Just spent a couple of days in Dunkirk and Ieper, paying my
respects to all the troops that fell there in WW2, both my granddads were luckily
enough to escape from the Battle of Dunkirk, but a lot of their friends didn't,
my granddad Pat was on one of the last boats off the beach, over 50,000 British
troops killed/captured and 300,000 evacuated, some by civilian boats from the
UK/France willing to help.
Ieper takes your
breath away with all the graves from WW1 & WW2, each grave stone is carefully
looked after and kept in pristine condition by volunteers. When possible each one has the fallen solders
name on, but that is not always possible.. and as a good will gesture the Belgium government
has placed the cemetery in their homeland territory, so a British soldier is in
a UK grave.
It's a sombre but beautiful place and it makes you really
think about what people went through in the name of war/freedom. Lest we forget
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