Bruges

So, what do you know about Belgium?  Before this past weekend I probably would have gone with they make good beer and chocolate.  Those are both accurate statements but there is so much more to know and appreciate about the lovely country of Belgium.

A frozen canal in Bruges

Don't forget to look up!  Much more attractive than Winnipeg's Skywalk!

Bruges is a very pretty little medieval town built around a canal system.  I would basically describe it as what you think a medieval European town would look like...picture perfect little streets and lanes that meander back into each other or mysteriously go nowhere at all.  Oh yes, and several giant churches.  Nothing like commissioning a giant cathedral or two to really let the world know you have arrived!  I was particularly enamored of the coloured glass -- usually green but sometimes pink -- stained glass windows adorn many of the houses throughout the town centre.

I never really had much interest in history at school and I honestly can't remember ever learning anything about World War I.  There are the names of certain battles: Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, Ypres.  But these are simply names of places that I wouldn't have been able to locate on a map (I probably wouldn't even have gotten the country right).  In the span of 4 years, half a million people, mostly boys in their late teens and early twenties, died in an area little more than 5 square miles.  To put that in perspective, it is an area about the size of my Uncle's farm in Saskatchewan.  The Germans were able to transport their dead back to Germany for burial.  The Allies had no such luxury as their soldiers were from all corners of the earth: from the Scottish Highlands to the islands of New Zealand.  So, the Allied dead are buried, more or less, where they fell in cemetery after cemetery after cemetery.  A large number of the dead were never accounted for as their bodies were quickly claimed by the sucking clay bog that the relentless shelling and endless rain of those years created.

Every Canadian child learns a little bit about Belgium going through school thanks to John McCrae's poem about Flanders' famous poppies. On Sunday I actually stood in front of the bunker where he wrote it. I don't mind telling you that, having just spent seven hours going from battlefield to cemetery to trench, I had a trouble fighting back a few tears.

In Flanders fields, the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead, short days ago,

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved, and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields!

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands, we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields!