A Visit To The Ypres Salient
Two British ex-pats and I drove from Prague in November to visit the Ypres Salient, scene of relentless fighting from the beginning of the First World War in 1914 right through until its end in 1918. The British, Commonwealth, French and German armies sustained a million casualties in a patch of waterlogged countryside barely 20km by 10km. Half of these were fatal, and half of those vanished, with no known grave. Winston Groom described the Salient as: 'A gigantic corpse factory'.
The unimaginable scale of loss of life and the deprivation suffered by the soldiers on both sides were futile. The Germans failed to capture Ypres and the British/French failed to break out in the generals' pipe-dream of a rapid advance to Antwerp and the coast. It was the unthinking persistence of the British high command, who worked from maps and never witnessed the battlefield, which led to widespread disillusion with modern warfare and a determination on the part of many influential British and French citizens to avoid a repetition - at almost any cost. This in turn led to the dangerous policy of appeasement in the 1930s.
The Ypres Salient was feared and loathed by all who served there. It gave the world poison-gas and the flame-thrower. It offered neither side any realistic chance of success, yet it continued to consume life and limb for nearly five years.
So we had to see it.
Stuart Summers: 'What struck me immediately was how flat and featureless the landscape was. The only hills are on the edge of the battle-area, and these were held by the Germans, who had a perfect view of the hundreds of thousands of British troops trying to protect themselves in trenches and shell-holes. The water-table was a meter down, so for most of the time men were living and working in a sea of mud. It was obvious, even today, that no-one would be able to fight their way out of that morass without appalling casualties'.
Euan Edworthy: 'I was impressed, and rather saddened, by the contrast between the British cemeteries - which are immaculately tended and possess great dignity - and the German cemetery at Langemarck, which is sombre and deserted. Tyne Cot contains 12,000 graves. Its sheer size is overwhelming; then you realise that this huge graveyard contains just a fraction of the numbers who died in the Salient. Langemarck is the final resting-place for 44,000 German soldiers, half of them in a communal pit. It is one of the gloomiest places I have ever seen. I felt these young men deserved better'.
We spent two days exploring the battlefield and trying to work out exactly what happened, and when, in the ebb and flow of the conflict. As the huge numbers of casualties, the incalculable waste, and the utter misery of the men's existence in the Salient began to sink in, we became depressed by the hopelessness of it all, and our journey home was quiet.
The unimaginable scale of loss of life and the deprivation suffered by the soldiers on both sides were futile. The Germans failed to capture Ypres and the British/French failed to break out in the generals' pipe-dream of a rapid advance to Antwerp and the coast. It was the unthinking persistence of the British high command, who worked from maps and never witnessed the battlefield, which led to widespread disillusion with modern warfare and a determination on the part of many influential British and French citizens to avoid a repetition - at almost any cost. This in turn led to the dangerous policy of appeasement in the 1930s.
The Ypres Salient was feared and loathed by all who served there. It gave the world poison-gas and the flame-thrower. It offered neither side any realistic chance of success, yet it continued to consume life and limb for nearly five years.
So we had to see it.
Stuart Summers: 'What struck me immediately was how flat and featureless the landscape was. The only hills are on the edge of the battle-area, and these were held by the Germans, who had a perfect view of the hundreds of thousands of British troops trying to protect themselves in trenches and shell-holes. The water-table was a meter down, so for most of the time men were living and working in a sea of mud. It was obvious, even today, that no-one would be able to fight their way out of that morass without appalling casualties'.
Euan Edworthy: 'I was impressed, and rather saddened, by the contrast between the British cemeteries - which are immaculately tended and possess great dignity - and the German cemetery at Langemarck, which is sombre and deserted. Tyne Cot contains 12,000 graves. Its sheer size is overwhelming; then you realise that this huge graveyard contains just a fraction of the numbers who died in the Salient. Langemarck is the final resting-place for 44,000 German soldiers, half of them in a communal pit. It is one of the gloomiest places I have ever seen. I felt these young men deserved better'.
We spent two days exploring the battlefield and trying to work out exactly what happened, and when, in the ebb and flow of the conflict. As the huge numbers of casualties, the incalculable waste, and the utter misery of the men's existence in the Salient began to sink in, we became depressed by the hopelessness of it all, and our journey home was quiet.