Ypres During the War

In an act of bravery befitting heroes, the Dutch army engineers had managed to slow the German advance by destroying some of the levees that kept the area country from being reclaimed by the sea. The result was the German forces had only one way to get into France: Through Ieper. The defenders grimly dug their trenches and prepared their weapons. They would not allow the Germans to pass without a fight.

And fight they did. Over the next four years, the defenders fought in some of the bloodiest battles of the Great war, the infamous battleground of Flanders. Over the course of the war, Ypres changed hands three times.

It was first captured by the Allies in 1914 to prevent the German war machine marching across France. In 1915, the Germans mounted their counter attack with a terrifying new weapon. Although they had used it on the eastern front before, the Germans now turned their latest weapon on Ypres defenders- Chlorine Gas. Unprepared for the new weapon, the Allies where driven out, and forced to entrench themselves around the city again. The third battle of Ypres commenced in 1917, and was the bloodiest yet. Pushing into the city, the Allies paid a cost that was on the wrong side of half a million lives- for only few miles of terrain.

The worst part of all this? By now, Ypres itself had been all but destroyed by each side’s attempt to destroy the other with heavy artillery. Soldiers fought and died over a piece of rubble. A strategically important piece of rubble, but rubble nevertheless.

Ypres Today

My journey began with the town of Ypres itself. Currently a thriving area of around thirty thousand people, it would be hard to picture Ypres as anything other than what it is today: a pleasant market town, filled with friendly people, and a hotspot for tourists. The marks of the war remain of course, the Menin gate (discussed later), a war museum, and a number of other landmarks that point to a violent past. Perhaps the most amazing thing though, is the fact that the city was there for me to wonder through at all. In 1919, the city was nothing but a smoking ruin, with practically no buildings standing.

Ypres had also seen the debut of not just one, but two new chemical weapons, Mustard gas had been deployed in the theatre of war surrounding the city in 1917. It’s important to note that both sides, not just the Germans, used these chemical weapons. Today, Ypres and Hiroshima are leading centers for campaigns for nuclear and chemical disarmament. For obvious reasons.

The Menin Gate

The Menin Gate is a massive war memorial, dedicated to those allied troops who where never found and given a proper burial. Many where never given a proper grave as they where simply too disfigured to be identified. Many corpses where never recovered at all, atomized by shells or drowned in the mud. It lists over 50,000 names, and they still did not have enough space to fit all the names on. The remainder are inscribed on a wall at Tyne Cot Cemetery.

The gate itself is situated over the main road in and out of the town. As you can see in the above picture, many people place memorials to dead relatives and friends here, if they know there is no grave to visit. It consists of a main tunnel area (Pictured above), and on each side of the tunnel is a “wing” (Pictured below). Linking the tunnels to the wings are two sets of stairs. Every wall on the inside of the Tunnel, on the stairs, and every wall on the wings contain names.

Each day at 20:00, all traffic through the gate stops and the local fire brigade’s buglers sound the last post in memory of all those who gave their lives to keep the nation free. This has occurred every day without fail since 1927, except while the city was occupied by Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

Leaving Ypres for the Flanders Battlefield

If you had a relative or friend in the Great War, then they almost certainly spent at least some time in Flanders. Likewise, I visited the war cemeteries, four of them along a single 4km stretch of road. In the first cemetery I visited, I noticed that the gravestones had a most unusual arrangement. Many where placed touching one another, and there where large gaps in the rows. There where also some stones placed down the side of the cemetery at a 90 degree angle to the others.

Upon asking, I found the reason for each of these:

Groups of touching headstones where groups of men who had died together, and their remains could not be separated, or they did not know to whom each “item” belonged. Such situations often occurred when a group of soldiers where standing together when a shell landed on them. They where therefore buried in one large grave, with the headstones all touching.

Men would never be buried where a shell had landed, and so the gaps in the graveyard where areas that where previously shell craters.

Sometimes a shell would land on the graveyard and exhume the bodies of those interred within, often utterly destroying all physical remains. Some remains could not be identified. These troops where given a second empty grave at the side of the cemetery as a marker that they where laid to rest somewhere in the area, but it was not known exactly where.

I noticed one grave had a massive amount of personal tributes on it, and as I read the headstone, I could see why. The grave belonged to the youngest known solider to be killed in action during the Great War.

From the cemetery itself I followed a path around the back towards the front line medical dug outs, where I was shown a place that was most important to the lasting artistic impact of the Great War. In these dug outs, Colonel McCrae wrote his famous poem “In Flanders’s Fields”:

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

In the dugout pictured, McCrae wrote that poem. That tight, dank hole in the earth feels more like a tomb than a bunker, let alone a place to take a wounded soldier.

Yet in spite of all the hardship, the brave soldiers kept on fighting and dying in their millions. With a somber feeling in my chest, I moved on to the next leg of my journey, Tyne Cot.

Tyne Cot Cemetery

As I previously mentioned, The Menin gate was not sufficient to house the names of all the missing deceased, and so a wall was created at Tyne Cot with all the remaining names in it, some 20,000 of them.

The Cemetery is also the final resting place to many thousands of Allied troops as well:

Sharp eyed readers may notice a very slight curve in the formation of the gravestones, the reason for this is that virtually all of these soldiers died charging a single German bunker. Each Great War graveyard has a monument in it called the cross of sacrifice, which is built in honor of these men. At Tyne Cot, the cross is built on top of that bunker that so many men died for. A sort of poetic burial, they can now rest easily, having reached their goal.

Among the graves can be found a final, moving gesture. Two headstones, marked with the flag of Germany belonging to German servicemen. Their names have been taken from their dog tags, and they have been laid to rest with all the care and attention that the commonwealth forces paid to their own dead. Their epitaphs read (in German); “Fallen for Germany.”

Tyne Cot is one of the larger of the war cemeteries in the area, with over 11,000 interred from all over the commonwealth.

I looked around the cemetery one last time, and then departed for my next destination, Artillery Wood.

Artillery Wood And The Story Of Hedd Wyn

Due to an unfortunate accident with my computer, at this point most of my pictures have been lost. I will continue to write though, as I hope you will stay with me until the end of my story.

Artillery Wood was a somewhat important location for me to visit as it contains the graves of many of my countrymen. During the Great War, Wales gave the highest percentage of our population to battle (nearly 14%) out of the countries of the United Kingdom. It is also the final resting place of one of our national heroes, the bard Hedd Wyn, author of the poem “Yr Arwr”, or the hero in English. The poem itself is too long to be posted in this article, plus it’s in Welsh (a language not exactly widespread), but if you want to read it, it can be found here.

Hedd Wyn was the bardic name of Ellis Humphrey Evans. As a farm worker, up until that point he had been exempt from the draft as his work was considered “vital to the war effort on the home front”. However, as the war dragged on, the draft became more and more widespread, and either Ellis or one of his brothers would need to join the armed forces.

Ellis joined the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in June of 1917 to prevent any of his brothers being sent into battle. Within a month he had completed the work that was to win him another chair at the Eisteddfod (a welsh celebration of culture), which he had won or come close to winning several times. After some trouble getting his entry sent off (his officer could not speak welsh and therefore could not verify the safety of the document), the entry was received by the Eisteddfod committee under the pseudonym of Fleur De Les.

September, 1917 and Britain’s Welsh Prime minister, David Lloyd George, is preparing to award the chair (the highest prize at the Eisteddfod). The Arch druid Dyfed announces the winner of the competition to be Yr Arwr, by Fleur De Les. The audience begins to applause and look around. Yet no one stands up.

The Arch druid declares the winner again, and still no one stands. Fleur De Les, Hedd Wyn, Ellis Humphrey Evans, has been dead for six weeks. Cut down as he charged the German position at Battery Copse. His last words: “Yes, I am very happy”, as he lay dying in a medical dug out.

31,000 men died with him. Field Marshall sir Douglass Haig had this to say about the battle in his diary: “A fine day’s work.”

The chair was draped in a black cloth, and amid the silence of a funeral procession, the other bards slowly gave tribute to Hedd Wyn, one by one. It was than taken by horse and cart 90 miles to his home in Trawsfynydd. In a final twist of fate, the chair was carved by a Flemish worker who had fled Flanders earlier that year.

Myself and the Welsh people in my group each laid a daffodil (the flower of Wales) on his grave and sang Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau (land of my fathers, the Welsh national anthem). We took some pictures, including this one (myself pictured), and then move on to our last destination, a German war cemetery.

Langemarck War Cemetery

I have a great deal of sympathy for the German troops of the Great War. I don’t blame Germany for the war any more than I blame anyone else. I blame the system of politics that was supposed to prevent a war. To lighten the mood a little, let me show you a youtube video from the British sitcom, Blackadder. It pretty much sums up what happened exactly, as well as various attitudes of the troops (Privates who had no idea what was going on, officers who thought they knew what was going on…):

One dead arch duke later and the powder keg was well and truly lit. The two super alliances where at each other faster than a Mac and PC user.

What we did to the German dead after the war though was all but unforgivable. Commonwealth graves are on land which has been given pretty much indefinitely, but the Germans where only given a few areas and a limited amount of time to keep their dead interred. Eventually the Germans had to exhume their dead, and many of them where placed in a mass crypt at Langemarck. Many where never given a true gravestone, but where instead recorded in the German equivalent of the Menin gate, the Kameraden Grab, which can also be found at Langemarck.

German war cemeteries are very different from Commonwealth ones. The Germans are buried eight to each plot, with a single flat basalt marker for all of them. German cemeteries use dark colours rather than the whites of the commonwealth. As a memorial, four statues stand watch over the cemetery, one representing each element of the armed forces: the air force, the army, the navy and one for the civilians who worked to supply the army. The sculpture was created by Emil Krieger.

In Closing

My time among the dead opened my eyes a great deal to the events of the Great War. It’s one thing to learn in a school about how many millions died here, and how many millions died there. Even looking at demographic charts, you can’t truly appreciate what happened in Europe between 1914 and 1918. If your country is a member of the commonwealth, then it’s more than likely at least one person in your family fought in the Great War. And they almost certainly went through Ypres.

The most terrifying realization about my journey though with this: The Great War was overshadowed by an even bloodier conflict less than thirty years after it had closed. The “war to end all wars” they called it. And still the second world war raged on after it. And after that we had the cold war, the Serbian war, the IRA. Sometimes it scares me that this continent may never actually know peace. And it scares me even more when I think there may be a third world war less than a decade away from us. To those who would commit us to war, I say this:

Walk through Flanders’s fields. Walk through Tyne Cot Cemetery. Read the names on the Menin gate. Every one of those people was a human being. They had families. They had lives. They had a job. They may have had children. They had a story, a story cut brutally short by the hands of incompetent leaders and bungling officers, they where People. They where not statistics. 57,000 causalities in one day at the Somme, and I think many of you regard that the same way you regard the £ 35,334,012,000, Britain alone spent on the Great War. People’s lives are not resources to be used. They are not money to be spent. They are living, breathing, thinking people!

They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn,
At the going down of the sun
And in the morning
We will remember them.
– Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)

Thank you for letting me share my experiences with you.