Flanders fields and the Somme: a short break with heavy historical baggage

Ypres today is a handsome, prosperous town but the war’s brutal legacy is everywhere

Tue Nov 03 2026 - 05:00 • 4 MIN READ

A guided trip to the battlefields of the first World War might last only three days and two nights, but an Irish person will inevitably pack a lot of baggage.

More than a century has now passed since that global conflict ended but it took the ending of our more local conflict in 1998 to enable a more nuanced appreciation and understanding of the fate of Irish soldiers in the British army, which had long been coloured and overshadowed by the simultaneous fight for Irish freedom at home. An estimated 200,000 Irish men served and 35,000-50,000 died.

I suspect most Irish visitors to Flanders and the Somme are well versed in the history of the first World War, keen to see with their own eyes the places they have read about in books. I, however, had neglected the subject.

I was schooled in the antiwar poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, learning only much later about the contribution of Irish nationalists such as Francis Ledwidge and Tom Kettle, who in turn would inspire Sebastian Barry in his literary reimagining of his family’s complex and divided loyalties, in novels such as A Long, Long Way. Like so many others, I was deeply moved by Frank McGuinness’s play Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme and by Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy of novels.

But having toured the battlefields, cemeteries, war memorials and monuments, I came away with a resolve to read much more deeply to comprehend how Europe’s leaders could have condemned their citizens to such horrors, becoming, in the words of an information panel in the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium, “monstrous machines of destruction ... fired by virulent, revanchist nationalism”.

Ypres today is a handsome, prosperous town but the war’s legacy is everywhere. The museum is excellent, with handsome display cases full of uniforms, kit, weaponry, paintings, devastating photography, posters, advertisements and artefacts.

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Visits to Poelcapelle British Cemetery and Langemark German Cemetery follow, austere and dignified and utterly bleak. More uplifting was the Peace Monument, an 11½-tonne cenotaph incorporating a negative/positive image of a single poppy, surrounded by 2016 others, hammered out by 250 blacksmiths to mark the centenary of the Battle of Ypres.

Talbot House marks a quirky change of tone. It’s an institution where British officers and privates socialised freely, and preserved signs display a very British sense of humour amid the horrors. “The wastepaper baskets are purely ornamental. By Order.” “If you are in the habit of spitting on the carpet at home, please spit here.”

Organised and attended by locals, The Last Post at the Menin Gate, where the names of 50,000 missing soldiers are remembered, is deeply affecting. For light relief afterwards, a visit to the Brewery Kazematten, under the ramparts of the old walled city, is hugely enjoyable. It is based in the same space where the soldiers’ newspaper, the Wipers Times, was once produced, under handsome vaulted brick ceilings, and its range of craft beers is named after it. An old printing press still stands in a corner.

Passchendaele Museum is fascinating but chilling. The display cases of shells are painted in bright blues, reds, yellows and greens with capital letters and decorated with plus signs. It could be modern art but the colours are to identify poison gas.

Tyne Cot cemetery is vast, the gravestones as uniform as the former battle gear of the dead, their endless ranks like the seats in the stand of a huge amphitheatre. The Island of Ireland Peace Park, opened by president Mary McAleese and British queen Elizabeth II on November 11th, 1998, with its round tower is a hopeful symbol of reconciliation between this land’s once warring traditions. I can’t help wondering what some visitors make of the adjacent shrine to the Virgin Mary.

The 16th Irish Division Memorial at Wytschaete commemorates in a sculpture the place where Major Willie Redmond, brother of Home Rule leader John Redmond, was fatally wounded at the Battle of Messines and carried to safety by Pte John Meeke of the 36th Ulster Division. Irish Comrades in Arms is chiselled into the granite but in truth these were comrades kept at arm’s length. Unusually, Redmond’s grave remains close to where he died, not in an official war cemetery, marked by visitors’ Tricolour flags and poppy crosses.

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The Newfoundland Park Memorial is primarily dedicated to Canadian war dead. The landscape is reminiscent of drumlins, mounds of earth bisected by trenches, as if the soil is still in turmoil. The Thiepval Memorial, designed by Edwin Lutyens, is monumental, commemorating by name 72,000 men with no known grave. No man left behind? Some 135,000 are still missing.

It struck me too, though, that the State was attempting to rehabilitate its reputation, sculpting something majestic to legitimise an obscene sacrifice. We also detoured to smaller cemeteries to visit the graves of relatives of people in our group. These smaller cemeteries, tucked between fields down country lanes, had a poignancy that the grander ones lacked.

Martin Doyle was a guest of GTI Travel, gtitravel.ie

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