The Battle of Passchendaele is one of the major battles of WW1, first edged on my consciousness through the harrowing war poetry I studied in school.
“I died in hell –
(They called it Passchendaele).”
Siegfried Sassoon
More than 300,000 allied soldiers died in the 2017 Battle of Passchendaele, many drowning in mud. Other soldiers returned without feet. Tyne Cot Cemetery is at the site of Passchendaele and is the largest Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in the world. Passchendaele was the first WW1 site on our trail and I immediately realised we would have to revise our itinerary to allow more time for reflection. (We ended up missing Versailles. It was going to be hard to stomach the self-aggrandisement of the ‘Sun King’ and subsequent French kings, after thinking about the suffering on the trenches).
The trenches of Passchendaele have been replicated at the near-by museum and it is possible to walk through, giving an idea of the otherwise unimaginable living conditions of the soldiers.
Tyne Cot Cemetery, Passchendaele Museum and other sites are part of the ‘Legacy’ cycle route and we talked to a Belgium couple doing the route at our accommodation over breakfast. It is easy to hire bicycles and if we were to do the trip again, we would probably include time for this.