First World War centenary: sights and events in France and Belgium

The statistics are numbing. Nearly 12,000 Commonwealth soldiers lie buried at Tyne Cot cemetery near Ypres, with a further 35,000 listed there as missing. Some 20,000 British soldiers died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. More than 250 tons of unexploded munitions are still found every year along the Western Front, the residue of 1.45 billion shells which the Germans and the Allies hurled at each other during four years of war. Of the many thousands of villages and parishes in the United Kingdom, there are just 52 – the “Thankful Villages” – where all the soldiers of the First World War returned alive; there are none in Scotland or Northern Ireland; in France there is just one. And so it goes on. On the face of it, this hardly seems the stuff of tourism. But the First World War is a story that can be told and retold on so many levels – military, social, family – that it exerts a powerful fascination still, and for all generations. You only have to go to the exceptional and deeply moving In Flanders Fields’ museum in Ypres (called Ieper locally), to be convinced of this.

First World War tourism may now sustain Ypres, and many towns and cities along the snaking path of the Western Front prosper from it. But few of those tourists return unaffected by what they see and learn when they get there. And now that the centenary of the outbreak of hostilities, which began in August 1914, is approaching, those towns and sights are anticipating a new surge of interest in the war. New museums are opening, older ones being renovated, and many events are planned. Here is our guide to what is being done to mark the occasion.

August 1914 – remembering the outbreak of war

It is easy to see the First World War entirely in terms of the trenches, and the seas of neat graves in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries that dot the land behind the shifting line of the front. In August 2014, however, official commemoration ceremonies will tell the rather different story of the opening weeks of the war, when unexpectedly stubborn resistance by the Belgians, first at Liège, then at Namur and Antwerp, held up the German advance for nearly three weeks, allowing the French to prepare their defences and the British to organise and dispatch the British Expeditionary Force (BEF).

After the war the Allies built a monument to honour Belgium’s sacrifice, the Art-Deco tower overlooking Liège, called the Mémorial Interallié, with a collection of sculptures donated by the grateful Allied nations. Recently renovated (but still not usually open to the public), this will be the scene of a major commemoration, attended by numerous heads of state on the morning of August 4 2014. In the afternoon, the official ceremonies will continue on the other side of Wallonia, at Mons.