![]() I ask if he's concerned about his safety working in the fields and he shrugs it off as "part of life here". He usually picks the shells up and puts them aside, then calls the police to come and collect them for disposal. Once he had a cartridge from a shell blow up under his plough. He tells me he has discovered seven unexploded shells while ploughing this year, after finding 17 last year. Reminders of those years still turn up today, in what is known as the iron harvest. The farmer's family has worked the land here since just after World War I. One of the farm's fields actually sits on a corner of the New Zealand sector, where the owner now plants potatoes. While visiting the Passchendaele battlefield, I stayed at the excellent Varlet Farm B&B outside the village of Poelkapelle. It struck me that we should really have a memorial here, as well as those that mark the sites of our victories. ![]() Looking over these crop fields on a beautiful summer's afternoon, the app helped me picture the torn, desolate landscape from 100 years ago. One of the most significant of these is Caterpillar Valley Cemetery, which also has a wall inscribed with the names of hundreds of our missing with no known graves.Ĭasualty accounts vary, but with about 900 dead in the space of a few hours, this ranks as the worst disaster in New Zealand history - military or otherwise. Another obelisk-shaped monument sits on a high point of the New Zealand battlefield, visible for kilometres.Ĭemeteries nearby contain many of the graves of about 2000 New Zealanders who died on the Somme. At the Somme in 1916, the New Zealand Division mounted a successful attack as part of the larger British campaign, followed by three weeks of grinding progress. Our troops were heavily involved in the massive offensives that occurred in these two places. They are about three hours apart by road, so it's possible to visit both on the same trip. Ypres in Belgium and the Somme in France are the two areas of most significance. Because there are vast numbers of English visitors who tour the World War I sites, the main areas are very well set up for tourists. The wealth of information now available means you can do a whirlwind tour of the New Zealand battlefields, or delve deeply and spend more time there. ![]() I also wanted to visit the graves of some of my relatives who died there, and to pay my respects at the cemeteries where thousands of New Zealanders lie. I recently spent six days on the Western Front battlefields, using the Nga Tapuwae app and some of the New Zealand-produced guidebooks to follow in the footsteps of our fighting men. ![]() Information panels have also been built at key points to supplement the multimedia presentations on the app. The New Zealand government has recognised this, and has created the Nga Tapuwae app to help tourists make sense of the sites. With so much attention on the Western Front right now, many Kiwis are venturing forth to see where it all happened. This will be followed next year by Messines in June, then the 100th anniversary of the catastrophic Passchendaele battles in October 2017. We've already had the Gallipoli 100th commemorations, and now it's the Western Front's turn.įor New Zealand, the first big centenary will be September 15, marking the date of our entry into the infamous Somme campaign of 1916. Of course, one reason there was not much fuss over the 99th anniversary is that everyone is focused on the upcoming centenary events. Many of our troops were based there during World War I and they built a large-scale concrete model of the Messines battlefield near Cannock for training purposes. ![]() It turned out they were from the village of Cannock in Staffordshire, which has a special link to New Zealand. Remarkably, they also knew about the anniversary and had come here to commemorate the occasion. A car scrunched to a halt in the carpark, and a trio of Englishmen joined me in contemplating the former battlefield. Two old concrete pillboxes sit at the edge of the lawn, the last witnesses to the Kiwis' dramatic attack on June 7, 1917. A team of gardeners buzzed around trimming hedges, mowing grass and pruning trees, part of the regular maintenance that keeps the park in immaculate condition. I was not entirely alone as I walked past the towering New Zealand monument. Exactly 99 years before, the soldiers of the New Zealand Division had swarmed up over the hillside in front of me and recaptured the village from its German occupiers. Standing in the beautiful New Zealand memorial park at Messines in Belgium, it seemed I was the only one who had come to mark a little-known anniversary. A modern app guides Adrian Schofield through battlefields of World War I's Western Front. ![]()
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