KEY POINTS:
On an autumn afternoon at Tyne Cot Commonwealth Cemetery - where the white stone graves stretch for what you have to hope is a restful eternity - it is sunny, although the light is getting that haze around the edges that portends a cold night.
Do you come here to Flanders, scene of New Zealand's great military disaster, to talk about the weather?
You can't help but think about it, if you have seen the pictures. The pictures are of mud, and men in mud, dying in it, drowned in it.
So, when on October 9 this year it starts raining in Ypres, you think: how pretty the wet cobblestones look, picture postcard pretty, in a town that looks ancient but which is, in the scheme of Europe's history, modern.
But you also can't help but think of October 9, 90 years ago, at Passchendaele, 16km away, about 60 metres above sea level, which counts as a hill in this flat Flanders landscape. That rise would , on the 12th, become known as "Hell-let-loose" to the New Zealand soldiers who ended up here.
If those soldiers had the time or inclination to turn round they could have seen Ypres, just as we can today. Well, not quite as we can. Then, there was nothing to see: not a house, not a tree. And they would not have been looking back, because before them was a patch of ground - you couldn't call it land - made of shellholes, and in those holes were 1800 British soldiers, three or four in every hole, the wounded calling for help. That "three or four " gives an idea of how big, how horrible, the shells that made them were.
Beyond was Passchendaele.
Today we can see the church spire. We are imagining that patch of ground, and its ghosts, with the aid of former New Zealand infantry officer turned military historian Chris Pugsley, who is standing, somewhat incongruously, in a newly ploughed field wearing a Maori TV hoodie. Across the road, a rooster crows, cows graze and geese look at a bunch of New Zealanders standing in a carpark, at a place called Waterloo Farm, as we look beyond the ploughed field to an onion crop.
"The poor bugger who managed to get as far as the onions found an impassable swamp," says Pugsley.
We have been brought by bus for a battlefield walk. "A tiki tour," says Pugsley," and how odd it is to hear that here, standing by this field in a foreign place.
"The objective is Passchendaele,"says Pugsley. "Not a long way to go at all. But we didn't make it."
There were reasons for the failure of the doomed push of October 12. Try this for ghastly simplicity: because, from October 9, as Pugsley puts it,"it was pissing down with rain."
It was tragic: 1084 soldiers died here or were mortally wounded; by the end of the month the figure was 3700.
It was about the weather.
I am with the London NZ Rugby Football Club (and WAGS, although not those sorts of WAGS) a lovely bunch, all New Zealanders living in London, except for the two South Africans, the guy from Barbados and the Aussie called Dingo. At Tyne Cot they are mobbed by a bunch of English schoolgirls who think they are the All Blacks.
One of the boys scored a Belgian girl last night. "Cementing our relationship, eh?" says Tami Hokianga, a veteran of Malaya who, like me, was along for the ride. He said about the green tinge on the white stone of the central monument, "they should get some Wet and Forget on that."
That was about the best thing I heard at Tyne Cot - except for the brilliant haka the lads did here - because it goes on forever and it is both beautiful and awful and there is nothing else to say except that it literally beggars belief.
So did this, in a wonderful, mad sort of way. On my first day in Flanders, I was given a German bayonet. It was handed to me from the boot of a car by a lively fellow called Freddy DeClerck who co-organised, with expat New Zealander Martin O'Connor, a game of rugby at Passchendaele. So here we are on October 7, a glorious day, watching NZ beat France 36-0, thus making me one of the few New Zealanders in Europe, the day after that World Cup game, able to send a text home saying: "NZ thrashed France."
They don't play rugby here. The team was supposed to be playing a Belgian side (cementing our relationship, eh?) but they couldn't rustle one up, so the French side, Rugby Olympique Club Tourquennois, stood in.
Amazing the people who turned up. Somebody said, "would you like to meet the deputy mayor of Waimakariri?" which I thought was a joke, but wasn't, and very nice it was to meet her.
The goalposts were rugby uprights trucked in from up the road and taped to the soccer goals. This made them 1.7m metres too wide and a bit easy for conversions. The sausage sizzle was superior to the foot-long hot dogs I'm told they have at Eden Park, but otherwise it was just like any provincial rugby club at home.
I met a man who has lived in Passchendaele all his life and had tears in his eyes at the thought that the New Zealanders had made it here at last.
Ron Steers from Auckland is here wearing, gamely, his Invincibles shirt. He has hitched a lift from Tyne Cot with some Aussies in a campervan full of Belgian beer. He'd been to visit the grave of his great-uncle who was killed at Passchendaele on October 4. He said: "I call it a meeting 90 years in the making." He said about the game: "this is awesome."
This was history in the making: the first time, possibly the last, a game of rugby will be played at Passchendaele. Somebody sent me a text from home about the Rugby World Cup. It said: "You'd think we'd lost the war."
They were all watching the wrong game.
What strange places they are, these little towns dedicated to never forgetting. Chris Pugsley says: "We'll have afternoon tea at Varlet Farm, then we'll stop in Ypres and you can buy your chocolates and life will go on."
At Varlet Farm, a bed and breakfast, there is a little museum and, by the side of a pleasant, Flemish field, a pile of shells, dug from the landscape. The implication is that some of them are, or might be, live. Later, I ask one of the Belgian army squad whether this could possibly be so, and he raises an eyebrow and says, "yes. And no."
The brochure for the B&B says: "Remember, at Varlet Farm you will sleep on the battlefield!"
Why would anyone want to sleep on a battlefield? Or imagine that they are a finger away from live shells for that matter?
And by the way, I am not keeping that bayonet. I am supposed to give it to a museum, so if there's one that would like it, give me a call.
I am standing in the middle of a forest clearing with Marc Baelde, a navy adjunct, who is my "guard" for the day at the Belgian army bomb squad station at Poelkapelle, half an hour from Ypres. They are used to journalists. "Do you get many?" I ask Baelde. "Too many," he says.
"Do many people get hit by flying bits of dirt?" I ask. "We haven't got a journalist yet," he said.
I ask this because we are standing in the forest, where there are deer, imported by the army, an old grey fox and rabbits which get eaten by the fox or shot. It is idyllic and we are here to watch some very big explosions. This is not the same as wanting to sleep on a battlefield, surely?
It is beautiful here. Is it protected forest? I ask. No, he says, "it's military. We protect it." Dogs patrol at night, because there are nutters who want the things the squad spends every day getting rid of.
I have lucked in. I'm here on the last day of the year that there will be a controlled shell explosion. Kaboom. Kaboom. Kaboom. Three great, billowing explosions.
After each, the earth moves beneath your feet in a slow wave. It is a shock but also exciting. For me, that is, obviously not for Baelde who has seen it hundreds of times.
The bloke who pushed the button to set off the detonator emerges from the black bunker - decorated in time-honoured soldier fashion with pictures of scantily clad girls - makes that universal sign of triumph with his fist - and wobbles off back to base on his bicycle, his impressive moustache waving in the breeze.
At lunch in the mess - Baelde hates journalists so much he insists on shouting me a very good lunch; meatloaf and brussel sprouts and spuds - he and a mate tell me about the nutters.
These are collectors of live shells. Like the teacher who liked to "mill and drill" live ammo, who blew himself up, and who, it turned out, used to keep his collection at school. And the bloke who built a bunker and liked to dismantle live shells in it until one day, Kaboom.
"He go bang," as Baelde likes to say about shells. The nutter had a bunker so he knew they were dangerous. The bomb squad lads just shrug. They do not collect shells, live or otherwise.
They are paid more than regular army troops because, says Baelde, "we spend all day doing a ****ing shit job." He means he is proud of the job they do, but that having to clean up after a war, 90 years after the event, is by anybody's standards a shit job.
Across the region, the bomb squad reacts to an average of 3500 requests a year. Twenty tonnes of what they call "problem ammunition" some of it toxic, are dealt with every year. In the briefing I'm shown a picture of one squad member with a huge mustard gas blister on his arm.
They dismantle the chemical weapons here. It is dangerous work. Would I like to go out with a unit? Yes, and no. Yes, because it is the strangest thing I can imagine - driving around in a truck with three guys wearing yellow gloves and watching them pick up enormous shells and place them, with what looks like nonchalant care on beds of sand in the back of the truck.
I don't know what they're saying but I suspect the laughter is at me because the "no" bit of my answer is "Let me off this truck".
On a building site, where they've been called to pick up shells, it is impossible to avoid bumps.
We (well, they) picked up 11 shells and a grenade in half an hour. Along the roadsides, you see them placed near power poles by the farmers.
All of this makes you think about what it must be like to live in this place. There was a proposal that the Cloth Hall - Ypres' grand 13th century market and warehouse which was devastated by German artillery - be left derelict as a memorial to the dead. It would have been a powerful symbol, but imagine seeing it every day. Besides, it is a much more powerful symbol to rebuild an entire town, from scratch. Still, Ypres is a place built on blood and bones and soldier's buttons. The soil is full of it; bones and buttons and shreds of uniforms are still found and re-interred.
One of the loveliest places to go for a misty morning walk in Ypres is the Ramparts Cemetery, near Lille Gate, the only one of the Ypres gates that more or less survived the war. There are New Zealanders here, too, just a few in the whole terrible scheme of things, including some of the men of the Maori Battalion, among them Lance Corporal E. Angel, a name that insists on being recorded. His resting place over looks the river, where people are fishing and there are white geese paddling about.
I asked an inadequate question: What's it like to live here? This is where we live, people say. Another shrug from Baelde who drives me to Langemark, the German cemetery where there are the names of 44,061 mostly student soldiers. As you walk in, you see, at the far end of the cemetery, a cluster of German soldiers, ghosts cast in sombre, metal.
There are wreaths from parties of English school children. It is dark here, under the oaks, in stark contrast to the white, brightness of the Commonwealth war graves and their groomed gardens. Here leaves are left to fall on the dark slabs placed flat on the earth.
"Some people like this better," Baelde says, "here, it's let go, back to nature." Which is a good answer to my question.
Freddy DeClerck says, "you don't have to be afraid of things in the past. Bodies? That's no problem. If we find them, we treat them with respect."
At the rugby game, Salomez Luc, the man overcome with emotion that the New Zealanders are here today, says "to this day, there is a corner [in his backyard] I don't make a garden. I leave as a memorial."
I say to 1st Sergeant Gunst, as we look at the shells, "they're horrible, aren't they?" Earlier Baelde had shown me some brightly painted ones, yellows and blues and greens and reds, - the colours of kindy kids' finger-painting - used by the bomb squad to teach children about its work. This is what the shells originally looked like. The toxic shells have crude coloured crosses on them because many soldiers couldn't read; they needed signs to tell them which nasty was which. The ones we're looking at are rusty and dirty and ugly. But the coloured ones were somehow even more sinister. Gunst says, "Yes. They are horrible. It was a horrible war."
- Michele Hewitson travelled to Ypres with the assistance of Young and Lee Tours and the City of Ypres.
