I’ve just returned from the ACFW conference in Minneapolis, which is why I missed posting at the end of last week. It was great to reconnect with old friends, brush up on craft related topics, think about the business end of things, and oh yeah, eat food that someone else cooked!
Here I am with four of my favorite ACFWer’s. From the left: Tammy Alexander, Deb Raney, Meredith Efken, me, and Jill Eileen Smith. Yippee for the opportunity ACFW provides to old friends to gather!
But now back to my research trip travel log…
Did I mention how lovely it was to arrive at Varlet Farm? First of all, Belgian countryside is beautiful, with crops of wheat and potatoes and barley planted on fields that aren’t nearly as flat as central Illinois. And where we have beautiful red-winged blackbirds, they have striking black and white magpies flying here and there. The fields are smaller than here in the US, smaller even than northern France. Western Belgian is somewhat hilly—though I think you’d call them ridges rather than hills. During the Great War, all of the high ground was fought over again and again. Fields are also occasionally broken by a wood, a village . . . or a cemetery. Every village had a cluster of small, brick homes with tiled roofs and one high church steeple, the churches seemingly too elaborate for each modest town.
Charlotte’s custom is to greet her guests with a friendly smile and homemade apple pie, coffee or tea. We’d arrived too late in the day to go out sight-seeing, so I spent a couple hours poring over Charlotte’s book collection in a cozy little reading nook. When I found my way downstairs I heard voices with definite English and Scottish accents.
There, sitting in yet another welcoming alcove, were three older gentlemen sharing an evening drink. They introduced themselves and I to them, and I went to get my husband who’d been enjoying the farm then taking a rest in our lovely suite.
Gordon Hall, the Scotsman, was a War Tour Guide from The War Research Society. Meeting him was another one of those moments! Amazingly, he’d never stayed in Charlotte’s B&B before, and just happened to be there for me to reap the benefit. I’d originally planned to go to two museums, one in Ypres called In Flanders Field and another in Peronne, France, whose name escapes me at the moment. I was told to skip those because they take a non-traditional, more modern attitude about the war, trying to gloss over some of the details in the hope of putting the war behind us as a people.
Gordon was able to offer plenty of alternatives. His advice was to start with a museum in Zonnebeke (one which Charlotte also recommended). It’s housed in an old chateau that offers a more traditional education about what happened in Flanders during the war. Make your way up the stairs, Gordon said, which will take you on a chronological journey of the war. There are pictures, videos, artifacts and war scenes in glass cases, all descriptions offered in various languages, including English. Then he said you’ll make your way down the stairs through another hall, and it’ll take you to a recreated bunker and trench—complete with the darkness and sound effects but absent live rats and stench, thank you very much. It was great for my Book Three, in which one of my characters is a soldier who would have fought under such horrific conditions.
We were also given explicit directions to an actual German bunker that sat a bit behind the lines, on a ridge overlooking what was then the Front Line. It would be a hard to find, we were told, but we were fully prepared for that, since everything seemed hard to find. From the narrow road we were to spot little more than a mound, with grass growing on the top and a gate to keep the cows out.
This concrete German bunker would have been considered luxurious accommodations for the soldiers on the Front. The German bunkers tended to use these large cement blocks, which was helpful in the muddy conditions. But Allied bunkers were more often lined with wood, sandbags and wooden duckboards.
My husband is 6’2″ and you can see from the doorway and the ceilings that the Germans of WWI must have been a little shorter to be comfortable here.
We had plenty more to see, and with much better direction thanks to Charlotte and Gordon!
Join Me!