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"Flanders Fields"
„Flanders Fields“ is a metaphor
for the area around Ypres in Belgium, in which
Allied and German soldiers died in their hundreds
of thousands in trench warfare during World War
I.
The years of intensive trench fighting
in the “Ypres Salients”, a 25 km wide
stretch of land shaped like a giant bow between
the villages of Langemark and Mesen, left indelible
traces in Flanders. Innumerable shells and gas
bombs transformed this landscape into a see of
mud devoid of buildings, trees or any other vegetation
Today, 90 years later, at first
sight only little of the untold horrors of the
war remains. Apart
from a few bunkers dotted about the landscape,
or shells discovered and put aside along the
roadside by farmers to this day, the area looks
like any other agricultural region of Western
Europe – its only otherwise distinctive
feature are the many war cemeteries.
However, under this surface of normality, the
scars the war inflicted on this landscape are
in many ways still visible or at least imaginable. |
