During the First World War, the battlefields of Flanders saw thousands upon thousands die in some of the worst trench warfare ever experienced, including mortar fire and poison gas attack. The center of much of this fighting was the town of Ieper. The town never fell into the hands of the Germans, but it did fall to their bombs. By the end of the war, the town was completely demolished and the surviving residents spread throughout the countryside.

Within four years of the war, however, the town was completely rebuilt (while the Allies were still debating how to make the town into a memorial to those lost).

We visited the museum which remembers the War and the fighting that took place here. The museum is called the In Flanders Fields Museum after the poem of the same name. It was this poem that immortalized the fighting here and helped to make poppies the international symbol of warfare and veterans. It seems that poppies grow best in freshly turned soil, such as after a heavy artillery bombardment and that the fields of Flanders would be covered with them while the war was fought.

The museum was powerful and well done, bringing alive the horror that is war.

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