BUCKETWORTHY BATTLEFIELDS

History is full of dramatic conflicts where the capricious tide of events could have turned the outcome in either direction. A mistimed cavalry charge, a careless tactical blunder, a change in the wind direction. What if Napoleon hadn’t wavered at Waterloo? How close did the Normans come to losing the Battle of Hastings? What would the United States look like today if Confederate general Robert E. Lee had routed the Union army at Gettysburg?

Here are 10 well-preserved battlefields where you can ponder these and other such questions.

Ypres, Belgium (1914–1918)

Simply uttering the name of this diminutive Belgian city conjures haunting images of World War I. Unlike other well-known sites of “the war to end all wars,” Ypres suffered not one but five battles—all bloody, costly affairs marked with the macabre motifs of the era: rat-infested trenches, poison gas, cratered tracts of no man’s land, and primitive tanks clawing laboriously through mud. Most of the action centered on the Ypres Salient, a semicircular dent in the front line surrounded by low hills. While the Allies occupied the salient, the Germans enjoyed strategic advantage on the ridges. Although small tracts of territory changed hands as the war wore on, the front line never advanced more than six miles in more than four years. Casualties, meanwhile, surpassed one million, the bulk of them sustained during the savage Third Battle of Ypres, better known as Passchendaele.

Ypres offers plenty of poignant monuments today, including several important war cemeteries. With more than 11,000 graves (many of the dead are unknown), Tyne Cot is the largest cemetery for Commonwealth forces in the world. On the edge of the city, the Menin Gate is an arched memorial where a bugler plays “The Last Post” every evening at 8. Two local museums offer a multisensory rendering of events by using film, sounds, and exhibits. The Memorial Museum Passchendaele