The Passchendaele Museum in Zonnebeke, West Flanders, has reopened after two months with a powerful exhibition that explores the horrors of the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917.
The Battle of Passchendaele in 1917 was the bloodiest battle in Flanders of the entire First World War, with 125,000 people killed in three months. The Passchendaele Museum has opened a new exhibition that brings home the reality of the battle and commemorates the soldiers who were killed.
“The Allies’ intention was to break out of Ieper, toward the coast,” said Simon Augustijn of the Passchendaele Museum. “But they were stranded 8km away, in Passchendaele. It was pure madness.”
That “pure madness” is what the museum wanted to demonstrate to visitors. Augustijn: “The visitor stands in front of a large round table on which the course of the battle is projected, while a counter indicates the human cost. Historical images are projected on the four walls of the room, 360 degrees around the visitor. These are all real images, digitally edited, so they come to life digitally.”
The images are accompanied by music by Flemish composer and pianist Jef Neve.
A new temporary exhibition on the landscape also opened this week at the museum: Echoes of War, part of Tourism Flanders and Westtoer’s First World War theme year Landscapes/Feel Flanders Fields.
The exhibition takes visitors through the conflict through three categories that have commemorative value: military cemeteries and monuments, war relics and landscape elements. It runs until November.