Wipers (Ypres)

Parris was indeed a beautiful city. Rather than the huge monuments of the Effiel Tower and Notre Dame I hugely enjoyed sitting in the grubby bars having cups of coffee. Thats not to say Raphaels religous scenes weren’t cool also the early Iranian and Egyptian antiquities were spectacular. So we spent time today looking at the the New Zealand involvement in the battles around Ypres, I was pleased to see a relative of mine marked on the Messines Memorial to the missing.
- David Satherley.

Today we’ve seen a staggering amount of graves and monuments. We did our second haka today at the Messines Memorial which was again pretty powerful. It’s kind of amazing how flat this country is – we drove past a slight mound, perhaps a little higher than the height difference between the field and the art block at school, and people were putting on their hiking boots to go walking up it! It just reinforces how important these little ‘ridges’ – slightly higher rolls of rolling countryside – were. In talking other guys on these battlefields and cemetaries, it has become apparent to all of us just how terrifying it would have been to fight in the middle of these featureless fields that would have been even more featureless when churned up with mud and dust. Myself, I really just can’t take in seeing 20, 30 and 40 thousand men buried under your feet. These cemetaries aren’t neccessarily sad places to be, but when you think about what the place would look like with 40,000 men standing up with all their families and their descendants it’s quite overwhelming. The Menin Gate ceremony tonight went very well.