Like York, Ypres is hosting the Tour de France. Each evening the Belgian city pauses to remember the First World War and in this year of special commemoration the riders will pass through the Flanders battlefields. On his bike, PAUL GRAHAM beat them to it.

WE ARE two blokes in our sixties riding everyday bikes, not a stitch of Lycra between us, who decided to combine two of the great talking points of the year: the Tour de France and the centenary of the beginning of the First World War.

We’ll watch the Tour flash past the bottom of our respective York streets on July 6. But how much finer, we thought, to ride part of the route of Stage 5, which will take Sir Bradley Wiggins & Co through the battlefields of Flanders, and pay our own homage to those who fought and died there.

It was a memorable few days, a very personal journey, and if we can do it – reasonably fit pensioners whose bike rides don’t usually get much beyond the library and the shops – anyone can. Heck, my chum cycles in his brogues and tucks his socks into his trousers.

It couldn’t be easier getting to Belgium: York to Hull by train (bikes go free), the overnight P&O ferry to Zeebrugge, and then you’re away, pedalling into a very different culture from the congested, sometimes hostile streets of home.

Even their man at passport control had an encouraging word for us. Seeing my mate’s elderly machine, he said: “Ah, Raleigh. Famous name. Enjoy your trip.”

Better still for my friend – “I’m not good on hills” – is that the 50 or so miles from the coast to the Ypres area is mostly flat and is covered comfortably in a day. More than that, cycling in those parts is family friendly and a delight. On public highways car and lorry drivers often give way to cyclists with a cheery wave (truly!), and there’s an impressive network of designated cycleways.

Some are beside canals, others on stretches of former railway tracks, filled with birdsong and wild flowers now, but which once carried troops to the front in the infamous Ypres Salient. For tens of thousands on both sides it was a one-way ticket. The Tyne Cot Memorial brings home the enormity, the slaughter impossible to grasp as you glimpse villages like Passchendaele whose present-day normality can never erase the nightmare it came to symbolize.

In York we can glance all too casually at names on a war memorial, plaques in working men’s clubs, at the main post office, outside the Nestle factory, or the one in St. Paul’s Church, Holgate. So our ride through Flanders was in part an attempt to add meaning to at least one or two of those lost lives by visiting their resting place.

Before going we did research through the excellent York and The Great War website. It enabled us to trace and place a cross and poppy at the grave of Private 18277 Walter Johnson of the 6th Battalion, Yorkshire Regiment who had lived in my parish.

He died on the August 15, 1917, aged 40, the husband of Nellie of 23 Cecilia Place, Holgate Road, and lies in Essex Farm Cemetery on the outskirts of Ypres.

The scene had been a dressing station and it’s where Lt. Col. John McCrae, a Canadian field surgeon, wrote the poem In Flanders Fields in May 1915. Among the immaculate rows you’ll also find a winner of the Victoria Cross and the grave of Rifleman Valentine Joe Strudwick, at 15 one of the youngest British casualties of the war.

There’s heartbreak wherever you look behind the rebuilt splendour of Ypres which had been pulverized over four years.

Another cemetery provides a snapshot of war’s extremes – the graves of two brothers side by side, a Brigadier General who’d won the VC, and a private from Hull who was shot at dawn for desertion, one of 306 executed British Empire soldiers who were all officially pardoned by an Act of Parliament eight years ago.

For Ypres, or Wipers to countless Tommies, the Great War never ends. Recently two construction workers were killed in the city as they attempted to move a decaying shell.

Tons of lethal ordnance are unearthed in the area each year, yet another sombre thought for the crowds who gather at the Menin Gate every evening at 8 when the traffic pauses for a simple act of remembrance under the arch on whose walls are carved the names of 54,415 Commonwealth soldiers who have no known grave.

The In Flanders Fields Museum is a salutary experience and in a very different way so is the German War Cemetery at Langemark where more than 44,000 lie in the most austere of settings watched over by a sculpture of four mourning figures. Perhaps it says something about a nation’s perceptions of history that most of the wreaths had been left by British school parties.

What was particularly affecting for us on a glorious May day was to cycle the roads soldiers knew on their way to Hill 60 and 62, the still-intact trenches at Sanctuary Wood, and all the other names that came to mean the unimaginable.

We thought of those members of the Army Cyclist Corps and, when we were back home, learned about François Faber, Octave Lapize and Lucien Petit-Breton.

When Le Tour sets out from Ypres along some of those same roads on July 9, the trio will be in many thoughts. They were all killed serving in the First World War. And all three had won the Tour de France.


Fact File: Hull-Zeebrugge with an inside cabin was £106 each return. There was no charge for our bikes. poferries.com

We stayed two nights at the excellent Hortensia B&B close to the centre of Ypres. It was £35 per person per night, including breakfast.

yorkandthegreatwar.com


Paul Graham was a builder at Rowntree's, and later Nestlé, is a grandfather of four and a member of St.Paul's Church in Holgate, where there's a memorial to those in the parish who were killed in the First World War.

Together with the centenary, it prompted him to look beyond the names on a wall and seek out their burial sites. He discovered that several of them lie or are commemorated in France.