Zeebrugge, Belgium

Apr. 17, 2023

Belgium is a country of northwestern Europe. It is one of the smallest and most densely populated European countries, and it has been, since its independence in 1830, a representative democracy headed by a hereditary constitutional monarch. Initially, Belgium had a unitary form of government. In the 1980s and ’90s, however, steps were taken to turn Belgium into a federal state with powers shared among the regions of Flanders, Wallonia, and the Brussels-Capital Region.

Here is the flag of Belgium:

Belgium is a country straddling the border between the Romance and Germanic language families of western Europe. With the exception of a small German-speaking population in the eastern part of the country, Belgium is divided between a French-speaking people, called Walloons (approximately one-third of the total population), who are concentrated in the five southern provinces (Hainaut, Namur, Liège, Walloon Brabant, and Luxembourg), and Flemings, a Flemish- (Dutch-) speaking people (more than one-half of the total population), who are concentrated in the five northern and northeastern provinces West Flanders, East Flanders, Flemish Brabant, Antwerp, and Limburg. Just north of the boundary between Walloon Brabant and Flemish Brabant lies the officially bilingual but majority French-speaking Brussels-Capital Region, with approximately one-tenth of the total population.

Belgium has been rich with historical and cultural associations, from the Gothic grandeur of its medieval university and commercial cities and its small, castle-dominated towns on steep-bluffed winding rivers, through its broad traditions in painting and music that marked one of the high points of the northern Renaissance in the 16th century, to its contributions to the arts of the 20th century and its maintenance of the folk cultures of past eras. The Belgian landscape has been a major European battleground for centuries, notably in modern times during the Battle of Waterloo (1815) and the 20th century’s two world wars. Given its area and population, Belgium today is one of the most heavily industrialized and urbanized countries in Europe. It is a member of the Benelux Economic Union (with the Netherlands and Luxembourg), the European Union (EU), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—organizations that all have headquarters in or near the capital city of Brussels.

The country has a total of 860 miles of land boundaries with neighbors; it is bounded by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, and France to the south. Belgium also has some 40 miles of shoreline on the North Sea.

Bordering the North Sea from France to the Schelde is the low-lying plain of Flanders, which has two main sections. Maritime Flanders, extending inland for about 5 to 10 miles, is a region of newly formed and reclaimed land protected by a line of dunes and dikes and having largely clay soils. Interior Flanders comprises most of East and West Flanders and has sand-silt or sand soils.

Belgium has a temperate, maritime climate predominantly influenced by air masses from the Atlantic. Rapid and frequent alternation of different air masses separated by fronts gives Belgium considerable variability in weather. Frontal conditions moving from the west produce heavy and frequent rainfall, averaging 30 to 40 inches a year. Winters are damp and cool with frequent fogs; summers are rather mild. The annual mean temperature is around 50 °F. Brussels, which is roughly in the middle of the country, has a mean minimum temperature of just below 32 °F in January and a mean maximum of about 71 °F in July.

The majority of Belgians are Roman Catholic, but regular attendance at religious services is variable. Although it is marked in the Flemish region and the Ardennes, regular attendance at church has decreased in the Walloon industrial region and in Brussels, and nearly one-third of Belgians are nonreligious. The relatively few Protestants live mostly in urban areas in Hainaut, particularly in the industrial region known as the Borinage, and in and around Brussels.

Belgium is a constitutional monarchy. The Belgian constitution was first written in 1831 and has been revised a number of times since then. A 1991 constitutional amendment, for instance, allows for the accession of a woman to the throne.

The prime minister is the effective head of government; the position of prime minister was created in 1919 and that of vice prime minister in 1961. Typically, the leader of the majority party in the parliament, the prime minister is appointed by the monarch and approved by the parliament.

Belgium’s long and rich cultural and artistic heritage is epitomized in the paintings of Pieter Bruegel, the Elder, Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, Dieric Bouts, Peter Paul Rubens, René Magritte, and Paul Delvaux (see also Flemish art); in the music of Josquin des Prez, Orlando di Lasso, Peter Benoit, and César Franck; in the dramas of Maurice Maeterlinck and Michel de Ghelderode and the novels of Georges Simenon and Marguerite Yourcenar; in the films of Chantal Akerman and the Dardenne brothers; in the mapmaking of Gerardus Mercator; and in the many palaces, castles, town halls, and cathedrals of the Belgian cities and countryside.

Belgium’s strong tradition of fine cuisine is expressed in its large number of top-rated restaurants. The country is known for moules frites (mussels served with french fries) as well as waffles, a popular snack. Belgian chocolate is renowned around the world and may be considered a cultural institution. Chocolatiers such as Neuhaus, Godiva, and Leonidas, among others, are internationally acclaimed for their truffles and candies sold in small, distinctive cardboard boxes. Chocolate is one of Belgium’s main food exports, with the majority being shipped to other EU countries.

Beer is Belgium’s national beverage; the country has several hundred breweries and countless cafés where Belgians enjoy a great array of local brews, including the famed Trappist and lambic varieties. While the reputation of Belgian beer is often overshadowed by that of its larger neighbor, Germany, the brewing and consuming of beer within the country is a cultural institution in and of itself. Most beers have particular styles of glasses in which they are served, and a variety of seasonal brews are correspond with various holidays and celebrations. It is also common for special brews to be created for occasions such as weddings, a tradition that is reported to have begun in the early 1900s, when nearly every village had a brewery. In many small Belgian villages, the brewer was also the mayor.

Our excursion began at the town of Zeebrugge. A busy port, Zeebrugge, is connected by canal to the inland city of Brugge, meaning “bridge.” Brugge is a city of medieval aspect, resplendent with cathedrals, late medieval public buildings, and ancient homes. As its name implies, the city has many bridges spanning the several canals and the Reie River. Mentioned as early as the 7th century, Brugge became an important trading center and reached its zenith during the 15th century, when the dukes of Burgundy held court there.

Zeebrugge is a West Flanders province in northwestern Belgium. It lies along the North Sea, 10 miles north of Brugge, for which it is the port. It is an artificial port that was built because the marine channel to Brugge had silted up. The 1.5-mile-long channel that creates and protects Zeebrugge’s harbor was constructed between 1895 and 1907. A 7-mile-long canal was also built about that time to connect Zeebrugge with Brugge. In April 1918, during World War I, British naval forces sank block ships in Zeebrugge’s harbor and canal to deny the use of the port to German submarines. The port was again blocked by the Allies in May 1940 for a similar purpose, and Zeebrugge itself was destroyed by the retreating Germans in 1944. The harbor was reopened in 1957 after the last of the old Allied block ships had been removed. Zeebrugge subsequently grew into a bustling port handling regular and container cargoes, as well as ferries bound to and from Britain.

The Ypres region was the backdrop to one of the bloodiest battles in history, over 100 years ago. Now the last witness has died too, the In Flanders Fields Museum is more than ever the gateway to the First World War in Flanders.

We visited the In Flanders Fields Museum. This is not a traditional war museum, as it is not about weapons and strategy; instead, it is about ordinary people who endured the war — the soldiers, nurses, fugitives and children. The generation that survived the Great War has died; the purpose of the In Flanders Fields Museum is to keep this compelling history alive for future generations. Some innovative high-tech methods used within the museum have earned Flanders Fields the title of Best European Museum.

The tour took in the dramatic history of World War I, and the battles fought in and around Ypres. The city of Ypres, located in Flanders Fields, was reduced to rubble by constant bombardments. Through the words of the poem by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, it has come to symbolize the meaningless slaughter of the Great War. Now resorted to its former grandeur, Ypres contains numerous poignant sites and monuments linked to the war. There are many battlefields around Ypres where German and Allied armies fought without decisive victories. New weapons such as gas, land mines and missiles left 1,200,000 injured and 500,000 dead.

The tour visited one of the British cemeteries and saw the Menin Gate — a famous British War Memorial with the names of 54,896 missing soldiers engraved on its walls.

The Tyne Cot Cemetery is an impressive haven of tranquility that extends through the former battle landscape. With its 11,956 graves, it is one of the largest Commonwealth cemeteries in the world and it is a silent witness to the bloody Battle of Passchendaele. During the British offensive of 1917, almost 600,000 victims fell in 100 days for a territorial gain of only five miles.

‘Tyne Cot’ was originally a German defense position on the first line in Flanders. In October 1917, the Australian troops established an aid station there that soon grew into a small cemetery with 340 graves for the soldiers who had succumbed to their injuries on the spot. After the war – between 1919 and 1921 – the British ‘Exhumation Companies’ collected 12,000 dead from the surrounding battlefields. Of these, only 3,800 bodies could be identified. The wall behind the cemetery contains the names of 35,000 soldiers with no known grave. They include British, Irish and New Zealanders who perished in the region after 16 August 1917.

Many tens and even hundreds of thousands of visitors come each year to pay their respects to the men – some still only boys – who lost their lives in the surrounding battlefields. A visit leaves no one unmoved. The cemetery was designed by Sir Herbert Baker and inaugurated in 1927. Nowadays, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission is responsible for maintaining the cemetery.

The visitors’ center, which the British Queen Elizabeth II and the former Belgian Queen Paola inaugurated in 2007, provides more information about the cemetery itself and offers a panoramic view over the battlefields of 1917.

More so than any other modern war and certainly more than any war fought before it, The First World War was the age of the “war poet”. For the first time, droves of books were shipped from Britain and France to their front lines in Northern France and Belgium (as well as other countries where the War was fought) to be read by a mostly literate army. Many nations had war propaganda posters asking people to donate books for the soldiers.

Inspired by the horrors of war and rarely without literary influence in the down times away from the front trenches, many soldiers began writing poetry. The resulting collection of poetry written by soldiers on the Western Front is huge and ranges in tone from staunch patriotism to utter fatigue at the madness and mass destruction of 20th-century warfare.

By far one of the most famous World War I poems in the English Language is “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae, a Canadian doctor who wrote the piece after a friend died while they both served at the Second Battle of Ypres.

First Battle of Ypres, (October 19–November 22, 1914), first of three costly World War I battles centered on the city of Ypres in western Flanders. Attempted flank attacks by both the Allies and the Germans failed to achieve significant breakthroughs, and both sides settled into the trench warfare that would characterize the remainder of the war on the Western Front.

The Second Battle of Ypres, lasting from April 22nd until May 25th, 1915, in which the Western Entente forces suffered over 87,000 casualties and the Germans at least 35,000, set new precedents in the War. First, it was the first time former-colonial forces defeated a European empire in major engagements in Europe. At the battles of St. Julien and Kitcheners’ Wood, Canadian forces defeated German forces.

The difficult loss of so many comrades (Canadian battalions lost over 80% of their men in several engagements) mixed with the desire to honor their sacrifice with the duty to fight is seen clearly in McCrae’s work.

Perhaps it was too difficult, too much a brand new and fresh horror to confront but absent from the poem is any reference to chemical warfare. Less than two weeks before McCrae wrote “In Flanders Fields” the German Army released the first mass attack of chlorine gas. French and then Canadian troops were the first to confront it.

McCrae was not a frontline man, but rather a Major and Medical Officer for the First Brigade Canadian Field Artillery. He would have seen some of the first ever medically advanced dressing station scenes of men coming back from the battle suffering from the effects of the poison gas.

McCrae, a very well educated and respected doctor born in Guelph, Ontario in 1872, had volunteered to serve when the Dominion of Canada was thrust into the war. He had fought for the British Empire as an artillery officer in the Second Boer War, in the middle of a very prestigious medical career that included service as expedition physician on a canoe trip to Hudson Bay with Lord Grey, the Governor General of Canada in 1910.

Lieutenant Alexis Helmer was killed on the front lines outside the Flemish town of Ypres at the beginning of May 1915. He was the friend of McCrae whose death is cited as the inspiration for the famous poem. The chaplain who normally would have presided over Helmer’s funeral was occupied with other duties, so it fell to McCrae to lead the service for his fallen comrade on May 2nd.

Though several stories of how McCrae wrote “In Flanders Fields” arose in the years after its publication, there is one that stands out. On the day after Helmer’s service, McCrae sat on the back of an open field ambulance and wrote in his notebook. Sergeant Major Cyril Allinson recalls seeing McCrae write the poem, occasionally glancing over to his friend’s grave. On the hallowed ground many poppies were growing, fertilized by the dead, a common occurrence in the region and written about in descriptions of recent burial grounds from wars past.

It is said that McCrae was unhappy with the poem and threw it out after he wrote it, only for it to be rescued from the rubbish by friends who later convinced him to publish it. “In Flanders Fields” was published anonymously in Punch magazine in Britain on December 8th, 1915, to great acclaim. Before long, McCrae was revealed as the author and showered with praise.

The poem was used as propaganda to recruit volunteers and sell war bonds. After the war, the poem, as well as the poppy flower, became symbols for remembrance, honoring those who served and especially those who gave their lives.

McCrae would become one of the honored dead on January 28th, 1918. On January 18th, he was promoted to Colonel and Consulting Physician to the British Armies in France and immediately contracted pneumonia. The sickness was severe, and he developed cerebral meningitis, which proved fatal.

To a nation that lost three-quarters of one percent of its entire population with an all-volunteer Army in World War I, McCrae is memorialized as one of its greatest poets and officers.

The Battle of Passchendaele, also called Third Battle of Ypres, (July 31–November 6, 1917), was a battle that served as a vivid symbol of the mud, madness, and senseless slaughter of the Western Front. The third and longest battle to take place at Ypres, Passchendaele was ostensibly an Allied victory, but it was achieved at enormous cost for a piece of ground that would be vacated the following year.

Saddened and reflective after this tour, we made our way back to the ship.