Chapter 22

Ten Enlightening Places to Visit

In This Chapter

Visiting unmissable museums

Exploring major battlefields

Paying your respects at memorials to the dead and the missing

If you really want to get to know a period of history, you need to put the books down and get out to see the places where it happened. The best way to get a feel for the First World War is to visit some of its battlefields and go to museums where you can see the soldiers’ weapons and clothing and the personal things they left behind. Reading about the distance men had to cover to get to the enemy line is all very well, but you can understand it much more if you go to the spot and see the distance for yourself. And don’t underestimate the power of memorials to bring home the appalling human cost of the war.

This chapter offers my own selection of places that you can visit – museums, battle sites and memorials that give you a sense of what things were like in the dark days of the war. (One important point, though: live shells, grenades and other explosives still sometimes surface on First World War battlefields. If you find one, never touch it. Just report it immediately to the local authorities.)

The Imperial War Museum, London

The Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London, England, is the must-see museum for anyone interested in the First World War. It began life in 1917 with a mission to tell the story of Britain and its empire in the war – hence the name. Since 1936 it’s been housed in the elegant former Bethlehem (or ‘Bethlem’) Hospital, the mental hospital that gave us the word ‘Bedlam’, a suitable setting for a museum devoted to the story of modern warfare, you might think. Nowadays the IWM is a major centre for research on the First World War with unrivalled collections of manuscripts, photographs, films and audio recordings as well as an extensive collection of exhibits. If you can’t make it to anywhere else, this is the place to come.

The Military History Museum, Vienna

The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand that triggered the war still haunts people’s imagination. What if the driver hadn’t turned right? Or if Gavrilo Princip had missed his target? How different might the world have been?

You can go and contemplate these might-have-beens at Vienna’s Heeresgeschichtliches Museum (that’s the Military History Museum) by standing in front of the actual car the Archduke was riding in on that fateful June day in 1914. All sorts of outlandish tales get told about what happened to this car. It’s supposed to have brought bad luck to its subsequent owners, to have been painted blood red and to have been destroyed by a direct hit in a Second World War bombing raid. Well, you can go and see it and when you do you’ll see that it’s a) still black, and b) still there.

Vienna was the vibrant cultural centre of Europe before 1914, so visiting Franz Ferdinand’s car gives you a good opportunity to get a feel for the city of the Habsburg monarchy, where the First World War had its origins.

In Flanders Fields, the Cloth Hall, Ypres

The ruined medieval Cloth Hall in Ypres, Belgium, became a symbol of defiance for the British stationed in the famous salient. After the war the Cloth Hall was rebuilt and its second floor now contains a large exhibition on life in the trenches, named after John McCrae’s famous poem, ‘In Flanders Fields’. Ypres is also a very good base for visiting the nearby cemeteries and memorials such as Tyne Cot, Passchendaele and Messines. Make sure you catch the large German cemetery at Langemarck too, and the moving Last Post ceremony at the Menin Gate.

Gallipoli

Visit Gallipoli, and see how hopeless the Allied position really was back in 1915. Today, of course, the whole area is studded with war cemeteries and memorials, and plenty of tour companies can take you round them. Highlights include the Helles memorial at the southern end of the peninsula and the famous Beach Cemetery farther up the coast in the ANZAC section. Gallipoli, in modern-day Turkey, is sacred ground to Australians and New Zealanders, though a visit to the cemeteries reminds you that most of the Allied troops were from Britain. If you want to know what a killing ground looks like, Gallipoli gives you a very good idea.

Edith Cavell Memorial, London

Edith Cavell was a British nurse working in Brussels at the time of the German occupation. She treated Allied and German servicemen equally, but the Germans arrested and shot her for her role in helping some 200 Allied soldiers to escape. Her story was used during the war as a propaganda example of ‘Hun beastliness’ and memorials to her were erected all over Britain. The dignified memorial outside the National Portrait Gallery in London tells a rather different story, however. It carries the words she spoke to a priest the day before her execution: ‘Patriotism is not enough; I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone.’ Not a message many wanted to hear in 1915 but a very relevant one today.

Historial de la Grande Guerre, Verdun

So taken up are the British with the Somme that they tend to forget Verdun, the epic battle that came close to draining France dry. In the forested heart of what was once a nightmare landscape stands a simple and rather beautiful 1960s building that houses the museum and study centre commemorating what for the French was the defining battle of the war. It has a large collection of artefacts from the fighting, giving a chilling view of what combat in the trenches was really like. All First World War battlefields tend to be sobering, but for sheer sacrifice and slaughter Verdun is still awe-inspiring, and many French people see visiting it as a sort of pilgrimage. It is.

Beaumont Hamel

To really understand the First World War you need to get into the open and explore the battle sites, and no tour of First World War sites is complete without a visit to the Somme battlefields of northern France. The area is studded with beautiful cemeteries such as the South African memorial at Delville Wood and the small cemetery that marks the trench where the men of the Devonshire Regiment fell on the opening day: ‘The Devonshires held this trench,’ runs the slogan; ‘the Devonshires hold it still.’

One of the best places to get a sense of what the Battle of the Somme was like is at a place called Beaumont Hamel, where you find a memorial park dedicated to the memory of the men of Newfoundland who died there, and a large statue of a Canadian caribou greets visitors as they arrive. The park has a section of trench lines preserved including a great crater caused by a mine. It’s pretty big now; just think how big it was then.

Beaumont Hamel offers the chance to get a feel for the way the fighting went in 1916 and to appreciate the sacrifice made by the men who fought and died there.

Thiepval

If you’re visiting the Somme, make time for Thiepval. It’s not very far from Beaumont Hamel in fact, but what earns it a separate mention here is the large, elegant memorial arch inscribed with over 72,000 names. Seventy-two thousand. But these aren’t just the dead: these are the missing – the men whose bodies were never found and are still out there somewhere, or else they were so blown to pieces that no one could identify them. The memorial is a beautiful and dignified one, and somehow it brings the sheer scale of the losses in that terrible battle home more acutely than any other.

The Brighton Chattri

High up on the rolling Sussex Downs above Brighton you might think you’re in the most typically English rural scene when suddenly you see a marble dome upheld by pillars. If you think it looks vaguely eastern, you’d be right: this is Brighton’s chattri, which is Hindi for ‘umbrella’. The chattri is where the Indian Hindu soldiers who died in the special hospital for Indians set up in Brighton’s Royal Pavilion were taken to be cremated in the open air, according to Hindu custom. Nowadays the Brighton chattri is a memorial: a place to remember all those Indians – Hindu, Muslim, Parsi and Christian – who travelled halfway around the world to fight and die for Britain. Every year, British and Indian ex-servicemen and the local community stage a pilgrimage to the chattri, to honour these men. An unusual memorial, perhaps, but a very fitting tribute.

The Sleeping Soldier, Munich

Every war memorial tells a story, but few tell quite such a momentous tale as the recumbent figure on the war memorial in Munich, in south-west Germany. It shows a German soldier in full uniform lying on a slab, holding his rifle, a bit like a 20th-century equivalent of a medieval knight’s tomb. But then you notice something about him: he’s not dead, he’s sleeping. And if your German’s up to it, you’ll understand the slogan, ‘Siewerdenauferstehen’, and give a grim smile. It means: ‘They will rise again’. And, boy, did they do it.