IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE ANZACS

Take a tour through the World War I battlegrounds of northern France and Belgium to show your respects this Anzac Day.

AUSTRALIANS REMEMBER THE war on the Western Front a little differently from most Europeans. For the Belgians and French, this torturous World War I campaign represents an invasion that was only reversed when other nations came to their aid. For the Germans it was a terrible, historic defeat. But Australians crossed the world to join a war they helped to win — and, while the European nations took many of their dead home to the lands in which they were born, those same Australians, like other Commonwealth troops, were buried where they fell.

There are more than 40,000 fallen Anzacs commemorated across the former battlegrounds of northern France and Belgium; row upon row of well-ordered white gravestones on prim green lawns that contrast to the terror and chaos of the four-year conflict that came to be known as the Great War.

For many years it was financially impossible for Australian families to visit these sites; instead, war memorials were built at the crossroads of country towns to give families a place to mourn. But now that airfares are within reach, these cemeteries take on a new significance. Meticulously maintained, they serve as a piece of visible history, and a place to honour those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

The $95 million Sir John Monash Centre, opening this month in France, is Australia’s latest memorial to the war dead, set in fields near Villers-Bretonneux (or ‘VB’). This impressive centre is devoted to retelling the story of the Anzacs on the Western Front, and marks the end of the Australian Remembrance Trail, which runs 200 kilometres through western Belgium and northern France.

Travellers can begin their Anzac pilgrimage at the city of Ypres in Belgium, following the front line as it stood in April 1917 through museums, cemeteries and memorials close to battle sites with familiar names — Passchendaele, Fromelles, Bullecourt — then tracing the River Somme to VB and Amiens.

The distances between key sites are generally short, and a determined driver could complete the trail in two days, but set aside a week to soak up the history of this small pocket of Europe where more than 295,000 Australians fought and 46,000 died between March 1916 and November 1918.

Ypres ( named ‘ Wipers’ by British troops) was razed to the ground in three battles, culminating in the 1917 Battle of Passchendaele, when Anzacs fought alongside allied troops to recapture nearby Passchendaele Ridge. Winston

Churchill wanted Ypres to be left as a ruin, a warning against war, but its majestic medieval and renaissance streets were reconstructed. The grand Cloth Hall, one of the largest commercial buildings of the Middle Ages, is now home to the In Flanders Fields Museum, which offers an excellent introduction to the West Flanders campaign.

A short walk from the museum is the Menin Gate Memorial, where enormous arches bear the names of almost 55,000 Commonwealth soldiers who died in the Ypres Salient and whose bodies have never been found. Every night at 8pm, the gate is blocked to traffic and a bugler solemnly sounds the Last Post.

In Ploegsteert near Ypres, the simple and sombre Plugstreet 14–18 Experience (for ‘Plugstreet’ is how the diggers styled the place) is close to the site of the famous Christmas Truce of 1914, when French, British and German troops cast down their weapons and took a break from fighting to recover their dead, exchange gifts, and play the odd friendly game of soccer in No Man’s Land.

The truce has its own monument, erected by the Union of European Football Associations ( UEFA), where scores of soccer fans have left behind balls, flags and scarves. The nearby Toronto Avenue Cemetery is the only all-Australian cemetery in Belgium. Deer roam the woods around the graveyard, where meaty mushrooms grow like cushions from the ground.

The Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917, housed in a rebuilt Normandy-style villa near Zonnebeke, is a fine institution set among peaceful memorial gardens. From the grounds, you can see the remains of Captain Oliver Woodward’s dugout, made famous by the 2010 Australian movie Beneath Hill 60. The Passchendaele museum offers the unusual experience of a ‘gas smelling station’, where visitors can experience the odours of chemical weapons such as mustard gas, chlorine gas and phosgene. Its collection includes an interesting selection of rarely seen bawdy wartime postcards, and a strangely beautiful gallery of different coloured shells. But its showpiece is a large and life-sized network of detailed replica trenches, through which museum-goers can stride and duck.

The local Tyne Cot Cemetery is the largest cemetery for Commonwealth forces in the world, for any war. Regulations meant that every single man, regardless of his rank, had to have a headstone of the same size, carved from Portland stone and bearing an inscription of no more than 66 letters. At the start of the war, families were coldly charged three-and-a-half pence per letter for engraving a message to their son, but the charge was eventually rendered voluntary.

In nearby Polygon Wood stands a memorial to the Fifth Australian Division, which sustained 5500 dead and wounded at the Battle of Fromelles in July 1916. In 2009, archaeologists discovered the remains of 250 British and Australian soldiers. An appeal was made for DNA from anyone who might be related to the fallen and, one by one, about 150 of the bodies have been identified. History is still in the making at the Museum of the Battle of Fromelles, which aims to gather the stories of each soldier who, in the words of a newly carved tombstone, ‘once was lost but now [is] found’. The statue Cobbers, by Melbourne sculptor Peter Corlett, looks out over the Australian Memorial Park in Fromelles. There is a small family museum at Bullecourt, where Australian troops fought in April–May 1917, and Corlett’s The Bullecourt Digger statue guards the former battlefield.

At Villers-Bretonneux, the Franco-Australian Museum was built by locals in gratitude for the Australian military effort on 24–25 April (yes, Anzac Day) 1918, when the diggers pushed the Germans out of town. Attached to the museum is the Victoria School, which was part-funded by Victorian children who were encouraged by their education department’s War Relief Fund to donate a penny each.

The trail concludes at the new Sir John Monash Centre, conceived as an extension of the Australian National Memorial, which has been on the site since 1938. The centre is not just a memorial to the life and impressive career of Monash, often described as Australia’s greatest military commander, but to the lives of all the Australians who fought and died here.

When you see the endless rows of identical tombstones at Tyne Cot, there’s only one lesson to take away: nothing like this can be allowed to happen again. But the Nazi German bullet scars that pockmark the tower at the Australian National Memorial testify to the solemn fact that it did. Only one year after the opening of the memorial, the Second World War began, the German Army rolled back into Belgium and France, and Australian troops made ready to help defend Europe once again.

GETTING THERE VIRGIN AUSTRALIA OFFERS FLIGHTS TO BELGIUM AND FRANCE WITH ITS CODESHARE PARTNERS ETIHAD AIRWAYS AND SINGAPORE AIRLINES. TO BOOK, VISIT WWW.VIRGINAUSTRALIA.COM OR CALL 13 67 89 (IN AUSTRALIA).

Bistrot Dit Vin

THIS PAGE

The Menin Gate Memorial at Ypres honours the Commonwealth soldiers killed in Belgium who have no known resting place. OPPOSITE PAGE, CLOCKWISE

FROM LEFT Names of missing in action soldiers inscribed on the Menin Gate Memorial; World War I artillery shells at the Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917; dining alongside the River Somme, where some of World War I’s bloodiest battles were fought. OPENER, FROM LEFT Tyne Cot Cemetery; today Ypres is a mixture of traditional architecture and cafe culture.