: GNER, York to Kings Cross, London. Eurostar, Waterloo to Lille.

Hotels: Rubens At The Palace Hotel, near Buckingham Palace, London. Superbreak reservations: 08705 992993. Novotel, Ypres. Hotel Ariane, Ypres.

Restaurants: Gasthof De Kring, Burgemeester Bertenplain, Poperinge. Old Tom Restaurant, Market Square, Ypres.

Further details from Tourism Flanders-Brussels, 31 Pepper Street, London E14 9RW

Updated: 09:03 Saturday, April 20, 2002