As thoughts at Christmas are always drawn to the famous football match during the Xmas Truce in 1914, you are reminded of the incredible senselessness of the First World War. But it wasn't until I went on a battlefield tour around the Ypres Salient yesterday that the scale of the slaughter really hit home. Despite studying it at school and taking a lifelong interest in its history, I never truly understood how horribly wasteful the events of that conflict were. In essence, I couldn't comprehend it.
The moving Vancouver Corner Memorial to the Canadian casualties inflicted by the first use of Chlorine Gas in the Second Battle of Ypres.
Thanks to the thorough, informative and moving tour given by Andre De Bruin (of Over The Top Tours, which I highly recommend should you be in the area) in the company of Australian Blogger Kate Carruthers, (who was also able to offer considerable insight ) among other friends, I now have a much deeper insight into this dark and shameful chapter. It is an insight that – as the day went on – inspired a full spectrum of different emotions. (Here is a slideshow of the tour)
There was the anger inspired, for instance, by the pettiness of the Belgian Government in the way that the German dead are commemorated in comparison with those of the Allied dead. The politics of the conflict aside – who started it and who won – the “sacrifice” of those fallen on both sides are the same, one would have to agree. And yet if you visit the Langemark Cemetary to German dead just outside Ypres, you would I am sure be as shocked as I by the mass grave of 25,000 bodies amalgamated from several other German cemetaries across the area when the Belgian Government forced the Germans to consolidate their memorials. It is a dark and infuriating site, where the tomb stones – black rather than white, and almost never of individual graves but only ever mass graves of various sizes – are forced to lie down on the ground to minimize their profile. It mirrors the dreadful mean-ness of the Versailles Treaty in its lack of magnanimity.
There was anger too at the sheer magnitude of the insanity of the so-called “War to end all wars”, probably best exemplified by the Battle of Passchendaele. Quite movingly Andre relayed a series of punishing statistics about the battle, fought over a small village on a ridge just north west of Ypres, as we drove through the snow across the site of the battlefield. I will share them here because for me they represent the scale of the madness in a way that nothing ever has done before for me:
The three-month battle fought across a four-and-a-half mile front to secure a two mile gain in territory resulted in a staggering half a million casualties on both sides. There was no shelter for the advancing troops – not a house, not a tree, not a bush. The German machine guns had a range of one-and-a-half miles and at point 50 yards would decimate their victims. The Allied shelling immediately proceeding the advance destroyed the intricate drainage system underlying the fields of the battlefront and as the battle got underway the week-long downpour turned the fields into an unprecedented quagmire of clag that prevented any chance of digging in for shelter. The industrial scale slaughter amounted to 35 Allied dead per square metre. Just Imagine that for a moment. That represents a pile of bodies, every metre across a nine square mile battlefield. The ground over which they were killed and into which their blood was shed was recaptured by the Germans no less than four months later.
There was even some relief in humour at the tale of John “Barnie” Hines, also known as “wild eyes” , the “notorious” Australian soldier with a price on his head from the German Government. He found a rifle simply ineffective for his purposes, and preferred instead two bags of grenades. When introduced to a Lewis Machine gun, he was heard to have said, “This’ll do me…‘it’s just like hosing the bastards down”! This killing machine was also a kleptomaniac and along with several pianos managed to steal a Grandfather Clock. His fellow troopers were forced to destroy it though because it went BONG every hour and gave away their position! Even this story ended in sadness, however, as the digger - who survived the war - wasn’t allowed to enlist for the Second World War and died a lonely vagrant in 1958
There was also the intense fury at the arrogance of the American commander who – with only six hours to go before the widely understood time of the cease-fire on the 11th November 1918 – attacked a small village so that his men could have a hot shower…at the cost of 300 men.
There was also of course great sadness, for instance when you visit the dressing station where Canadian John McCrae was inspired to write the poem “In Flanders Field” which gave rise to the poppies as the emblem of rememberance.
But most profoundly of all was the grief at the words written at the foot of one grave at Polygon Wood – scene of a particularly ferocious battle involving an Australian Division. Every family was offered the option to include a small inscription – at a penny a letter – at the foot of their family members' gravestone. The mother of one Australian, Lieutenant Harry Hill, chose to use the last words he wrote to her, signing off on his last letter home, “I’m alright mother, cheerio.”