Ypres Salient

 It is a challenge to drive a bus into Ypres, and Phillippe manages it in the unflustered style we are rapidly becoming accustomed to. As you approach the city centre, the cobblestone streets are narrow and the corners sharp. Apparently in the near future buses are going to be banned entirely from the centre. I wonder how this will affect the economy of the town, which is strongly built on battlefields tourism.

It's Sunday 6 October 2024 and this is my second visit to this city. 25 years ago, Robyn, Andrew and I had planned to stay here, but with no accommodation available we stayed in the neighbouring town of Poperinge. It was Andrew's gap year after the HSC and he was travelling with us on this segment of our first big overseas holiday. Michelin maps provided our only navigation guides, and Andrew proved to be an excellent navigator. Ypres was our first battlefields stop on a trip that was taking us from Amsterdam to Paris.

So there is a familiarity as our bus edges through the town square, framed by the magnificent Cloth Hall and the steeple of St Saviour's Cathedral soaring skywards behind. In front is the Menin Gate Memorial, but currently shrouded in scaffolding and coverings as it experiences a major renovation in time for its own centenary in 2027. In my mind's eye I see the magnificent painting at the Australian War Memorial - "Midnight at the Menin Gate". I tell visitors on my War Memorial tours the story of Fanny Seabrook, from Five Dock in Sydney, who stood in front of this painting during its 1928 tour of Australia and in its ghostly figures mourned her three sons killed just up the road from this place. William, killed by phosphorus bomb, and buried nearby. Theo and George, killed by shrapnel from the same exploding bomb, and whose bodies are never recovered. Their names, and all those British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the fighting around Ypres, and who have no known grave, are commemorated on the walls of this Memorial. It is sacred ground for Australia.

We're staying in Ypres for two nights and our hotel is just around the corner from the Menin Gate Memorial. Phillippe delivers us to the front door, in a street which permits no passing by other vehicles. 

A local restaurant is the venue most Sunday nights for the 'tour dinner' for the Mat McLaughlin tour groups, and a number of us take the option of what is described as a local staple, a rich, hearty Flemish stew. We are directly opposite the Cloth Hall and looking at it again, I still see the ruined building from the First World War.. In fact no city on the Western Front suffered more damage than Ypres in that war, and walking around later I see the enduring marks from shrapnel in walls which somehow survived. There is something about this city, or at least the city centre, that just takes you back to those dark days, as well as to the indomitable human spirit that saw to its rebuilding. And the money for that rebuilding? German reparations, which would near bankrupt that country and feed into the festering resentments which led to the rise of Nazism and ultimately the Second World War. 

The Cloth Hall, hauntingly beautiful on this Autumn night, viewed from my restaurant table.  It's now a museum, telling a powerful story of the reality of the experience of war for combatants and civilians. That experience is captured starkly in the postcard below.

All that was left of the Cloth Hall, in November 1918. 
No city on the Western Front suffered more damage than Ypres.

The "Ypres Salient" refers to the battlelines around Ypres for most of the duration of the First World War.  German trenches surrounded Ypres in a rough semi-circle, taking advantage of higher ground. We will be visiting some of these places today, where Australians fought and died.

Leaving Ypres, we head south and quickly come to a large round-about. "Hellfire Corner". It's beautifully treed, green, a perfect round-about. It's also the road junction where German troops had perfect sight of Allied troops moving to and from the city in those war years. Like so much we are seeing, a 2024 scene of urban ordinariness belies a bloody history.

Hellfire Corner on the Menin Road, in the Ypres Sector. This well named locality was continually under observation and notorious for its danger. At night this road was crammed with traffic, limbers, guns, pack animals, motor lorries and troops. Several motor lorries received direct hits at different times and were totally destroyed. The dead bodies of horses, mules and men were often to be seen lying where the last shell had got them. The neighbourhood was piled with the wreckage of all kinds of transport. A 'sticky' spot that was always taken at the trot. Left to right is Ypres Wood on Railway Ridge in background, hessian camouflage on the corner, Hooge, track to Gordon House veers to the right with Leinster Farm in the distance. Source : Australian War Memorial.

Messines

We are heading towards Messines, but won't travel that far. What we have come to see is much closer to Ypres, near the village of Zillebeke (near the village of St. Eloi in above map). We're at "Hill 60", where just after 3am on 7 June 1917,  Captain Oliver Woodward of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company detonated two huge underground mines, the northernmost of a string of 19 mines detonated in series over about 20 seconds. Over about 9km. this set off the largest and loudest non-nuclear explosion of all time. We refer to this event broadly as part of the Battle of Messines, and the Australian film "Beneath Hill 60" captures the drama and intensity of the preparation for, implementation of, and aftermath of this momentous event.

Will Davies book "Beneath Hill 60" captures the immensity of the moment : "At first, far-off tremors rumbled through the earth from other mines fired along the line............and then a dull roar came from deep within the earth, growling and heaving, and suddenly the German frontline burst upward as a sheet of dark, muddy clay, planking, huge lumps of dirt the size of hay bales, and the cartwheeling bodies of men and weapons, shot skyward. Out of the top burst a sheet of red flame, highlighting the now cascading debris as it fell back and crashed and splintered in a wide radius" (p.197-8.) A contemporary account adds :"At exactly 3.10am Armageddon began. Never could I have imagined such a sight. First there was a double shock that shook the earth here 5000 yards (c.4600m) away like a giant earthquake. I was nearly flung off my feet. Then an immense wall of fire that seemed to go half-way up to heaven. The whole country was lit up with a red light like a photographic darkroom. At the same moment, all the guns spoke and the battle began on this part of the line. The noise surpasses even the Somme; it is terrific, magnificent, over-whelming." (Lieutenant G A Hamilton, Artillery Officer near Zillebeke. Quoted Davies p.198).

Our bus parks at the entrance to the Hill 60 memorial. A raised wooden walkway takes us up a hill which would be otherwise unremarkable if we didn't know its century-old secret. But beyond Hill 60, and after crossing the railway line,  the "Caterpillar" reveals the legacy of that awful day. This is a crater about 90m in diameter and 16m deep. It is awe-inspiring, and awful.

The rim of the crater is the upper path, at the tree-line, not the water-line at the dam which has formed in the middle. Over time, the earth has settled but this peaceful place today cannot disguise its past. It's as easy to imagine the sheer horror of those caught up in this and other explosions, as it is to feel the awe and shock of those watching the results of their months of mining operations.

Nearby, in another well-tended park, opposite comfortable houses with lovely outlooks over rolling hills, is yet another monument. At once both incongruous in its leafy suburban setting, and utterly appropriate in its honouring of a past unable to be put aside.

Under the rising sun AIF badge, the inscription reads : "In memoriam of Officers and men of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company, who gave their lives in the mining and defensive operations of Hill 60, 1915 - 1918.      This monument replaces that originally erected in April 1919 by their comrades in arms. 1923."

Polygon Wood

Back through 'Hellfire Corner" we are heading east on the Menin Road, and turn off in the direction of Zonnebeke, stopping just below there (on the map) at Polygon Wood. The scene, in late September 1917, of one of the significant battles in that series of battles often referred to as the 3rd battle of Ypres, or sometimes just called Passchendaele, the end point of 3 Ypres. I'm looking forward to seeing Polygon Wood and understanding the area. From Ross McMullin's biography of Pompey Elliott, I am aware of the suppression of Pompey's report of that battle, and the blemish in Charles Bean's monumental history of the AIF in the First World War in his own coverage of this incident. 

There are cemeteries on either side of the road where Phillippe stops the bus.

Polygon Wood Cemetery is the smaller one, a niche cut into surrounding farmland. I am surprised at its smallness, given the loss of Australian lives in this battle. In later checking,  I can't find an accurate number of those killed, only the total of 5770 casualties, combining those killed and those wounded. I also find out later that 950 names are commemorated on the Menin Gate Memorial - these are either those whose bodies were never recovered, or were recovered but their names unknown. 

Graves in this cemetery are also surprisingly random in layout, testament to its role as a place of hasty burial while war raged all around.

As with every other cemetery we are seeing, Polygon Wood is beautifully tended. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission does a mighty job.

Over the road is the "Buttes New British Cemetery", a much bigger cemetery, and containing the graves of 650 Australian soldiers, most of whom are unknown. We follow a tranquil, walled entrance into the extensive grounds of this cemetery. 

In the near distance stands an imposing monument on a raised hill. That hill is the original "butte", a raised mound used by the Belgium army for rifle training before the war. Each of the 5 Divisions of the 1st AIF has its own memorial, and I am looking at the 5th Division Memorial. Pompey Elliott's 15th Brigade was one of the three Brigades in the 5th Division, and one of the major contributors in the battle of Polygon Wood.  I recognise on the memorial's plaque the names of places where that Division fought and where many lives were lost.  From its commanding position above the cemetery below, it's easy to be drawn into a reflection on the names of some of those I have come to know who fought and died in this Division.

Of the 2100 graves in this cemetery, over 1600 are names unknown. I'm looking for one of the named ones, which I find. John Hunter. There is an extraordinary story here, and I will tell it in a separate post. It's called "Brothers in Arms".

The New Zealand 'Memorial to the Missing' frames the end of the cemetery. Instead of one major memorial to all the missing, the Kiwi practice is to have a number of these memorials (seven), spread over the Western Front, and list the names of those either never recovered or in unknown graves, who died in battles nearby to those memorials.

378 names are listed on this memorial. It is moving in its simplicity and solemnity. 

Past the NZ Memorial is a gate into Polygon Wood, today a lovely woodland area, maybe 4 or 5 football fields in size, used by the locals for walking.  Bodies and the detritus of war still lie beneath this now peaceful woodland. About 100m down the central path through the wood, is a track leading off to another indestructible legacy of the Great War.

This is not the first German pill-box we have seen, but it is the largest undestroyed one, still solid and unyielding after all this time. I am reminded of the diorama in the Australian War Memorial, "Battle of Menin Road", showing a similar pill-box under attack by Australians in an area close by. Not for the first time over these days I wonder "what does it take in skill, nerve, and weaponry to attack behemoths such as these?"

Tyne Cot

I've been here before, on my 1998 tour with Robyn and Andrew. There's something about the sheer scale of this cemetery that is overwhelming. Is it the row after row after row of gravestones, the visual representation in one place of the enormity of those killing years? While the smaller cemeteries speak to losses we can comprehend within the families of these men, the acres of Tyne Cot tell the larger stories of national loss as well as the individual loss seen in every headstone. There's about 12,000 buried here, named and unknown. Mostly unknown. It's too big, too overwhelming, to wander and look at individual graves. 

The central memorial cross is built on top of the remains of a German pill-box. The remains of another two are to my left and right. How close together are these beasts?  I climb the stairs of the central memorial cross, and look around the whole area, taking in the enclosing walls containing the names of thousands of the missing, the thousands of headstones standing in silent watch, the flower gardens, the respectful visitors quietly moving between the lines of graves. It is too much.  I will let the photos tell the story.

Looking down to the original entrance

How many bodies still lie undisturbed in the paddocks beyond?

The memorial walls carry the names of 35,000 Btitish missing.

These irregular graves take us to the earliest burials, while war raged around. Two of these graves are of German soldiers, who may well have died in a British casualty clearing station on this site.

Sitting serenely or an ugly blot? One of the three pill-boxes in this cemetery.

Passchendaele

It's a short drive from Tyne Cot to Passchendaele.

But it was too far for the exhausted Australians, who had slogged through the mud of Menin Road, Polygon Wood and Broodseinde. They were withdrawn from the line and it was left to the Canadians to take this prized position. With all the development over the past 100 years, the Passchendaele ridge does not stand out as much today as it once did. Hardly a dominant ridge, really just a gentle slope with no apparent commanding features.

Today's Passchendaele is a lovely town, neat, tidy and with a prosperous look. Driving through its orderly streets, it's hard to believe that not a house was left standing by November 1918.

We are heading to the Passchendaele Museum, not in Passchendaele itself, but the nearby town of Zonnebeke. In expansive parkland grounds, it doesn't look at all like a museum. The building is a chateau, and we are joined today by a group of school students whom I assess as around year 6 or 7. Teachers are establishing order on the outside steps - nothing changes with school excursions, I think. As it turns out, our efforts to get in front of the kids fail, and we "share" the space inside for the next hour or so with the usual mixture of the engaged, the bored, the noisy, the nerds and the rogues. It is amusing though to see them sitting on the models of the latrines.

Latrines??  After the usual museum experience of all the objects you would expect, you descend into a re-creation of an underground tunnel system. Its new, obviously lacking the smells and grime of the real thing, but that doesn't entirely detract from the story it wants to tell, of life lived underground. Bunk rooms, mess (meals) rooms, rooms for planning operations..............and latrines. What a smell they must have added to an at times foetid atmosphere. No doubt phenol or other chemicals were used to lessen those odours. But it certainly brings home the reality of living underground.  And the schoolkids - well, the boys! - love it. I can't understand what they are saying but no doubt poo and fart jokes abound!!

Outside, you exit into a reconstruction of a trench system. It's neater and far better formed than the originals might have been, of course, but it gives a good indication of how these things were planned and the irregular shapes they would follow so that any enemy incursion had no long straight lines to fire upon.

This is a museum worth visiting, telling a faithful story of much of the realities of battles of 3 Ypres, and its conclusion at Passchendaele. And it's always good to see a younger generation furthering their understanding of these times, and, for these local kids, perhaps coming to a deeper understanding of the stories behind the many memorials and cemeteries they pass daily and are part of the background of their lives.

Langemark.

I had never heard of this place. It's one of the few German cemeteries that Belgium authorities permitted after the war. Jo, our tour guide, believes it's important we see this other side of commemoration of war dead.

She's right. It's an amazing place, utterly unlike the cemeteries planned and managed by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It's heavy. Darker in its use of materials. It feels darker. The cliche "teutonic" springs to mind, but I may be rushing too quickly into stereotype.

Inside the gate is a grassed area about the size of a tennis court. It is a mass grave, "Kameraden Grab" - Comrades Grave - holding near 25,000 bodies. It is edged by 68 bronze panels, holding the names of those known to be here. This is also the burial place for German bodies recovered in later years.

Apart from the mass grave, there are near another 20,000 bodies buried here. But there are no individual gravestones. Each burial plaque contains multiple names. Looking at a number of plaques, the most I count is 16, but there could well be more in other graves.

And where there were two German soldiers buried at Tyne Cot (and at other allied cemeteries, no doubt), there is a memorial plaque to two British soldiers buried here.

Some of these who died in 1914, at 1st battle of Ypres, could well have been some of the 3000 cadets and school students who volunteered to serve 'The Fatherland'. This led to the myth that Langemark  contained far more of these student graves than it actually does. About 15% of those German troops at the time were these youngsters.

At the edge of the cemetery are - again - the remains of German pill-boxes. These things are everywhere, I am beginning to understand. What is significant about these ones is that they mark where the Hindenburgh Line ran through this area. That Line, heavily fortified with trenches, deep dug-outs, pill-boxes, was the impregnable last line of German defences, carefully planned to occupy whatever ridges or otherwise advantageous topographical features the land offered.

I have become aware of a particular visitor to this cemetery, early in the Second World War, when Nazi Germany had swiftly conquered Belgium and France. I'm now standing on the same ground that Hitler stood on, next to one of these pill-boxes.

Hitler's visit perpetuated the myth of the 'Studentenfriedhof'. It also reminds us of the significance of 'The Fatherland' in German military history. Where Australian soldiers were lost to their families, German soldiers were lost to their nation.

It's chilling to be walking these same paths as 'der Fuhrer'.  The darkness of the place, with its black stone crosses, its heaviness, the unfathomable numbers of those buried in the same graves, is weighing in on me.

I am grateful that we have visited here. I would have never thought to come here. But I am also pleased to be moving on.

Ypres

We've travelled today around most of the Ypres Salient, and seen many of the places significant and sacred to Australians. In 'peak hour' traffic Phillippe navigates his usual efficient path back to our hotel in Ypres. Tonight, we are attending the Last Post Ceremony at the Menin Gate Memorial.

It's a cool autumn night, and the flow of people down the street leading to the Memorial is constant. Every night at 8pm these crowds gather. It's been this way since the first Last Post ceremony in July 1928, following the Memorial opening in 1927. The war years of 1939 - 45 saw a pause in this ceremony.. 

In my mind's eye, I see the magnificent painting at the Australian War Memorial, "Menin Gate at Midnight".  Will Longstaff had attended the opening ceremony, and inspired by that ceremony and what the Menin Gate Memorial represented, painted this masterpiece.

Enormous crowds came to see this painting as it toured the country. For many, it was a place of mourning, seeing in these ghostly figures their own lost sons, fathers, husbands and brothers.

One of our group, Rob, will be laying our tour group wreath tonight, in honour of his great uncle buried at a little cemetery outside Villers-Bretonneux.

Tonight the Menin Gate Memorial is swathed in scaffolding and covers as it undergoes remedial works in preparation for its own centenary.. This is my 1998 photo, with Robyn and Andrew to the left.

The memorial is built on the site of the ancient Menin Gate, through which Australian soldiers marched on their way to and from the battlefields we have been visiting today.

There are 6000 Australian names engraved within this Memorial, all buried in places unknown throughout the Ypres Salient, some in cemeteries, some in the ground where they fell. This is sacred space for Australia.

Waiting for the Last Post Ceremony, I recognise a name on the wall. Phillip Howell-Price. Five of the six Howell-Price brothers served in this war, and three never returned home. Phillip survived Gallipoli and the Somme. Killed in the fighting at Broodseinde, his body was never recovered, and so he is commemorated here. Every one of these 600 names carries his own story and a family story of loss and grieving. Like the Howell-Price brothers, there are many sets of other brothers remembered here.

We honour these names, and all the fallen in the ceremony. There is something additionally significant knowing the linkage we here this night all have with the thousands of Last Post Ceremonies that have happened continuously in this place for the best part of 100 years.

Lest we forget.