Driving through northern Flanders, the flat, agricultural farmland is dotted with cemeteries, a visual reminder of the bloodshed that unfolded here a century ago.
Around the Ypres area alone there are more than 130 cemeteries run by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the resting place of thousands of men who fought on the allied side in the first World War.
Today, visitors and tour groups quietly move among the gravestones looking for lost loved ones, or silently paying respect to the unnamed individuals that are “known only to God”, as their gravestones state.
Accents from across the English-speaking world drift through the air – snatches of Canadian, Australian, Irish voices indicate the wide geographical reach of the devastating war.
Six kilometres north of Ypres is the Langemark German cemetery. Here , the resting place of 44,000 German soldiers , the atmosphere is subtly different. The cemetery is empty of visitors on this late-October day. Visually, the graveyard differs from the nearby Commonwealth graveyards, the signature rows of white crosses replaced by small, black marble slabs and a “Comrades Grave’” containing the remains of 24,000 soldiers.
The cemetery, which began as a small group of graves in 1915, was redeveloped in the 1930s when the remains of about 10,000 German soldiers were collected from 18 German burial sites around the region.
Hitler visited the cemetery in 1940 after the Nazi occupation of Belgium.
Also known as the "Student Cemetery", it is the resting place of about 3,000 student volunteers, who left Germany as teenagers to fight in the opening months of the first World War.
Accounts from the time recall that the German students, with just six weeks of training, faced their enemy with arms linked and singing patriotic songs, before being mowed down by allied forces.
‘Soulless logic’
On Tuesday, German chancellor Angela Merkel took another step in confronting the painful legacy of Germany's involvement in the first World War. Addressing representatives from more than 80 countries at a ceremony in Nieuwpoort in Belgium, the chancellor recalled the "soulless, military logic" that drove German generals in 1914. "The standards of civilisation were suddenly rendered null and void. Nationalism clouded all judgment."
Almost 90 years after the Treaty of Versailles sowed the seeds of German resentment by ascribing responsibility for the first World War to Germany, Merkel acknowledged her country’s actions in Belgium. “As German chancellor I consider it a special honour to have been asked to speak to you considering all that has happened, all the sufferings inflicted by Germans on Belgians in two world wars starting with the invasion of Belgium by troops of the German Reich in 1914.”
While the presence of the chancellor was a powerful symbol of reconciliation, the event also included voices from the front. Three letters and eyewitness accounts of the war were read by descendents of the authors.
The first was a letter from a German soldier, Robert Pöhland, to his wife in Bremen. "My faithful and beloved wife: My fond memories are destroyed by a terrible image I've just seen. A half hour away from here, the Belgians shelled an outpost held by our troops. Two men were seriously wounded and three were slightly wounded. The serious casualties were immediately evacuated right before our eyes. It was a horrible sight to see. They were just lying there uncovered, on a stretcher. Under these circumstances, I'm afraid that I might go mad . . . Why don't they end this murderous madness in any way they can?"
‘Slimy gangways’
Another account from a Brussels doctor, Dr Maurice Duwez, describes an assault on October 22nd, 1914. "Everything was mown down, bodies falling on top of each other. Wounded men would slip off the slimy gangways and disappear into the mud below. Our post is in a small cowshed [...]Everyone with whom we had endured so many hardships is now coming back maimed and bloody, their uniforms torn to shreds. Almost the entire battalion has been wiped out . . . And so it goes on. The plains continue to return their victims to us."
The final excerpt, from the diary of Ghent publisher Raoul Snoeck, is a vivid account of conditions in the early months of the war. "We are desperate and have not eaten or drink anything for three days . . . We sleep next to friends killed in combat and we do not have the strength or energy to bury them . . . Despite everything we remain at our posts. What else can we do?"
As commemorative events to mark the first World War continue over the next four years, it is voices like these that have the power to speak to people across borders and nations.