The German advance on Paris was halted in 1914 in what was known as First Battle of Ypres. For most of the war the city was the scene of a vicious stalemate. The Germans almost took the city in 1915 using gas at the Second Battle of Ypres. In 1917, at the Third Battle, the Allied armies managed a costly victory but failed to bring about the end of the war.
These days, two out of every five visitors to this small blood-soaked point of pilgrimage are British. Coach parties - from school age to old age - pile into Ypres. This is one of the places where the British experience of the First World War is most keenly felt. There is an English church, St George's, built in the 1920s by the Imperial War Graves Commission. The city even had its own English enclave up until 1940 when the German army returned and threw them out.
The Cloth Hall - like everything else in Ypres - is a complete rebuild. German artillery had reduced it to a pile of masonry by 1917. After the Armistice, German reparation money rebuilt the entire medieval city, gargoyle by gargoyle.
At the entrance to the museum I met Piet Chielens, the curator responsible for the total rethink. The first In Flanders Fields opened in 1998, but Piet said the approaching centenary of the war's outbreak prompted the move to enlarge and completely rebuild it.
Since 1998, many new exhibits have also come to light: a horse-drawn ambulance truck from the 3rd London Field Ambulance Division (captured and painted grey by the Germans); hundreds of photos bequeathed or handed over by combatants; and a unique collection of First World War uniforms from a private collector.
The construction of a new business park outside Ypres had also unearthed a British HQ abandoned by the 38th Welsh Division during Passchendaele. By the time they regained the ground it was completely flooded, but recent underwater archaeology has unveiled a military Marie Celeste of weapons, helmets and field glasses.
The new museum is dramatic, technically advanced but also very moving.
Music by Stuart Staples of Tindersticks creates an atmosphere of abiding sadness but the experience is highly personalised; as I entered I was given a wristband on to which was programmed my age, gender, place of birth and language. At various points around the museum I could look inside small viewing boxes and the wristband would automatically select a personal testimony by someone from my part of the world.
There will soon be 800 of these "encounters" on file. At the end, visitors can download their personal encounters to smartphones or have them emailed home.
The other innovation that impressed was the 10 "iconocharacters" who stood behind glass screens talking to me. These life-size figures from Belgium, France, Britain and America are actors recorded in high definition speaking the written testimony from the time.
Two British nurses were particularly moving. Writing in 1917, Ellen La Motte and Enid Bagnold spoke of their revulsion at the extreme injuries and having to patch up a soldier who had tried to kill himself.
"We had to make him capable of standing up against a wall so he could be executed."
Further information: See inflandersfields.be.
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