It’s just 10 pm and I have just gotten to my hotel room. I stayed in Ieper (I learned from the material that the British call it “Wipes”) and had dinner there — pepper steak (with fries, of course). Also in the material was info about a group of Ieper buglers who perform “Last Post” at 8 pm. I got to the place about 7:55 and while I could hear them, the huge crowd meant I couldn’t see them. I probably needed to have been there about 20 minutes earlier. It was nice, however. The British built a huge war memorial to all those whose remains were not recovered. The “Menin Gate” goes over the road on the way into the center of town. The gate is about 50′ tall, three lanes wide, and about 100′ long inside — kind of like a tunnel. Inscribed on all the walls are about 55,000 names of the missing. The buglers stood inside the gate so their sound echoed in the gate. Quite impressive.
On the way out of town headed back to Kortrijk, I passed several more British cemeteries but didn’t stop until I saw a sign for “The Scottish Stone”. For that I turned off the road. First, I found another big British monument to a group of “miners” who were killed underground. These were tunnel builders who would tunnel underneath German lines and plant huge caches of explosives (mines) which would be blown up at the start of an attack to open up ways though the lines. Very interesting. My brochure talked about an attack that started with 21 tunnels and mines being laid. “They ended in small rooms where thousands of kilograms of explosives were brought. Two of the 21 mines did not explode; the 20th mine exploded during a thunderstorm on July 19th 1955. The last mine is still keeping it’s explosion a secret.” One of these craters is now a park called “The Pool of Peace.”
A bit further on was the memorial to the Scotts for an ill-fated charge in which 2/3rds of them were killed.
From there it was back to the hotel for the night. A very interesting day!
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