`In Flanders Fields'

Author: By Phyllis Meras, Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, November 8, 1998

Page: M6

Section: Travel

From 1914 to 1918, on the Ieper Salient, the arc-shaped Allied front around the medieval town, half a million soldiers died -- 250,000 of them soldiers of the British Empire. In Tyne Cot Cemetery in neighboring Paschendaele, the largest British military cemetery in the world, more than 11,000 soldiers, principally from the British Isles, New Zealand, and Australia, are buried, and a wall stands bearing the names of 34,957 others killed or missing in action in the area. At the end of Ieper's main street, on the Menen Gate, are 54,896 more names of missing British soldiers. ``A more sacred place for the British race does not exist in the whole world,'' Winston Churchill said of Ieper.

Here, for the first time in the history of warfare, poison gas was used, dispatched by the Germans toward the Allied trenches, intended not necessarily to kill but to make the enemy so sick that its soldiers could no longer fight.

The new museum is housed in the former Cloth Hall, built from 1260 to 1304, and the largest nonecclesaistical Gothic structure in Europe until it was virtually destroyed in the First World War. But it was painstakingly reconstructed, as was the neighboring cathedral. For years, there has been a Remembrance Museum in it, but the new museum has been designed to make one personally see and hear and feel what crossing no man's land and trembling in a trench were like.

At the museum entrance, on a marble memorial, the names of cities of this century most destroyed by war are listed -- Beirut, Berlin, Coventry, Dresden, Hiroshima, Ieper, Leningrad, Nagasaki, Rotterdam, Sarajevo, Stalingrad, Verdun, and Warsaw.

Inside, one first hears a sprightly 18th-century English folk ballad. The ditty seeks to get across to visitors for how many centuries low-lying, centrally situated Flanders has been a bloody battleground.

Will ye go to Flnders, my Mally-o??

Will ye go to Flanders, my bonny Mally-o?

There we'll get wine and brandy

Sack and sugar candy

O, will ye go to Flanders, my Mally-o?

You'll see the bullets fly

And you'll her the ladies cry.

And the soldiers how they die, my Mally-o.

Then one sees headlines of French newspapers, Belgian papers, English papers announcing the start of World War I: ``Heir to Austria's Throne Killed in Sarajevo,'' ``La Guerre, La Guerre, La Guerre,'' ``Kaiser Declares a State of War.``

The visitor reads of the German invasion of Belgium in August 1914; of how on this Western Front, the French, the Belgians, and the British fought and died in the mud and muck of trench warfare.

But, in this very moving museum, one also hears a friendly exchange between German and English soldiers during a 10-day 1914 Christmas cease-fire -- ``Hello, Tommy,'' ``Hello, Fritz'' -- and learns that on that frosty moonlight night young Germans and young Englishmen alike lit candles and Christmas trees and propped them on parapets so each could enjoy the other's celebration. During this Christmas peace, the Germans gave the British cigars and sausages; the British gave the Germans plum pudding and tinned beef and apple jam. The two sides passed family photos back and forth between the front lines.

But then the cease-fire was over.

The next entry emblazoned on a wall quotes Captain Julian Grenfell of the 1st Royal Dragoons recounting that ``the German put his head up again. He was laughing and talking. I saw his teeth glistening against my rifle sight and I pulled the trigger very slowly. He just grunted and crumpled up. . . . I adore war. It's just like a big picnic without the objectlessness of a picnic.''

There is also, however, the handwritten poem of Pfc. J. J. U.:

Lord God, I have never spoken to You

But now I want to say ``How do You do?''

You see, God, they told me You didn't exist,

And like a fool I believed all this.

Last night from a shell hole I saw your sky

And figured they had told me a lie.

Had I taken time to see things You made

I'd have known they weren't calling a spade a spade.

Well, I have to go now, God goodbye,

Strange, since I met You, I'm not afraid to die.

A young male voice reads Royal Candian Medical Corps officer John McCrae's poem ``In Flanders Fields,'' published in 1915, three years before his own death on the battlefield.

Another voice recites from poet Wilfred Owen's recollection of the death throes of a comrade unable to affix his gas mask quickly enough. There is a descripton of gassed soldiers, naked, in a room, that seems almost to presage the gassing of concentation camp inmates in World War II.

The museum reverberates with the sound of shellfire, horses' hooves, shovels digging trenches, the song of twittering birds.

An Englishwoman's voice asks, ``Did you see my boy after he died? I sent him a package in August. Share it with his friends.''

One learns that birds and cats and dogs were popular pets with the lonely soldiers. There is such memorabilia of the war as miniature tanks made from scrap metal, shell cases, helmets, medals, last letters home.

For those who dare to cross it, the museum has a reconstruction of a no man's land -- the strip of ground between the front-line trenches of the opposing armies. These were fortified with jagged tree stumps and barbed wire and popular with hungry rats. The museum visitor ``crosses'' in semi-darkness and hears the sound of rats gnawing on the bodies of dead men and dead horses. There is the drip-drip-drip of water in a shell hole (sometimes they were so deep, men drowned in them); the voice of a soldier cries out, ``I am dying in Hell.'' Shadowy soldier figures are hunched here and there, crying.

An exhibit on the heroism of the International Red Cross in World War I tells of the execution by the Germans of English nurse Edith Cavell for harboring and aiding Allied prisoners; of the generosity of American neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing, who volunteered to work with the British Army at Ieper. The visitor learns that fatalities from head wounds greatly decreased after the introduction of steel helmets in 1915; that anthrax, tetanus, and gas gangrene were the most prevalent infections of the war. There is a pocket-sized photo of a German soldier with virtually no face who was sent back to the front after plastic surgery.

``In Flanders Fields'' is a museum that, like ``Saving Private Ryan,'' leaves the viewer numb. One hopes such numbness will be transformed into an active determination to, once and for all, end the carnage.

``In Flanders Fields'' Museum is open April through September daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. From October through March, hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesdays to Sundays.

For more information, write to the Belgian Tourist Office, 780 Third Ave., New York, NY 10017, or call 212-758-8130.