If It's 3:15, It Must Be the Menin Gate
06 September 2003
    
   Ieper (Ypres) in a Day
Taking a day trip to Ieper is an ambitious undertaking.  The day began at 4:30 and 
we got home at midnight.  In all we spent 3 and a half hours exploring Ieper, which gave rise
to conversations such as, "Well, we've got 17 minutes to enjoy a quiet lunch, then
we can spend one hour and 15 minutes in the museum, and after that . . . ".  Still, it was
a lot easier doing it from Horsham than from Clifton Park, NY.
      

Ieper (or, Ypres, in the French spelling and pronounced
either as 'eep,' eeps,' yeeps,' or, by the British
soldiers in WWI, 'Wipers) is a small, medieval city
that was at the front lines for four long years during
World War I.  The entire town was, literally, flattened.
I don't mean 'literally' in the figurative sense, either,
it was, by the end of the war, reduced to a pile of
rubble.  Even the surrounding forests were mowed down
by the continual barrage of cannon, mortar and machine
gun fire.  It was said that an officer sitting on his horse in the
market square could see the entire city, it was that flat.

After the war, there was some debate
concerning what to do with Ieper.  Some
wanted to leave it was it was as a monument
to the Great War and the millions of dead, others
thought to rebuild a modern city on the ruins,
but, in the end, they simply rebuilt it as an exact
duplicate of what it once was. 

   
Rebuilt Cloth Market in the Grand Square.

Through a fortunate stroke of luck, they had the plans
for the city and, although it never said this in anything
I read about it, I have to assume that had lots of building
materials lying around.  In any event, they rebuilt
the city so that it can hardly be distinguished from
what it looked like before the War.

A new addition was the Menin Gate.  This mammoth
structure contains the names of over 50,000
soldiers who fought in the war but whose bodies
were never given a proper burial.  Many were left, out of
necessity, rotting in no-man's land, others were blown to
bits in explosions and others simply vanished in the
battles, never to be seen again.  The names on these walls
recall members of armies from all over the world.

   
Privates F and T Harling from Lancashire, died in the
Great War; their bodies were never found.

It is a large structure, on many levels with
many walls covered in names.  On one section,
labeled 'Lancashire Regiment,' I found two
missing soldiers with the name of Harling.

On such a beautiful sunny day, walking along the
walls that surround the old city, it is difficult to imagine
the destruction and carnage that was the daily life in
Ieper for four hellish years.  To think, after all that, that
the survivors had enough will, enough hope for the future
and enough faith in their fellow man to rebuild is an
astonishing tribute to the human spirit.
Let's not forget.