What were they fighting for?
A typical small town in Flanders, with a fine set of historic houses. Almost. But this is Ieper, the eponymous centre of the Ypres Salient. By the end of the First World War, only a small part of the tower of the Cloth Hall was still standing.
I happen to believe that there are cases when, as a last resort, warfare is a justifiable response
to a bad situation. I suspect that, in the light of summary executions of civilians and other such behaviour, most
of the dead would probably have agreed. But this piece of utter lunacy deserves its place in history.
After a series of flanking manoeuvres, known as the "race to the sea", the fighting bogged down into trench warfare and around Ieper the bulge in the lines, technically known as a "salient", was the scene of particularly heavy fighting. Ieper itself was shelled into the ground by the Germans in order to prevent the allies using it as a headquarters. You might notice that the
Tyne Cott cemetery, which stands on the scene of some German pill-boxes, is on a very light slope. In the surrounding flat countryside these ridges provided the only landmarks anyone could think of fighting over.
The sun it shines down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished now under the plough;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
Here's how it works. You lob artillery shells into the ground between the two lines. The idea is to cut the barbed wire but in fact all it does is turn the area into a swamp. Then the shelling stops, giving the enemy a pretty good idea that you might be coming. Next you stick your head up over the trench, and see how fast you can run a hundred yards through two feet of mud across the barbed wire. Oh yes, and I almost forgot: of course the enemy has every machine-gun for miles firing at you while you do it.
You can easily walk from Ieper to Passendale (Paschendale) - in fact, given the one-way system in Ieper it may well be quicker than driving. It's about three miles to the Tyne Cott cemetery. From August to November in 1917, the allies took 100 days to capture the ground, losing one man dead for every 27mm of the road. On November 17th, the German pill-boxes fell, and the first burials at Tyne Cott were around a first aid station set up at that point.
In the German "Spring Offensive" of 1918, the allies were pushed right back to Ieper. It took just three days to give up the ground that had cost 150,000 dead on the Allied side alone.
Ieper was such a symbol to the allies that there was a lot of discussion about turning it into a memorial. Churchill and others suggested that the battlefield be preserved intact, or that a vast marble shrine be constructed. While the arguments were going on, the erstwhile residents returned and quietly started to rebuild the place, including the historic Cloth Hall. They had to stop for a while between 1940 and 1945, of course, but today, at first glance, the only clue is that the metal reinforcing plates, which normally stop old walls bowing, are in neat rows. In my view, at least, a most fitting memorial.