English is spoken a lot less here than it is in Holland, as my mom discovered. When she ordered a decaffeinated tea, she received a café au lait. A very good café au lait.
Ross already mentioned we went to Vimy Ridge to see the Memorial, but here are a few more shots:
Almost 12,000 names are carved into the monument, and these are the names of the Canadian soldiers in France with no known grave.
We were fortunate enough to get a guided tour through the tunnels constructed by the soldiers in 1916/17. It truly was a moving experience.
The memorial is also worth seeing at night, when it is dramatically lit. All around it was an incredible day.
The next day we drove to Ypres, Belgium, a city flattened by four years of battle from 1914-1918. The city was completely restored to it's medieval architecture after the war, and it is impossible to believe the entire city is less than one hundred years old.
It was in this part of Belgium (Flanders) that John McCrae wrote In Flanders' Fields, and there are endless amounts of cemeteries and monuments commemorating those who died in battle. We visited a few cemeteries including Tyne-Cot, the largest of all the Commonwealth cemeteries. At Tyne Cot, 12,000 graves stand, enclosed by a wall bearing 35,000 names of Commonwealth soldiers with no known graves. This was about one-third of the cemetary:
We also visited the Brooding Soldier monument at Passendale, dedicated to the 2000 Canadians who lost their lives in the first gas attacks.
Most of the battlefields have returned to farmland, but for areas that have remained untouched, the scarred terrain still tells stories exploded grenades and brutal trench warfare.
Lest we forget.
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