33 Members in 17 Astons converged on the hotel at Kemmelberg for our Area 10 WW1 tour. The hotel was situated on one of the few hills in Flanders, overlooking beautiful countryside. On our first evening we had a drinks reception with Soren our excellent guide who told us what we would be experiencing in his company the next day. It would have been impractical to marshal 17 cars and so Soren had arranged for a coach to take us to a series of key sites whilst providing an informative and sometimes amusing commentary on what we were seeing.
He told the story of the conflict with fascinating detail as we stopped off at about eight varied sites. We could visualise the scale of the fighting and the losses. We stopped to visit a ridge where the allies tunnelled under the German trenches and planted explosive mines, the explosion of which was said to have been heard in Whitehall. On to Messines where the famous Christmas truce of 1914 was marked by both a statue and a UEFA monument reflecting the supposed football match between the opposing troops in no-man’s land.
At the Berkshire Cemetery extension, we visited the 1915 grave of Ronald Poulton-Palmer, the England Rugby captain who led England to the Grand Slam in the 1913-14 season.
After an excellent lunch, we visited the Tyne Cot Cemetery where my grandfather William John Sears is commemorated – the memorial wall, consisting of some 150 panels, holds about 35,000 names of missing men whose names would not fit on the Menin Gate.
At the Hill 62 Memorial we could experience original trenches and tunnels, and a museum with many WW1 artefacts.
Our tour concluded in the evening in Ypres – after taking the opportunity of exploring St Martin’s Cathedral and St Georges Memorial Church, the group assembled at the Menin Gate for the Last Post ceremony which commences nightly at 8pm.
The following day most people visited either Bruges or Ghent dodging showers around lunchtime before returning to the hotel for another excellent meal with great service.