Visiting the WWI Battlefields of Belgium

 

In 2019 my husband and I were lucky to join a guided tour of World War I Battlefields. The war may have ended over a hundred years ago, but the landscape is still scarred by it, and by the war that followed.    That may look like a pond, but it is a shell hole that has filled with water. The landscape is dotted with such features.   These pictures were taken near an area known as Hill 60. If you've ever wondered, the numbers designate meters above sea level. There are four hill 60s, but are in different sectors, so it wasn't confusing to planners during the war. The hill 60 in the Ypres area was subject to a lot of mining, much of it done by Australians. Hundreds of tons of explosives were planted under German emplacements. Much of it (but not all of it) was detonated. When farmers returned to their land after the war, they rebuilt. Some of them didn't know they were rebuilding 90 feet above 20 thousand pounds of unexploded materials. One cache went off in a 1950s thunderstorm, the theory being that plowing had exposed the wires to a lightning strike. Our guide for the day was Ian, a retired soldier from Northern Ireland who has written books on WWI. He led us past old German bunkers, showed us bomb craters 85 feet across, and answered (quite patiently) my thousand questions. Jennifer Bohnhoff is a writer who lives in the mountains of central New Mexico. She is currently working on an historical novel set in New Mexico and France during the time of the Pancho Villa Raid and World War I. You can learn more about her books by signing up for her newsletter here, or visiting her website here.