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.
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.
Before: the Ieper Town Square and Cloth Hall circa 1900
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.
"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.
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.
Trenches were seldom this neat and clean. Belgian spiders were hanging out in the bunker to Alex’s left.
Photo by Gary Mawyer.
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.
Original prefabricated bunker; the spiders on site are authentic descendants of the original spiders (not pictured).
Photo by Gary Mawyer
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.
In the Wipers mud, 1917
Today it’s all farmland again.
Zonnebeke Ridge from Polygon Wood; spire to the right on the horizon is Zonnebeke Church.
Photo by Gary Mawyer.
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.
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.
Polygon Wood today
Photo by Gary Mawyer
Photo by Gary Mawyer
German field fortification in Polygon Wood, surmounted by the Australian Memorial.
Photo by Gary Mawyer
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)
(Wikipedia)
The Menin Gate, Ieper.
Photo by Gary Mawyer
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.
Crowd assembling for Last Post.
Photo by Gary Mawyer
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.
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.
Ieper at sunset.
Photo by Gary Mawyer
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.
Photo by Gary Mawyer
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.
Outstanding accommodations at Ieper.
Photo by Gary Mawyer
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.
City wall with goat.
Photo by Gary Mawyer
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.
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.
At this location, a memorial was erected.
Photo by Gary Mawyer
Photo by Gary Mawyer
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.
Soccer Monument at Mud Post.
Photo by Gary Mawyer
Photo by Gary Mawyer
Site of the 1914 Christmas Truce. (Soccer Memorial just out of the picture to the right.)
Photo by Gary Mawyer
Photo by Gary Mawyer
Photo taken at the 1914 Christmas Truce. (Imperial War Museum)
Road to Mud Corner.
Photo by Gary Mawyer
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.
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.
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