Letter excerpt from 2008 trip about Ypres: Next morning we left for Ypres. Ypres is beautiful, of course, with architecture dating from the 1300’s through the 18^th century, but it was quite clear from the information we gathered from the museum that most of it had been rebuilt after WWI. Ypres was the death ground of 100,000 (!) of its British, Commonwealth & Belgian defenders. The museum that we saw had a huge and very interesting exhibition showing how many countries were involved in that terrible war. Somehow, we had never really understood how universal that war was. It also had a number of permanent exhibits about the war, including one room in which shells went off and there was a tremendous amount of yelling and confusion – to simulate life in the trenches.

There were a tremendous number of tourists in Ypres – including many groups of school children, some from Belgium, but others from Britain and other European countries. They went through the museum as well as the arch which lists 35,000 soldiers from all over the world who were killed but whose bodies were never found. After our visit to the city, we went to find the Yorkshire trenches – which were found not too long ago. The outside trench is all that can be seen, but they found an entire encampment 30 meters under the earth. A large group of school children on bikes was there before us!