Crush The Kaiser: Museum of Passchendaele

As usual, on our way back to the ferry after the Crisis show we stopped off somewhere with a WW1 connection. This year it was the fairly new Museum of Passchendaele in the chateau at Zonnebeke.

It's a very good museum and well worth a visit if you are in the area. Set inside the chateau are various rooms with lots of uniforms and other information about the area during the 14-18 period and in particular the third battle for Ypres in 1917. One of the most interesting parts of the museum is a reconstructed command dugout, which you go down into by a series of steps. There are lots of vignettes in there of command rooms, dressing stations and dormitories, and I can tell you that on a bleak Sunday afternoon, when you are the only people in the museum, the sound effects are very real!

The museum is in the process of expansion (like many other places getting ready for the forthcoming centenary) and from April next year will have a much bigger dugout and reconstructed British and German trenches in the grounds, so should be even better!

I took loads of pictures (as usual!) and some are below. The uniforms are of course in glass cases so some of the pictures suffer from a bit of reflection.