WWI Armistice Centenary: Historians restore trenches in Belgium, relive army life

World
Europe

02:47

People commemorate the end of the First World War in their own ways. A group of historians in Belgium are choosing to do that through rebuilding war-time trenches and remembering how difficult it was for soldiers to live amid fierce shelling. Jack Parrock has this report from West Flanders, Belgium.

A quiet, rural part of the world now. But 100 years ago, this was the frontline of some of the fiercest fighting the world had ever seen. Allied forces dug in at the bottom of the hill and Germans here on top. Unable to breach the line, British soldiers dug tunnels under the German trenches.

STEFAAN DE CROCK WW1 HISTORIAN "At the end of the tunnels, they put munition on it and on a certain day, a certain moment, they blew it all up."

The famous battle of the mines which moved the Allied advance forward before being pushed back by the Germans a year later. Stefaan de Crock is part of a team who restored the trenches here in Bayernwald originally dug by the German army in 1915.

STEFAAN DE CROCK WW1 HISTORIAN "On this site, there were more than 100-200 soldiers. We have only 4 bunkers here. And those bunkers are very small, so you could not get many people into it."

If you weren't one of the 50 or so lucky ones to cram into the tiny bunkers, you were out here in the elements.

JACK PARROCK WEST FLANDERS, BELGIUM "On a day like today when the heavens have opened and there's torrential rain, you can only imagine what it would have been like for the soldiers living in these trenches. We get to go home to our warm beds tonight. Some of them would have been here for 3 years."

Both here in the German trenches and down the hill in the allied trenches, the mud was often up to their knees and full of excrement - disease and vermin were rife. But the ports 40 kilometres north of here were too important for both sides.

STEFAAN DE CROCK WW1 HISTORIAN "The allies knew, they had to be stopped here. If the allies did not stop the Germans here, they went through and went to the North Sea and to the harbours. So this was a very important and strategic place."

The fighting here was the lead up to one of the most vicious battles in human history - the so called "Hell of Passchendaele" in which over half a million men died. And it's a history Belgium will never forget with reminders of the first and second world wars everywhere.

JACK PARROCK WEST FLANDERS, BELGIUM "Hundreds of the over 15 million Allied soldiers who died fighting the Germans in the trenches here in West Flanders are buried in this cemetery. And there's cemeteries like this across this part of Belgium. And it's the memory of those soldiers who'll be commemorated during the centenary of World War One. Jack Parrock, CGTN, West Flanders, Belgium."