Falling in Love with a Belgian....waffle: An Image in Ypres

Our class is studying resistance movements in World War II, so on class trips we experience and cover a heavy subject matter.

In brief: The first class trip we took was to Ypres, Belgium, commonly pronounced Wipers by both the English and by our class. We visited two museum and two cemeteries. As much as I probably should have remembered the details of each museum and cemetery, I don't. My memory of the day is simply one image.

Langemark German Military Cemetery, Belgium.

By the time we arrived, I was tired of walking around museums and tired of looking at gravestones. It was a lot to grasp in one day. The sky was gray and misty, and this graveyard, unlike the previous British cemetery, Tyne Cot, was dark and gloomy. The stones were black, and I'm still picturing them as moldy. There were trees looming over the gravestones, and tourists walking in and out of the rows.

We stood right near the entrance, at the grave called the “Kameraden Grab”, the Comrades Grave. It was a small grave filled with twenty-five thousand, unidentified bodies.

Hitler also stood at the foot of that grave.

Let that one sink in.