Gary Dale Mawyer
  • Home
  • Blog
  • DARK
  • Exemptions
  • MACAQUE
  • Rockfish
  • Sergeant Wolinski
  • SOUTHERN SKYLARK

Nine Days in Belgium and France - Part 3

8/22/2015

0 Comments

 
This blog post is part three of a series describing a recent visit my son Alex and I made to Belgium and France. In my first two posts I described our several days in Brussels and in Ypres, also known as Ieper. 

Leaving Ieper on the road to Armentières, we soon noticed more French and less Flemish in the roadside signage until the Flemish language disappeared altogether and we were in France. We intended to drive more slowly through Armentières and get a passing look at the place, and thus wandered off the high road. The somewhat quiet neighborhood in which we soon found ourselves had plainly been designed by one of the less flamboyant surrealists. Though pleasant enough in its own way, one could not help wondering where everybody had gone. Had we found the Twilight Zone? Could this be Armentières?


Picture
Photo by Gary Mawyer
No, not quite. However, it was not far to Armentières itself. 
Picture
Armentières: A famous crossroads. Photo by Gary Mawyer. 
Armentières is a bustling town of modest size through which armies have been retreating or advancing briskly since Julius Caesar divided all Gaul into three parts. Originally part of Flanders, Armentières and surrounding French-speaking territory became part of France as late as the 17th century, as the Wars of Religion finally burned themselves out. 

Picture
Armentières: the Grand Place. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

We headed for the open countryside of northern France, famous for its slag heaps—once a bitter terrain in 1915, where battles at Loos and Arras and Neuve Chapelle and Vimy Ridge set the tone of stalemate in the Great War.

Picture
1915 New York Times map (Wikipedia).

This section of the Western Front in 1915 was the testing ground for the Anglo-French theory that sufficiently heavy attacks could, by sheer brute force, drive an opposing army of approximately equal strength out of heavily fortified trench works. This is, of course, a military truth. Ultimately nothing can be successfully defended if an attacking force is willing to pay the price, as history has ever shown. For Americans the best clue to the battle mentality of 1915 may be the island battles of the Pacific War - Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa - where the entire surface was fortified, there were no flanks, and all attacks were frontal. 

The 1915 battles, though largely unsuccessful for either side, seemed promising and led directly to what we call the Battle of the Somme. Participants referred to it as the Big Push, a term borrowed from the Battle of Loos, which had been the previous Big Push. The Big Push along the Somme began on July 1, 1916, and was officially declared over on November 18, 1916. Its goals, the recapture of the towns of Péronne and Bapaume, were not achieved, but the front was pushed six miles eastward, and the British and French generals and politicians regarded the Big Push as a victory. The British press and public also regarded it as a victory, although an increasingly terrifying one as the true casualty figures slowly trickled out. July 1, 1916, is often called the worst day in the history of the British army, with 60,000 troops killed, wounded or missing. The war would end before the story of that day became common knowledge.

Despite the usage of the iconic date of July 1, there was in fact no one “Battle of the Somme”. On the southern end of the Somme front, British and French troops, supported by technically superb French artillery, inflicted tremendous losses on the German army at little cost to themselves, and advanced through the first, second and third defensive lines to reach open country, where they could see German reservists in the distance desperately trying to dig a new trench line. On the northern end of the Somme front, the Big Push resulted in the slaughter of the attacking battalions and no gains at all. How the participants experienced it depended on where they were. Fresh attacks to lop off sections of German line were planned at once and the Big Push went grinding on for months, thirty yards here and a hundred yards there, almost all of it uphill, until winter and manpower exhaustion brought the thing to an end. 

Picture
Classic Somme scenery: Hawthorn Ridge looking toward Beaumont Hamel. Photo by Gary Mawyer. 
Picture
As it was in 1916. (Imperial War Museum) 

We came in through Bapaume and thus reached the site of the last stages of the battle first. On the whole, now that the trenches have mostly been filled in and the fortifications plowed over, we could see no special visual logic to the Somme battlefield. It’s a 15-by-8-mile oblong of chalk downs studded with woods, farms and creek bottoms associated with the Ancre and Somme rivers. The ground rises from west to east. The piecemeal capture of this terrain took months and over a million and a half casualties on both sides. Some of its landmarks are vantage points on higher ground, or sites of climactic events, while other landmarks are the scenes of particular disasters or happenstances, or became famous by anecdote or association. As a tourist, it would take at least three full days to work one’s way across the entire battlefield and have a look at all the famous locations.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Somme

We turned off the Bapaume-Albert road, basically the axis of the British attack, to see High Wood and Delville Wood. These two woods were fought over for many weeks at the height of the battle and are legendary elements of the story. High Wood is fenced off and private but Delville Wood is a park, the land given in perpetuity by France to South Africa to recognize the South African soldiers who helped recapture it. 

Picture
Delville Wood Memorial. Photo by Gary Mawyer.  
In the battle, Delville and High Wood were so devastated by bombardment that few trees survived. However, Delville Wood does contain one tree that was not destroyed in 1916, called the Last Tree.

Picture
The Last Tree. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
The ground in Delville Wood is deeply rutted with old shell holes and former trenches.
Picture
Uneven surface of Delville Wood. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

It’s a lovely quiet spot. The other visitors were a party of three South Africans and a young British couple. A French family was also enjoying the shade at a picnic table in the parking area beyond the wood. We had plans to spend the night in Amiens and thus only a day, so we opted to head next to Thiepval Ridge and the Memorial to the Missing. If one considers the Albert-Bapaume Road the principal axis of the Big Push, Thiepval Ridge to the north was one of the principal obstacles and was quite slow to fall.

We mentioned to the South Africans that we were headed for Thiepval Ridge - a conversation inspired by the fact that one of them was my age and, like me, not willing to scramble over the park wall and thus obliged to go out the gate. 



Rightly or wrongly, we were using the GPS in our rented Volkswagen. The South Africans in their rented Land Rover obviously decided to follow us, perhaps in the touching belief that as Americans we must already know everything. The GPS soon turned us off the main highway and onto a dirt farm lane in the vicinity of Mouquet Farm, partially blocked by farm equipment and by some French farmers vainly trying to wave us back.

I waved back too as Alex accelerated in a cloud of Somme chalk dust, the South African Land Rover right behind us. “This area is famous for the hundreds of tons of unexploded ordinance on it,” I said.

“There’s one now,” Alex said, pointing at a protective tractor tire surrounding a monstrously large artillery projectile. No doubt that was what the French farmers were on about, and the South Africans, we noticed, pulled over and stopped.

“I bet they’re trying to buy it,” I said.

I would have photographed it but Alex, with the survival instincts of a Great War ambulance driver, had the Volkswagen bounding across the ruts in a spray of gravel towards the GPS’s promise of a paved road. Perhaps the best thing.

The Thiepval memorial was roped off from visitors, shielded in scaffolding and undergoing a good cleanup in anticipation of next year’s Somme centennial. A groundskeeper on a lawn tractor was methodically towing a ground-penetrating radar set back and forth across the parking lot, searching for any leftover unexploded shells that might still be buried there. His face was serious and he was paying the most studious attention to his equipment, which made me wonder if someone with a magnetometer had perhaps come through and gotten a nasty shock.

Like the Menin Gate, the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing is a cyclopean brick-and-marble portal to the next world, bearing the names of 72,195 missing British and Commonwealth soldiers with no known grave, sometimes referred to as “the Missing of the Somme.”

See http://www.amazon.com/The-Missing-Somme-Geoff-Dyer/dp/0307742970

Picture
Thiepval Memorial (Wikipedia)


See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiepval_Memorial

From there we pushed on north along the Thiepval Ridge to Thiepval Wood. One of our main interests in going to the Somme was to visit the section of the battlefield where J.R.R. Tolkien served as battalion signals officer of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers. Tolkien, age 24, arrived at the Somme on July 14, 1916, two weeks after the Big Push began, and stayed until the end of October, two weeks before the battle ended. His battalion was first thrown into the fight at Ovillers, near the Albert Road, with astonishing casualties, and then sent into Thiepval Wood opposite the formidable Schwaben Redoubt. The Schwaben Redoubt had been one of the first day objectives on July 1, and the first attack scarcely got out of the edge of Thiepval Wood before it was massacred. The dead from that attack and several attacks since then were still littering No Man’s Land uphill from the British trenches when Tolkien arrived.

Picture
In front of Thiepval Wood. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
The wood itself was also gone by then. Thiepval Wood was scoured earth torn by ditches and bunkers housing thousands of British troops, from which at irregular intervals new waves of attacks were sent forth to leave new scatterings of casualties and corpses across the foreground. The top of the ridge in the photo above was unreachable when Tolkien was there. Weeks turned to months. When the Schawben Redoubt finally fell, there was little left of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers.

At the end of October, Ronald Tolkien contracted potentially lethal trench fever and was evacuated to England. He spent months in hospital and most of the rest of the war recuperating. In 1917 he wrote the first of his great literary passages, The Fall of Gondolin. By then his old company had achieved annihilation, its last handful of soldiers joining the rest of the missing.

See http://www.amazon.com/Tolkien-Great-War-Threshold-Middle-earth/dp/0618574816/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1440014543&sr=1-1&keywords=tolkien+and+the+great+war

The influence of the Great War on The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion can hardly be missed. The area in front of Thiepval Wood was the original Mordor, close to the German word for murder, “mord.”

And yet everything passes, and this is the face of the original Mordor today:


Picture
Poppies on Thiepval Ridge. Photo by Gary Mawyer.  
Today it is easy to walk to the top of the ridge and see what must have been a machine-gunner’s dream, looking back toward the edge of Thiepval Wood.

Picture
Alex on a walk into Mordor. Photo by Gary Mawyer.
Of course the Germans were being murdered on just as liberal a scale. The embarrassment of their situation, as an uninvited foreign army in somebody else’s country, sometimes obscures the reality that the Allemande had a cause too—the German imperial cause. Of course the German soldiers of the Great War were as patriotic as the other soldiers, but there was more to their desperate plight than patriotism. Barely half a century earlier, within living human memory, Germany had been a region of small, poor, politically weak principalities rather than a modern state. Since then Germany had unified and rapidly developed into an industrial giant, a nation of great wealth and power, opened up a world trade, embarked upon the adventure of overseas colonization, and declared itself an empire and the foremost military power on the European continent. 

Picture
Die Proklamation des Deutschen Kaiserreiches by Anton von Werner (1877). (Wikipedia)

All those things had been gambled away in the 1914 invasion of Belgium and France and concomitant war with Russia. By 1916 Germany’s colonies were gone.  German world trade was gone. Access to raw materials for industry was gone. The emperor, the army and the government rightly feared that if Germany sued for peace, the German people would rise up in disgust and throw the monarchy and all those who depended on it out of power. Before the war, the largest political party in Germany, the Social Democratic Party, was anti-monarchical, parliamentarian, and inclined to Marxism. Only war fever stood between the Kaiser’s government and collapse, and the last card in the Kaiser’s hand was the possession of most of Belgium and a large part of northern France, hostages for some yet-unimagined potential outcome that would not spell the end of the Imperial Reich. 

Picture
German War Bond poster (Wikipedia).

In common with other Lost Causes buried in the ruins of history, it can be hard to imagine what the principle of Empire meant at the beginning of the last century. One way to reconceptualize the Imperial concept is to consider the nature of the armies that faced each other at the Somme. The British army, supported by tens of thousands of Chinese organized into labor battalions for engineering purposes, drew its manpower from the farthest reaches of the world: Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans, shock troops of the Empire; insanely valorous soldiers from India like the famous Deccan Horse who charged High Wood with pennons fluttering, to be cut to pieces by machine gun fire; Gurkhas famous for their trench raiding skills; Fijians and Maoris, men of legendary strength, manning the big guns; alongside the French, the Algerians, the Senegalese, the Annamese… this is what “empire” meant, a world in arms. This kind of world domination, which seemed to have come so naturally to Great Britain, had long been the well-stated goal of the Kaiser’s Reich, and the Somme was now part of the price for not having succeeded.

The Hawthorn Ridge mine crater was one example of the horrors the Germans faced. British engineers set off 8 large and 11 small mines under sections of the German line on the first day of the Somme. The Hawthorn Ridge explosion remains to this day one of the largest conventional explosions ever managed. Those on top of it never knew, but those around it were alerted at once that the impending attack would be on a huge scale.
 
Picture
The explosion of the mine under Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt I, 1 July 1916. 
(Photo by Ernest Brooks) Imperial War Museum.

A century later, the crater remains - still huge, and requiring a scramble to get into. 

Picture
Steps to Hawthorn Ridge. Photo by Gary Mawyer.  
Picture
Crater at top of rise, shrouded in trees. Photo by Gary Mawyer.  
Picture
Into the crater. Photo by Gary Mawyer.  
The July 1 attack on the newly blown Hawthorn Ridge crater was a failure. The goal was to swarm past the crater into Beaumont-Hamel. Few of the British and Commonwealth soldiers even reached the German wire. One of the most poignant monuments on the Somme is the Newfoundland Memorial, with its bronze caribou. The original trenches and shellholes have been left to nature in this park. The Newfoundland Regiment, part of the second wave, got about halfway across No Man’s Land, suffering 90% casualties. Months would pass before Beaumont Hamel was finally captured. By then it was just a smear of brick dust, part of the landscape of Mordor.

Picture
Newfoundland Memorial. Photo by Gary Mawyer.  
Our plans were to spend the night in Amiens, so we put the Somme behind us and drove on through Albert. The enormous battlefields of Picardy behind us seemed as peaceful and charmingly pretty as a landscape could possibly be. Is it really only our imagination that furnishes the farmland of the Somme with ghosts?

In the next blog post we will turn our attention from the Great War to the great cathedrals, and from battlefields to champagne fields, before circling back to sites of conflict. 

0 Comments

Nine Days in Belgium and France - Part 2

8/2/2015

0 Comments

 
In my last blog post I described the first couple of days of the trip my son Alex and I made to Belgium and northern France this summer. After two and a half days in Brussels, and with reservations in hand, we bade Brussels, or Bruxelles, a temporary adieu and picked up our rental car at the airport to drive to Ieper, also known as Ypres, in Flanders. Ieper is pronounced the way it is spelled. Ypres is not. The British in World War One called this town Wipers and the Americans called it Yeeps. Ieper was nearly shelled off the face of the earth in the Great War. The casualities included the medieval Cloth Hall, one of the finest Gothic buildings in northern Europe, along with every other structure in town, and tragically many of its civilian population as well. A hardy people, the Flemings were not the sort to run away at the first artillery barrage, but ultimately nothing could live above ground in Ieper from 1915 to 1918.


When Germany invaded Belgium in 1914, Great Britain sent its small but dedicated professional army, the “Old Contemptibles,” into Belgium. While getting into positions around the town of Mons, the British discovered for the first time the incredible size of the Kaiser’s military juggernaut. The first reports from British airmen scouting the German advance were wrongly dismissed as hallucinations, but in reality the British in Belgium were massively outnumbered at all points, leading to the headlong running engagement known as the Retreat from Mons. Characteristically for the Great War, the Retreat from Mons was regarded as something of a victory by both sides. However, it was thought politically and militarily unacceptable to give up all of Belgium to the Germans. British strategy demanded that some part of Belgium be held. Ieper, a road intersection covering the Dunkirk-Calais coastline, seemed a fairly obvious spot. Though the town itself is low-lying and sits in a sort of bowl surrounded by shallow ridges on three sides, the ridges themselves were selected as good defensive positions.


The Kaiser’s army attacked ceaselessly to drive the British and Commonwealth forces out of Ieper. Attacks and counterattacks continued nonstop for the rest of the war. Poison gas was used there for the first time in history, with some success, and the British lost the ridges and found themselves confined to the lower areas of the Wipers Salient, surrounded by German artillery on three sides. The water table was so close to the surface that most trench lines in the salient had to be built above ground out of sandbag parapets. As the agricultural drainage system was destroyed by shellfire, the salient turned into a bottomless morass and countless men simply drowned in the mud.


In one offensive after another, British and Allied troops fought their way back up out of the salient, culminating in the horror known as the Passchendaele Offensive of 1917, where with almost unimaginable losses to both sides the British finally regained the ridgetop they had been unable to defend in 1914—only to lose this ground again in the final German offensive the next year. The map below shows the final British offensive.   

Picture
www.nzhistory.net.nz

Picture
Before: the Ieper Town Square and Cloth Hall circa 1900

Picture
After: Ieper from the air, 1918

Nothing could stop the loss of life in the Wipers Salient but the end of the war. French, Africans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Nepalese, Indians, Vietnamese, Chinese and ultimately a contingent of Americans faced the hardships of the Salient, alongside the English, Scots, Irish and Belgians and of course the Germans and Austrians too. We may well ask what it was for, but it changed the world.

Picture
"The Growth of Democracy" by Bruce Bairnsfather (1917). "Colonel Sir Valtravers Plantagenet gladly accepts a light, during a slight lull in a barrage, from a private in the Benin Rifles". (Wikipedia)

We opted to drive to Ieper along the older roads instead of using the expressway route. We had cause to wonder at times on this short drive whether we had erred; the back roads of Flanders tend to wander from village to village according to the old rule that says farm lanes have to touch every farm.  The resulting tortuous course, however, seemed strangely familiar not just from old photos of the Great War but from the history of European art. Flemish painting has retreated into museums but rows of poplar trees, lots of large cows, and a lovely light remain.  

In our GPS-monitored writhing from one rural traffic circle to the next, we effectively lost track of where we might be in relation to the town of Ieper itself until we reached Passchendaele and the monument to the high water mark of the British offensive of 1917. We were in the Salient, arriving by way of the ridge the English soldiers called Passion Dale.

In 1917 people died by the tens of thousands to get to Passchendaele, and ironically the survivors who lived to see the place would rather have been somewhere else. The fields sloped off extremely gently as we drove on to Zonnebeke, where we stopped for some delicious beer and then toured the excellent new Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917 (web link below).

http://www.greatwar.co.uk/ypres-salient/museum-passchendaele-1917.htm


Our schedule did not permit much museum-visiting but without something of the kind we had no chance of really getting oriented in the Wipers Salient. The Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917 makes a great introduction to the trenches of the Great War, not least because of its meticulous reconstruction and/or relocation of original bunkers, both deep and shallow ones, along with an idealized reconstructed trench. Among its fascinating displays were tactile exhibits where one could handle some of the typical equipment of soldiers, and in the gas exhibit we were allowed to enjoy a tentative sniff of each of the varieties of poison gas used in the Great War. They all turned out to smell pretty foul, like various forms of bug spray.

Picture
Trenches were seldom this neat and clean. Belgian spiders were hanging out in the bunker to Alex’s left. 
Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Some of the late-war mass produced bombproofs at the museum are original and have their original shrapnel holes, indicating the limitations of their bombproofness.

Picture
Original prefabricated bunker; the spiders on site are authentic descendants of the original spiders (not pictured). 
Photo by Gary Mawyer
Below is the reality of Wipers. Trenches in the salient eventually deteriorated into linked rows of shell holes full of stagnant gas-poisoned water. The idea that anyone could dig a formal trench system into a surface like this was not even laughable.

Picture
In the Wipers mud, 1917

Today it’s all farmland again.

Picture
Zonnebeke Ridge from Polygon Wood; spire to the right on the horizon is Zonnebeke Church. 
Photo by Gary Mawyer. 
We walked a  mile from the museum in Zonnebeke to Polygon Wood. The valiant capture of Polygon Wood by the Australians made further attacks seem like plausible maneuvers to generals far behind the lines, culminating in the Passchendaele Horror. As the picture of Zonnebeke taken from the direction of Polygon Wood shows, the ascent toward Passchendaele is very gentle.

Polygon Wood provided our first trench walk and cemetery. Many of the Australians, Canadians, British, Germans and others who fought there remain nearby to this day. We saw about twenty visitors, mostly Australians and British; we may have been the only Yanks present.

Picture
Polygon Wood today 
Photo by Gary Mawyer
Picture
German field fortification in Polygon Wood, surmounted by the Australian Memorial. 
Photo by Gary Mawyer
We then drove through Hell Fire Corner and into Ieper, where we checked into very comfortable lodgings in good time to take a shower, ramble the town square and attend the daily Last Post ceremony at the Menin Gate. Australians were present in numbers, along with British tourists. The Menin Gate is carved with the names of “54,896 Commonwealth soldiers who died in the Salient but whose bodies have never been identified or found. On completion of the memorial, it was discovered to be too small to contain all the names as originally planned. An arbitrary cut-off point of 15 August 1917 was chosen and the names of 34,984 UK soldiers missing after this date were inscribed on the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing instead. The Menin Gate Memorial does not list the names of the missing of New Zealand and Newfoundland soldiers, who are instead honoured on separate memorials.” 
(Wikipedia)
Picture
The Menin Gate, Ieper.
Photo by Gary Mawyer
When someone is found and identified, which still happens, his name is removed from the gate. The Last Post ceremony the day we were there included a memorial service for one of the missing, a fellow who enlisted in 1915 and survived Loos and the Second Battle of Ypres as well as the Battle of the Somme, but did not survive Passchendaele. This was as close to a funeral as this bloke ever got. It takes more than a funeral, however, to recall a fellow from among the anonymous dead. 

Picture
Crowd assembling for Last Post.
Photo by Gary Mawyer
If the sheer weight of tragedy could make ghosts then Ieper ought to be haunted to the gills, but we found it to be a place of peace instead. Wipers was hopping with tourists. Contemplation of the events of the war seemed calculated to make even the most bellicose wonder if killing each other in huge numbers is all it’s cracked up to be. The sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of young lives at Ypres said much about the courage and idealism of youth, but also revealed the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the imperial systems that could not see any other way to resolve their diplomatic tangles.

Today when one drives across the Salient it doesn’t seem very far. One could walk it from end to end in a day, with plenty of time left over for lengthy beer stops. Wipers has a great literature, and in that literature Wipers expands to the size of a small planet, a world of its own whose landmarks loom with fatal significance. Movement within the Salient was phenomenally hard in the Great War. The ground was fractalized into webs of barely passable trenches. Rains of shrapnel, high explosives and poison gas were frequent. If you were lucky the mud was only knee deep. And the last fatal thing many soldiers did was climb high enough to see where they were going. Thus sites within the salient acquired and still have legendary auras of unreachability, almost mythic significance, crowned of course by Passchendaele Ridge. A week could be well spent in Ieper and probably three days ought to be considered the minimum for a comprehensive tour. Our day and night was necessarily a brief cross section.

As the sun went down and the tourists mostly left—Ieper being quite a small place—the meticulously rebuilt streets emptied and a Flemish School afterglow set in.

Picture
Ieper at sunset.
Photo by Gary Mawyer
Reconstruction never stops; we found a yard behind the church full of battered medieval tidbits awaiting their chance to be remounted as part of the eternal recherche du temps perdu. 

Picture

Photo by Gary Mawyer
Picture
Photo by Gary Mawyer
The thing we both felt most forcefully about the battles at Ieper was not the fighting, but the desire of the Belgians to have their old town back after the larger world had stupidly had its way with the place. They started reconstructing their old lives practically as soon as the shelling stopped. By 1919 the market was a market again, even if there was little to sell. The rebuilding went on rapidly and steadily until Ieper was largely identical to its 1914 self. You can’t call it a flawless reconstruction. The original flaws were also treasured and rebuilt. The farmers wanted their farms back and the townspeople wanted their town back and the existence of tons of unexploded ordinance under it could not stop them. One feels that nothing could have stopped them. Peace is stronger than war.

Picture
Outstanding accommodations at Ieper. 
Photo by Gary Mawyer
We returned to our very comfortable and pleasant accommodations at the Albion Hotel and discovered that most of the TV stations were BBC. The English Channel is close here and so is London. We asked what else there is to do in Ieper at the desk, and it turns out that walking the old 17th century ramparts is high on the list. These ancient ramparts were too massive to be destroyed even by World War I, so Ieper remains a rare example of an authentic walled town and the city wall provides a glorious dawn promenade.

Picture
City wall with goat. 
Photo by Gary Mawyer

Leaving Ieper, we went on to Ploegsteert (Plugstreet to the British) and the Messines Ridge, famous for its mine craters and the splendid Island of Ireland Peace Park.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_Ireland_Peace_Park

At Plugstreet we found the Bruce Bairnsfather Memorial, a plaque commemorating the satirical cartoonist who made the Wipers Salient funny and provided the immortal Fragments from France series. Though wounded at the Second Battle of Ypres, Bairnsfather survived that war and cartooned his way through the next one as well. 

Picture
At this location, a memorial was erected.
Photo by Gary Mawyer 
Picture
Bruce Bairnsfather in 1914 (Wikipedia)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Bairnsfather

Picture
www.dailymail.co.uk

As the plaque mentions, Bairnsfather was there for the famous 1914 Christmas Truce and impromptu Anglo-German soccer match held in No Man’s Land. This event now has its own Soccer Memorial as well as a reconstruction showing how close the trenches were at that point in the line. People leave soccer souvenirs, and we saw a steady parade of tour buses pulling up to the memorial while we were there. The soccer site seems to have been obscure for a long time and the monument is a fairly recent one.

Picture
Soccer Monument at Mud Post.
Photo by Gary Mawyer
Picture
Site of the 1914 Christmas Truce. (Soccer Memorial just out of the picture to the right.)
Photo by Gary Mawyer
Picture
Photo taken at the 1914 Christmas Truce. (Imperial War Museum) 

Picture
Road to Mud Corner.
Photo by Gary Mawyer
After the war, the farmers reclaimed their fields and let nature have the bogs back. Plugstreet is still an incipient mud hole waiting for the rainy season.

Wipers is a perfectly rational pilgrimage spot for Great War battlefield historians and for students of early 20th century British literature, as well as for countless descendants and relatives of the people who fought there. During our visit, Australians were very much in evidence. We gathered from our conversations that American visitors are scarce. As Mark Twain said, “God created war so that Americans would learn geography,” but in this case it may not have worked. Wipers does not really fit the American psychology. We Yanks like the particular, and especially the sentimental particular. At Wipers, well over 100,000 soldiers of all sides still remain missing, and a few hundred thousand more died, on the shelving wheat fields around one Belgian village. The American world view does not have a category for facts so complex and unsentimental. We like it when justice is seen to be done and Lassie comes home, and Wipers seems to be saying that maybe the world is not really like that.

0 Comments
    Picture

    Author

    Gary Dale Mawyer, a Central Virginia native, has over 40 years of publishing and editing experience and lives with his wife Karen and two cats in Albemarle County. 

    Buy Gary's books now

    Sites I like

    afroculinaria.com/
    ​
    largea.wordpress.com/​livinglisteningandthingsilove
    naturalpresencearts.com/
    someperfectfuture.com

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    September 2022
    October 2021
    September 2021
    January 2021
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    October 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    September 2018
    August 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    August 2016
    April 2016
    January 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013