Ypres In A Day

And so to inspire some interest in that, this episode is the first of a new series of episodes where we'll look at individual battlefields along the Western Fronts and try to visit them in a day. Now obviously we can't do justice to the momentous episodes of the Great War in just a single day on any battlefield but what we can do is give a taste of what the war was like in that area, an insight into what the men of both sides went through and what there is to find on the battlefields today.

As always it will prompt you to go further and that's the very purpose of visiting these battlefields like this and many go to the Western and don't know where to start so hopefully these battlefields in a day episodes will give you some inspiration to get out there to get on the ground and begin your own journey along the old front line While a war is raging in Europe once more, and our perspective of visiting these battlefields might be slightly different because of that, what do we get by

taking a trip to the Western Front, to any battlefield of the Great War? What it does, I think, is take our reading and understanding of the subject one step further.

You could read an entire library of books on the First World War, but in many respects, until you've seen the ground, until you've understood just how low the ridges in Flanders were or the rolling downland of the Somme affected the outcome of the battles or how dense the woodland was or what the heights of the Meuse around Verdun were like or the rocky mountains in the Vosges where the fighting took place or stood on the beaches at Gallipoli and walked the dry nullahs there until you've done

all that In many respects, it's a one-dimensional view of what the conflict was about. And I think more than that as well, when you've read so much about a subject and you've studied it and you've read the memoirs and you've heard the voices of the Great War, connecting to the landscape, that last witness of the Great War, which still has so much to tell us, is really the next step along that path.

The landscape that we find in France and Flanders and the wider battlefields beyond tells us so much and affects us. Part of us, I think, once you've been there will always remain behind and this is what visits to battlefields like this give us, apart from the greater historical understanding of the battles and engagements that took place there. What kind of preparation do you need to do before you go to these battlefields and take a trip like this? In this episode, we'll do Ypres in a day.

What do you need to do? Well, you obviously need to plan your route, and to make that easier, the route that we're going to take in this podcast will be mapped out on the podcast website for you, so you can go on there and see the Google map links that'll show you the route that we're going to take. Plan your routes, see your ground, understand the ground that you're going to visit. There are plenty of books that you can consult on the Great War before you go. You may well have read so many.

There are guidebooks. There's my own Walking Eap, for example. There's the Major and Mrs Holtz book on Eap. Gerry Merland and the late John Cooksey have done a whole series of battlefield guides. And there are many titles in the Battleground Europe series. But a good easy title to take with you to pop in your knapsack because it's only small and very thin and easy to digest is a book written by my former geography teacher, Les Coates.

Les Coates and my history teacher Roger Bastable were the ones that got me across to the Western Front nearly 40 years ago now and I'm forever grateful to them both for that. Les Coates formed a publishing company with some fellow teachers and they put out quite a few books that were designed for students but they are so much more than books for children.

They contain good information, good maps, Les Coates was a geographer so that's not surprising and some good veteran testimony as well and good links to what you Thank you for watching. It all seems to come together and is somewhat more understandable once you can visualise and once you can think back to what that battlefield, what that location is like.

So I'll put some hints on reading both pre and post visit onto the podcast website and if you take nothing else with you I would certainly recommend Les Coates' little book just called EAP and easily available and I'll put a link to that on the podcast website too. So with our preparation done, our books read, our guidebooks packed away, our maps at hand, whether digital or real, we head off to the battlefields, we head off to the western fronts and we begin our attempt to visit Ypres in a day.

Before we begin our visit on the ground, it's always worth thinking about some background to a battlefield. This is something that we regularly do when we take coach groups to the Western Front, or indeed any battlefield of either World War. Setting the scene is an important part of our understanding, and for many of you, perhaps, this will only be a virtual visit rather than an actual one, or I hope most, if not all of you, will get that chance one day.

So Ypres in 1914 was a sleepy Flemish city. It was described in a pre-war Baedekker's Guide as a medieval gem of Europe. It had some magnificent medieval buildings and it was a city that had grown rich on the cloth trade. Its main and most visible building in the centre of the city was the Cloth Hall. Here in medieval times, cloth had been bought and sold. All the little individual doors that surrounded the base of the building were each individual cloth stalls.

The cloth trade had long since ceased in Ypres by 1914, but the money that had been generated from it, the taxation, had allowed the construction of good defences around the city, a good water system, a good sewage system, and a network of canals going up towards the coast to ship goods. the barges of cloth to other parts of Europe. For Britain, the route to Ypres in 1914 came by the declaration of war against Germany on the 4th of August 1914.

The German invasion of neutral Belgium and our guarantee of that neutrality had drawn Britain into the conflict.

The British Expeditionary Force, the BEF, had mobilised as soon as the war had begun, the first troops arriving in France on the 5th of August, the very next day, and then it had fought its first battle at Mons on the 23rd of August 1914 A successful battle which the Germans were held but the French retreated on our flank and the great retreat from Mons that took the BEF from Mons to the Marne over 200 miles began.

At the Marne, British and to a much greater degree French troops pushed the Germans back from the gates of Paris. The Schlieffen plan, the lightning strike against France, its attempt to reach Paris had failed. Both sides dug in on the Aisne Heights and then the Germans moved their forces up into Nantes Northern France and Flanders for the so-called Race to the Sea, the German attempt to get to the Channel ports. One of the places that stood in their way in 1914 was the city of Ypres.

The old roads that went across this part of Belgium came through Ypres en route to the Channel coast, and the German army found itself heading towards that medieval gem of a city. To the north of Ypres, the Belgian army flooded the eastern plain, and around the city, British and French troops moved up to take their positions to hold the German advance.

The War of Movement in 1914 was rapidly becoming a war of entrenchments, not on the scale that it would soon become, but even at this stage, British troops were digging in. This was the first Battle of Ypres, in which 56,000 British soldiers became casualties.

The BEF and the French and the Belgians to the north held the Germans the race to the sea failed both sides dug in trench warfare began and trenches would be part of the landscape here in Flanders around Ypres for the next four years While aiming to dig in and dig deep and hold the Belgians and the British and the French at bay, the Germans in the spring of 1915 decided to go on the offensive in Flanders and the Second Battle of Ypres saw the birth of chemical warfare on the Western Front.

On the evening of the 22nd of April 1915, poison gas was released against French troops, French colonial troops and British and Canadian troops on the battlefield. Over the course of the next few weeks, the Germans pushed these soldiers back captured a lot of ground using the gas but the city of Ypres was held. One thing that the Germans did take in that second battle of Ypres was much of the so-called high ground. The battlefields in Flanders are flat.

Any rise in ground here will afford you an advantage and the Germans then have that advantage for the next two years from mid-1915 to mid-1917 when there is static warfare at Ypres. No major battles, a few minor engagements but no big attacks like there was later on or before. This was the day-to-day activities of trench warfare. Thousands Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of men passed through here and thousands became casualties just holding the line.

In mid-1917 the Battle of Messines to the south ruptured the German line and 19 huge subterranean mines were exploded underneath the German positions allowing British and Commonwealth forces to advance from one side of the ridge to the other in a single day. This led to the Third Battle of Ypres from July to November of 1917 often referred to as the Battle of Passchendaele although Passchendaele wasn't reached until the very last stages of the offensive.

This saw the British and Commonwealth forces and with the assistance of French to the north advancing across this ground in a battlefield smashed to pieces by shell fire a lunar landscape of shell craters and with the wettest summer in living memory it turned the whole battlefield into a quagmire. Some of our most potent images of the Great War come from this period but the Battle of Passchendaele pushed on.

It resulted in over 300,000 casualties and the capture of all that high ground to the north and northeast of Ypres and pushing the Germans back. Finally we had the advantage. But so smashed was that landscape that by the time Passchendaele was taken, it was taking British units up to 18 hours to move from Ypres up to the front line on the Passchendaele ridge. We held that line during the winter of 1917-18. broke through. Ypres was almost taken.

The line to the south was pushed right back and towns and villages that had previously been behind the battlefield were now part of the battlefield. But Ypres stood defiant and the German offensive ran out of steam. The Americans did indeed come to Flanders in the summer of 1918. The 27th New York and the 30th Tennessee divisions fought alongside the British here.

And in the fourth and final battle of Ypres, when British and Commonwealth forces entered the the north the Belgians broke out of the old battlefields around Ypres, pushed the Germans back, the town of Menin was taken in October and beyond that both sides found themselves fighting not in trenches but in open ground leading to the final shots in Belgium at Mons, the final shots on the Western Front on the 11th of November 1918.

Four years of fighting at Ypres, four major battles, five including the Battle of the Lys and so many smaller engagements as well, and with it, the mighty cost of a quarter of a million British and Commonwealth dead. At least that many Germans, thousands more French and Belgians, the battlefields of Ypres, which measured no more than 20-odd miles north to south and about the same from east to west, had really become one vast cemetery.

As early as 1919 it became a place of pilgrimage because of these losses. The very first battlefield guide being published by the Michelin tyre company just a few months after the end of the war and it makes fascinating reading today. The pilgrims came in drips and drabs. The civilians returned and the landscape of Ypres was gradually reclaimed.

The pilgrims, the visitors coming to see cemeteries and memorials that were being constructed to see where a loved one had fought and died and veterans returning to see where they had fought and lost so many of their comrades came first in drips and drabs and small groups and then in organised parties. By the 1930s it was thought that a quarter of a million English-speaking visitors were coming to Flanders each year.

This level of pilgrimage, perhaps forgotten now, was massive really in that interwar period. Another war broke out in 1939 and in 1940, fighting returned to Flanders, returned to the streets of Ypres and the villages around it once more. And following four long years of occupation, Ypres was liberated by the Poles on the 6th of September 1944. The last post was played at the Menin Gate that evening and has been played every single evening ever since.

The war being the only break in that wonderful continuation of remembrance that began at the Menin Gate about a year after its construction. But by the 1950s, the pilgrims gradually declined. The numbers coming across declined. The generation of the Great War was getting older. The parents were beginning to fade away, the parents of those who died. And by the 1980s, when I first came across, it felt as if the battlefields of Flanders were forgotten.

There were so few English-speaking visitors then. But that's all changed in those four decades. The Great War is not forgotten. The generation who fought in the trenches of the Western Front are remembered. And during the centenary, the number of visitors, English-speaking visitors, reached the same sort of levels that they'd reached in that interwar period. But the story of the Great War in Flanders is not a story that has ended.

that last witness of the Great War, the landscape continues to give up its secrets. Whether it's the trenches and the dugouts, that troglodyte world of the Great War, or whether it's the remains of soldiers of both sides, the Great War remains very much part of the lives of the people who live around Ypres. So now it's time to begin our journey and head out to visit Ypres in a day. The first part of our battlefield road trip begins in the city of Ypres itself.

We're in the main square of Ypres, with the road behind us, the Meninstraat going down to the Menin Gate, where the last post is sounded every evening, and ahead of us the magnificent building of the Cloth Hall. By 1918, Ypres was a city in ruins. It was said that if you entered Ypres by horseback, you had an uninterrupted view from one side of the city to the other. Very little remained to obscure your field of vision. The buildings were smashed to oblivion by four years of bombardments.

And only what remained of the clock tower of the Cloth Hall and the spire of St Martin's Cathedral behind gave any indication that any buildings of any stature had ever been here. So today we see a city restored, a city restored using the original medieval plans. It rose like a phoenix from the ashes. And when we stand here today, it's hard to believe that the hand of war ever passed through here.

The Germans only ever entered Ypres once in 1914 when a German cavalry patrol came through this square. After that it was a route to the front line. In the early battles, in the early period of the war, British troops marched through this square, down the Meninstraat, the Menin Road, out through the Menin Gate and out onto the battlefields. Once the Germans took the high ground around the city that became more and more difficult and really movement in Ypres was always done at night.

It was often said that at night the city came alive and the men emerged from their dugouts and the cellars and went about their tasks, whether repairing the roads, working on positions within the city, evacuating the casualties or moving up to a frontline area. Darkness shielded whatever they were doing, and then in the daylight the city once more went quiet, as quiet as any part of these battlefields could ever be.

Leaving this main square we'll head down the Rüsselstraat, the Rue de Lille as it was called during the war and that'll take us out towards the Lille Gates. Now quite a few of the places that we'll see in this Eap in a Day are areas that we've covered in greater depth in previous podcast episodes so it's a nice way to bring together some of those episodes and to add detail to your visit later on or during them by listening to those episodes relating to a specific location.

The Lille Gates so called because it was on the road to Lille all of the gates were named after the towns that the roads took you to was really the main route out of Ypres for most of the war because the Menin Gate could be spotted from the high ground east of the city when soldiers moved out they often came down through here rather than the Menin Gate there were headquarters in the ramparts the old Valban ramparts that surround the city used by British troops Plumer, General Plumer who

commanded the forces in the Battle of Messines was said to have an advanced headquarters here the tunnellers had headquarters here and there were medics close by as well receiving the wounded coming back from the battlefield and up on the ramparts to our right as we go through the little gate and out onto the old front line here is the rampart cemetery a small battlefield burial ground made during the war where the graves of the fallen there look out onto the ground over which they'd fought in

some respects the guardians of the city of Ypres Coming out of the city over the Moat Bridge we reach the modern world and its roundabouts but that takes us on the road heading down towards the Messines Ridge to the south of Ypres and we'll turn off at a road junction here which during the war was named Shrapnel Corner.

Shrapnel Corner because it was bombarded with shrapnel by the Germans on a regular basis because they knew it was a key part of the infrastructure, the lines of communication to the British and Commonwealth forces in this sector. Turning off to the right here this takes us on a road that runs parallel to the high ground to the south of Ypres. I think not enough people come down here. There's a lot of traces of the war.

Very soon we see a sign for Belgian Battery Corner and this is where a Belgian gun battery was in action during the first battle of Ypres in 1914 but that too became a major route to and from the trenches particularly for artillery units and there's a cemetery of that name close by where you'll find the graves of many gunners alongside the infantry soldiers who took part in the like Messines and 3rd Ypres but continuing along that road which would eventually bring you to the village of Kemmel in

the southern sector of the Ypres battlefields we'll come down to a small hamlet where there's a large concrete works now called Weerstraat and we'll just jump over a junction here because up on the left hand side is a memorial to the American participation in the fighting in Flanders Fields this memorial records the men of the 27th New York and the 30th Tennessee divisions which we mentioned earlier in the podcast who took part in the fighting here in the summer of 1918.

It's one of the very few American memorials on this part of the battlefield and the role of soldiers of the American Expeditionary Force, the AEF, and their parts in these actions is something that's not widely known about. But the role of the doughboys here and their involvement and their casualties, many of the British cemeteries in this area had American dead.

American dead that was later either repatriated back to the United States or moved to the Inflanders field And while their casualty level was much smaller than most other nations that fought here, it once more reinforces just how international the scale of the sacrifice was here during the Great War. Doubling back on ourselves to Wehrstraat, we turn off to the right on a road that would take us to the village of Wicherta, or White Sheet as the British Tommy called it.

And this is a route that I like to come because it gives you an appreciation of the Messines Ridge.

When you're driving down the Messines Ridge, Ridge you can sense that you're on higher ground because you have quite a good view but you can't sense what the ridge looks like and coming to here and pulling out of this junction heading towards Wichita and then stopping and getting out of your car you can see the line of the ridge in front of you stretching from the northern area around St. Alois through Wichita and down towards Messines across to your right and you can see how high the ridge is

compared to where you're standing by the positioning of the churches that sit on top of it and I think coming to locations like this and stopping and pausing for a moment and absorbing the landscape seeing what this landscape is really like is all part of what these battlefield visits are about. Taking this road into White Sheets coming up to the rising ground of the ridge we're coming into an area where some of the 19 mine craters are located.

Just to our left is Holland Sheshure Farm where several mines were exploded underneath the German positions there and although the craters are on private ground they can be viewed from just by the side of the road and right across this part of the ridge the evidence of these mighty mine craters are everywhere from here across to Petit Bois, Maidelstead Farm, Peckham, Spanbrook Molan and indeed beyond.

In the village by the church is a memorial to the tunnellers, a recent memorial a bronze figure of a British tunneller kneeling with an entrenching tool in his hand.

Now we've mentioned this in a previous podcast this memorial and the entrenching tool in his hand is not really the type of equipment that tunnellers used to work on the tunnels beneath the battlefield in the underground war but the memorial does bring attention to the role of these tunnellers there were no tunnellers in the army on the outbreak of war, many miners joined the army or were in territorial units and came across to the western front and when the war went static and the tunnelling

began largely instigated by the Germans and the French, the British responded in the early part of 1915 with the creation of what were then called often divisional mining companies ad hoc units made up from miners that served in infantry units or other units on that part of the battlefield. Eventually these became the tunnelling companies of the Royal Engineers and miners were recruited from areas like South Yorkshire from Wales and across the country where mining was a very prevalent activity.

And here on the Messines Ridge on the 7th of June 1917 the tunnellers, the miners the men who worked and fought that underground war had their finest hour and in some respects their final hour because the war was never that static again that allowed a mining offensive of this scale with 19 mines being exploded ever to be utilised again. Coming out of Whitshire till we get on to the Ypres to Messines Road and across to our right we'll see the distinctive spire of Messines in the distance.

The village, the smallest town in Belgium actually that gives the ridge its name, an area of intensive fighting from the very beginning of the war but we'll turn left and head up towards Ypres again to the next village of Saint-Loire.

This was an area of mining activity from 1915 onwards and it's an area where you can find quite a lot of mine craters including the crater of the largest British mine of the war of something like 96,000 pounds of explosive that was blown as part of that Messines offensive in June of 1917.

There's a little pathway through a gate that brings you into the crater which looks like a big ornamental pond and indeed several of the back gardens of houses in this village have almost adopted the crater as part of a feature within their garden. It's how the old world of the Western Front and the new world merge together I suppose. pose.

Continuing on the road back towards Ypres, a little further up we turn off to the right and in taking this part of the journey we are roughly following the curve of the Ypres salient as it curved around the city of Ypres. We are literally running close, parallel almost, to the front lines and this will take us across a silted up canal, a canal that was not in use in 1914.

This is the Ypres-Commines canal that comes from the city of Ypres down towards the Belgian town of Commines on the French border.

Here both sides met in the battles of 1914 and both sides dug in and the old spoil from when the canal was made became known as an area called the bluff where the lines were very close together there was a lot of mining activity and if you paused here and walked down the little cobbled path into the area of the canal and the bluff today which is a big nature reserve you would find the evidence of mine craters in there and there's quite a good little visitor centre with a permanent exhibition

with a film and maps in multiple languages that'll give you an insight into the war that was fought here amongst these trees of the bluff in what today is called the paling beak and because this was a position that sat on the front line for so many years of the great war there are a lot of military cemeteries here we'll see spoil bank cemetery as we drive along this road chester farm named after the cheshire regiment who had their headquarters here in 1915 and across on the rising ground towards

the wooded area of the Paling Beak there are small battlefield cemeteries like the First DCLI, First Duke of Cornwall's Infantry Cemetery, Hedgerow Trench and Wood Cemetery. Coming out on the next road, we pass the hamlet the Velurenhoek where the front line continued and where in April 1917 the London Irish Rifles made a full battalion size raid on the German positions just prior to the Battle of Messines. We then turn off into the ground around Hill 60.

Hill 60 was probably one of the most famous locations around Deep during the war. It was in the newspapers all the time because the fighting was almost constant here.

From the battles using gas in 1950 to the two long years of trench warfare and mine warfare where both sides dug underneath each other and blew those mines and the front lines here were just separated by mine craters to the Battle of Messines when two huge mines, the Hill 60 mine and the Caterpillar mine were blown and enabling the men of the 23rd Division of the British Army in this area, the West Yorkshire Regiment to advance across this ground and take these positions.

Today the Caterpillar crater can be visited on foot You walk a path that takes you across no man's land into the trees. There's the remains of a German bunker there and you come up onto the lip of that mighty crater that gives you an insight into just how big these mine craters could be from the Great War. And when you walk the ground on Hill 60 on the other side of the railway cutting here you can see how smashed the landscape of the Western Front once was.

Mine craters, shell craters, rubble from destroyed bunkers and bunkers themselves that can be visited including an Australian engineers observation bunker built on top of a German one that was used later in the war. Hill 60 was once site to a trench museum that existed in the interwar period and for a little while after the Second World War and right up to the 1990s there was a small battlefield museum here and you can find out more about these in a previous Hill 60 episode of the podcast.

Rose Coombs who wrote what was the best single volume guidebook to the Western Front battlefields speculated that at least 8,000 soldiers of both sides remained unburied beneath the grass here, beneath the mine craters and the shell craters of Hill 60. So while it is a memorial site, a preserved area of battlefield, like so much of this landscape, it is the grave of soldiers who died here during the Great War.

And it's thoughts of that really that I think is what makes this landscape that we visit on trips like this so much more poignant. The cost of war, the true cost and reality of war is never that far away. Leaving Hill 60 we travel down into the village of Zillebeek. This village sat just behind or on the front line for all four years of the war. It was reduced to almost dust with the largest pile of dust of rubble being the church.

So again we see a village like all of them here risen from the ashes of destruction in 1918 and for a moment we can blink and imagine that the war never really happened and then amongst the trees of the village churchyard alongside the church itself we We see the white Portland headstones of British soldiers and the reality of the war returns once more.

This is the Aristocrat Cemetery, officially Zillebeek Churchyard, where officers of the British Army who fell during the First Battle of Ypres were brought for burial. Many of these men had gone to the top public schools of Britain, were from aristocratic families, thus the name. Men like the 5th Baron of Congleton or Lord Gordon Lennox. And these burials here give us an insight into just how destroyed the British aristocracy was by the four years of fighting in the Great War.

These were men who were taught, who by instinct led by example. They did that in civilian life, they did that in the army, and on the battlefields of the Great War, often paid for that example with their lives. Coming out of Zillebeek we emerge onto a modern road system just outside the city of Ypres on what was known as the Menin Road. This is Hellfire Corner, a main route up to the front line. During the war there was a road and railway junction here.

It was a main route for almost every unit that came up to take part in the fighting here. It was bombarded mercilessly by the Germans and that's how it got its hellish reputation. Across to our left, which is now a fast road, a ring road around the city of Ypres, was the old railway line and in a hollow there soldiers would wait until they were given the orders that it was safe, as safe as it ever could be, to proceed across Hellfire Corner and continue with their journeys.

Around about today it's lost a bit of its mystique but we'll find here a demarcation stone, one of a number of these stones that were placed on the battlefields by cycle touring clubs after the First World War to mark the Western Front. Each stone proclaims, here the invader was brought to a standstill The invader of course being Germany and they mark the spots at different parts of the Western Front where the German army reached its zenith.

Here this was the closest that the Germans ever came to Ypres. This one has the shape of a British helmet on but there are others with French and Belgian helmets marking the contribution of those nations and they extend right along all 450 miles of the Western Front. I think originally they intended to have possibly hundreds if not thousands of these stones but in the end a few were placed, and many of them sadly lost over the period since, some in the Second World War.

Turning off at Hellfire Corner, we take a route familiar to British and Commonwealth soldiers in the Great War along that Menin Road. Ahead of us the road, an old Roman road, extends towards the rising ground around the village of Hoog, Bellawada Ridge and Freisenberg Ridge across to our left, and the rising ground of Sanctuary Wood, Observatory Ridge and Hill 62 to our right.

Here, as we go along this road, you can see how dominant the Germans could be on this so-called high ground, just because of the tens of metres above sea level, they could look down into the British positions, down into the city of Ypres, and dominate the battlefield.

And that'll bring us up to the Hoog Crater Café, a café where we'll have a welcome lunch stop, but also a chance to visit the best private museum in Flanders of the Great War, where an incredible private collection of uniforms, equipment, artefacts, photographs... and a big display of battlefield archaeology helps bring alive the landscape that we've seen during our morning's visits with objects connected to it.

Here we'll pause for lunch and you could walk beyond the cafe up onto the Bellawada Ridge to see the preserved mine craters amongst the trees on the crest of the ridge and the unique Royal Engineers grave that commemorates men from the tunnelling companies who died beneath that ridge from 1915 to 1917. There are no headstones there they're commemorated on the base of the Their sepulchre is deep beneath this part of the Flanders landscape.

But pause we will and then we'll continue with our journey up into the northeastern part of the battlefields. Pulling away from Hoogh we continue along the Menin Road and we can see the ground ahead of us now is rising. We're coming on to what was known as the Menin Road Ridge where there was fighting here in September of 1917. And as we come up over onto the crest of that ridge, we come to a road junction. The road goes off to our right.

And in the trees to our right was a chateau at the time of the war that was marked on the maps as Stirling Castle. And this road junction was called Clapham Junction. And there are two memorials here. The one on the left is to the Gloucestershire Regiment who fought close to this ground in the first Battle of Ypres in 1914.

And then on the other side of the road is another memorial to the 18th Eastern Division, one of three memorials to this formation made up of home counties, regiments like the Suffolks, the Norfolks the East Surreys, the Queen's Royal West Surreys, the Sussex Regiment and so on and they fought here during that Battle of the Menin Road Ridge in September of 1917 during the third Battle of Ypres and when I come here and stand on this bit of ground and look across the fields beyond these two

memorials towards the wooded area a wooded area known as Coalbox Wood during the first Battle of Ypres I think of the 2nd Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment who were here at that time they'd been on the move and on the fight since the Battle of Mons, they'd been in the retreat from Mons, the fighting on the Marne and the Aisne and they moved up here to Flanders and had lost two commanding officers during that period and were about to lose a third Lieutenant Colonel Crispin of the Northumberland

Fusiliers on attachment to the Royal Sussex came up here on a white charger a rather conspicuous figure on an open landscape with only small firing trenches to protect you He became an almost instant casualty here. His body was taken back for burial where the Hoog Crater Café is today, but that grave, along with many others, including a small French cemetery, was lost in the later fighting, and Crispin's name is now on the Royal Sussex panel of the Menin Gate.

Proceeding further down the Menin Road, we pass Herrentage Chateau Wood on the right-hand side, where there was heavy fighting in there during the first Battle of Ypres. A lot of the wooded areas here are private, but since the 1990s, just beyond the southern area of the Menin Road, quite a lot of them now have open public spaces and footpaths going through them, and it's an area that is well worth exploring if you have some more time.

But we'll turn off left and take a minor road that moves northeast from the Menin Road and takes us up towards Polygon Wood. Cutting across this ground, we're very close to the site of the Tank Cemetery.

an area where tanks had moved up during the third battle of Ypres had come under artillery fire and the wrecks of them were abandoned on the landscape and the tank cemetery became a tourist attraction in the 20s and 30s during that period of battlefield pilgrimage the wrecks were torn up it appears by the Germans in the Second World War and scrapped so nothing of them remains today except in photographic evidence because so many people photographed them as part of their battlefield tour in that

interwar period. It brings us up to another warded area, Nonneboschen, and in Nonneboschen during the first Battle of Ypres, the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry were digging in, supported by men of the 5th Field Company of the Royal Engineers when the Germans attacked. And this became one of the instances in the war in which the engineers put down their picks and their shovels, picked up their rifles and fought as infantry.

And the 5th Field Company is the only unit of the Royal Engineers to have Nonneboschen as a battle honour and they became known as the Fighting Fifth as a consequence of the action here where they fought alongside the men of the Ox and Bucks.

turning right and crossing over the modern motorway that was built in the 1970s, a period before battlefield archaeology when apparently no human remains were found during the construction of this cutting and nothing of any archaeological significance was recovered either, something that is quite difficult to believe when you look at the work of modern archaeologists on the battlefields.

But nevertheless, this brings us out to Blackwatch Corner and we see a fantastic modern bronze of a Blackwatch soldier looking over the ground where this regiment fought during the First Battle of Ypres in October and November of 1914. Here, close to Polygon Wood on the 11th of November, right at the end of that first battle, battalions of the Guards moved up under the command of Brigadier General Fitz Clarence VC.

He was a veteran of the Boer War, awarded the Victoria Cross as an Irish Guards officer then, and now as the self-appointed OC Menin Road, officer commanding the Menin Road, he'd taken over a number of units in a staunch defence of this ground but on the 11th of November he couldn't resist leading his old regiment into an attack and he was killed leading them forward. His body was never recovered and his name is on the Menin Gate just like Colonel Crispin.

But Fitzclarence is the most senior British officer to be commemorated on the Menin Gate. He's at the very beginning of Panel 1 under commands and staff and again demonstrates how these senior officers became casualties from the very beginning of the war. Many people believe they spent their war in chateaus and went home and died in bed.

But the graves of senior officers and the names on memorials to the missing like Fitz Clarence's name on the Menin Gate demonstrates that there is another part to this story.

We'll continue around the edge of Polygon Wood now and the De Drever Café run by Johan van der Waller just up the road from here is an excellent place to stop for an afternoon coffee but also to go upstairs to his private museum of the work that he's done as an underground archaeologist looking at the tunnels and the fighting tunnels and the dugouts of Flanders Fields is well worth going to have a look at but we'll continue along the edge of the ward you can go into Polygon Ward and there's a

previous podcast episode discussing this to see some of the bunkers that are in there and also visit the battlefield cemeteries that are here including Polygon Wood British Cemetery which is itself the shape of a polygon mimicking the shape of this wood, a wood that before the war was a Belgian army training ground with a rifle range in the middle of it with a rifle butts at the end of it, a big mound basically and that mound became a feature on the battlefield at which the Australians when they

fought here in September of 1917 there was tremendous fighting around that mound and sitting on top of it today is the memorial to the 5th Australian Division and beneath it the cemetery where the graves of many Australians and indeed New Zealanders who fought here later on including their New Zealand memorial to the missing can be found. We'll continue from Polygon Wood from the very tip of it around and into the village of Zonnebeek.

There are so many fantastic museums along the Western Front and you can't visit them all particularly when you're trying to look at an area in a day but here at Zonnebeek is the Memorial Museum Passchendaele found in the old Zonnebeek Chateau rebuilt after the war on the site of the original and now a brilliant museum with a huge array of displays covering this part of the battlefield and a massive area of reconstructed trenches both British and German giving you an insight into what the

trenches actually looked like during the war but we'll continue through Zonnebeek and we come alongside the church again a new feature here is to be able to go up the tower of this church and get fantastic views across the Flanders landscape and it's well worth doing that but alongside it and underneath it was a huge German dugout system that during the centenary was opened up it was full of water the water was pumped out and you could go down the original steps and into the dugout and get an

insight into what this underground war was on the Western Front was like. Unfortunately it couldn't be kept open permanently but underground features like that are very much part of the legacy of the landscape here, the legacy of the Great War that still impacts upon the lives of locals when the subterranean positions collapse and houses then need underpinning and even people fall into these things as happened on a farm very close to here a few years ago.

But beyond the village of Zonnebeek we'll go up the rising ground of another ridge, the Brunsinder Ridge that will bring us up onto the approaches to the village of Passchendaele. As we turn left at the crest of the Bruunseinde Ridge, down towards the village of Passchendaele, we'll see the spire of the church there in the distance. Passchendaele, that iconic part, that iconic name really, connected to the fighting here in Flanders during the Great War.

This landscape, smashed to pieces by the bombardments of 1917, resulted in men living not in trenches, but in interconnected shell holes, very often up to their waist, Waste in mud and muck and slime. Men disappeared into this landscape. Horses, mules, limbers, guns, even tanks. And the proportion of missing soldiers from this period was incredibly high.

And as we come round this part of the Brunsinder Ridge, it brings us up to the largest British and Commonwealth cemetery in the world from either World War, Tynecott Cemetery, with almost 12,000 graves and 35,000 men listed on the memorial to the missing behind it. Here on the slopes of this ridge before the village of Passchendaele I think we get an insight into the scale of the First World War.

As you turn the corner here to come to the main entrance it's almost impossible not to gasp at the sight of rows and rows and rows of white headstones disappearing seemingly almost into infinity on the slopes of this ridge ahead of you. Tynecott, as you wander amongst the rows of the graves here, we see how many of these soldiers were not identified. Unknown soldiers of the Great War, an unknown Australian, Canadian, New Zealander, or from a regiment of the British Army, but their identity lost.

Their name recorded on the Menningate or here at Tynecott, but the fact that the majority of the dead buried here are not known shows the sheer brutality of artillery of industrial warfare on the Western Front at this point in the Great War. Tynecart seems to me to always be the point at which the criss-cross paths of the Great War meet.

Here we see the reality of sacrifice, the cost of war, the tragedy of war, and it's a defining location on the landscape of the Western Front, a place that once you've been and once you've walked amongst the rows of headstones, you can never really forget. And a new visitor centre built at the back of the cemetery brings insight into this location because it is a place that because of its size many people can almost feel lost in.

We'll leave Tyne Cot now and cross this Passchendaele landscape across to St Gravenstaffel, a small hamlet close by where we'll find a memorial to the New Zealand division who fought here in October 1917. Here was their worst day of the war on the Western Front when thousands of New Zealand soldiers became casualties advancing in this mud-filled landscape towards the village of Passchendaele.

Again it just reiterates as we travel round the Western Front, we travel round battlefields like Flanders to see just how many people came from different parts of the world to fight here and the route beyond takes us across what the Canadians called Mouser Ridge during the Second Battle of Ypres we pass the Canadian Memorial a little bit further on and then come to Vancouver Corner to where the main Canadian Memorial, the Brooding Soldier is located, looking out across the battlefields around

the village of St Julian where in a 48 hour period, more than 2,000 Canadians were killed in action and 4,500 were wounded, gassed or taken prisoner. The defence of Ypres by Canadian soldiers in 1915 saw the virtual destruction of that original Canadian expeditionary force, the 1st Canadian Division that came across to France in early 1915.

The brooding soldier as his head bowed low, remembering his fallen comrades and shows us just how important a war in Europe could be to people on the other side of the world, a strong resonance with our world today. We continue from here into the next village of Langemarck and beyond it the German Soldatenfriedhof, the German military cemetery at Langemarck. It's not the largest German military cemetery from the First World War.

That is also in Flanders at Menin with 48,000 burials but here there is a staggering 44,000 German soldiers buried in this cemetery, more than half of them in a mass grave by the main entrance. Langemarck is a cemetery of myths.

The very name was used by the Nazis to demonstrate how Germany was betrayed in the war because here at Langemarck in the first battle of Ypres so-called studentensoldaten student soldiers recruited from the schools and colleges and universities of Germany went into battle and many of them became casualties but the Nazis said that this destruction of the cream of German youth sent to a pointless and futile death showed how Germany had been betrayed by its politicians and by traitors and Jews and

whoever you wanted to add to that list. The history of Langemarck was weaponised used by the Nazis as propaganda and the cemetery took on the air that we see now, the character that we see now in that 1930s period and when we enter and go inside we can see how different the German approach to the commemoration of the dead is to Tynkott where we've just come from. But we see here not just the outcome of the First World War but of the Second as well.

Post-World War II the German Volksbund the German War Graves Commission decided to close the majority of German cemeteries in Belgium and move them into mass graves like the one here at Langemarck. So the more than 22,000 German soldiers who were buried in this mass grave were once originally buried in German cemeteries and they were moved here during the 1950s.

It's not one great big hell pit as I've often heard it described that the Germans just tossed their dead in after the Great War But Langemarck remains a powerful, powerful place to visit. We can understand the sacrifice of those from Britain and the Commonwealth, from our Belgian and our French allies, but what did these men sacrifice their lives for? Many of them came from lands that are no longer German. Silesians and Prussians, that land is now Poland.

And the complex history of Germany in the 20th century certainly weaves a dark path through places like this. Crossing to the other side of Langermark, we find not a memorial to a soldier who died in the Great War, but its last survivor, Harry Patch, the last fighting Tommy. And the book of that name by Richard Van Emden is really worth a follow-up read after you've spent your day visiting Ypres. Harry Patch was a man who, after the war, wanted to forget it. He threw away his medals.

He had no photographs of himself in uniform. He wanted to forget the war. until he could forget it no longer. And in that last phase of his life, he returned to give testimony to the sacrifice of an entire generation here, to symbolize an entire generation. And on so many occasions, he was there under the Menin Gate on the 11th of November as the poppy petals fell down from the roof. And he looked up, and one wonders what he could see in his mind's eye as he saw those poppy petals fall.

What faces of the Great War was he remembering? His memorial here is just a simple one by the side of the Steenbeek River where the fighting had taken place in August and September of 1917 and close to the railway line, the railway embankment, which he could remember having moved up to take part in the fighting beyond Langermark towards the village of Polkapel, his first and last major battle on the Western Front.

Getting back onto the main road, we go past Cement House Cemetery, named after a German bunker, and a cemetery that remained open right up until the 1990s. It was the main cemetery for the burial of the dead from across Belgium. So when soldiers were found at any part on the battlefields within Belgium, they were brought here for burial, and when smaller cemeteries were closed and the graves were moved, they were brought here.

So this cemetery today not just represents men who died in Flanders fields, but in battles like Mons in August 1914 as well. And it was reused again in the early 2000s when some of the dead recovered by the diggers recovered during the archaeological work they did on the industrial estate near Bozinger. The remains of those soldiers were brought here for burial and there is a separate plot in this cemetery where you can find them.

Continuing along this road we pass a new memorial from the centenary, a red Welsh dragon on the crest of the Pilkelm Ridge where the men of the 38th Welsh Division made their advance. New memorials like this emerged both before and during the centenary period and they indicate just how connected we still are to the history and the men and the sacrifice of the Great War. It feels like the desire to record, remember and mark that sacrifice has never been stronger.

A little further up we turn off into that industrial estate where the diggers did their work in the late 90s and on into the early 2000s, working one step ahead of the bulldozers as this site was constructed, recovering the artefacts and the remains of the battlefield and also the remains of those soldiers who had fallen there.

And in the heart of it now, surrounded by modern factory and storage units, is that bit of the western front preserved Yorkshire Trench, a small section of frontline Trench dug by the men of the West Riding Division after the French had occupied this ground previously and now preserved so that not all of that forgotten battlefield as it was called then was lost.

There's a new visitor centre close by at the Zwarnhof an old farm building where you can go in and see an excellent film about this part of the Flanders battlefields there's some interesting maps and photographs and also quite a big display of some of the artefacts that the diggers found on this part of the battlefield Cutting through the industrial estate, that brings us to the Yser Canal, the old medieval canal that once witnessed the passage of barges full of cloth.

During the Great War, this was behind the British front line, but to the north at Bozinger, it became part of the front line with the British, and to the north, the Belgians dug in on one side of the canal, and the Germans on the other. There were bridges right across it throughout the Great War, but we're taking a modern road bridge now that takes us down to Essex Farm and Essex Farm Cemetery.

Named after the men of the Essex Regiment who were here in 1915, in the spoil banks of the canal behind that farm building, a dressing station was made, and it was used by the Canadian Army Medical Corps during the tail end of the Second Battle of Ypres. Canadian poet John McRae came out of his dugout here one morning You could see in May 1915 that amongst the crosses the poppies were beginning to grow.

May is the month in which the poppies begin to emerge across this landscape and this moved him to write the now immortal poem in Flanders Fields which you can read on a modern memorial to him on this spot. When Macrae was here, it was a wooden dressing station. Later in 1916, it was made permanent with concrete, and that concrete dressing station that gives us an insight into the medical side of the Great War, the evacuation and treatment of the wounded, is possible to enter and visit today.

For many years, when I first came here, this was flooded. There's a little stream, a beak, that runs alongside it, and the beak often overflowed, and the farmer didn't really like people going in the bunker. But some years ago, the city of Ypres purchased the ground and preserve this site and it's one of those locations where we can bring together the literature and poetry of the First World War.

Going into the cemetery we see beyond it a tall memorial to the men of the 49th West Riding Division, those Yorkshire Territorials who dug Yorkshire Trench and a plot as we go through a little gate in the rear of the cemetery to our right slightly at angle to the rest of the graves is part of their original divisional burial ground where we'll find men from the York and Lancaster Regiment, the West Riding, and many other of these Yorkshire units that served here at that time.

For most visitors, particularly school groups who come here to Essex Farm, it's the grave of a teenage Tommy that they come to see, Valentine Joe Strudwick. Born on Valentine's Day 1900, he died one month short of his 16th birthday, aged just 15. A 15-year-old in the Great War was very different to a teenager now. He would have considered himself a man and he lied about his age to get in and do his bit.

So many things Richard Van Emden I think has counted almost a quarter of a million of these teenage Tommies who enlisted and served in the trenches of the Great War. For young visitors to the Western Front today, Strudwick's grave is a point in which they can connect with a subject that perhaps to them seems very, very distant at times. He's the same age as them.

He was certainly the same age as me when I first stood at this grave all those years ago with Les Coates and Roger Bastable, my old teachers. It's the very reason, I would guess, that they brought us here.

And one wonders how many tens of thousands of students have trod this path and now go home with valentine strudwick's name forever remembered by them and here we can walk out of the cemetery take the little bridge across the beak up to the west riding division memorial on the bank we can see the spires of eep in the distance our journey's end on this eep in a day has come to an end this is our final stop in a single day we can only hope to peak at the great war really But all these places we've

seen, they're not in isolation, they're all parts of the same puzzle, all pages in the same story. Here we see how the Great War has left an indelible mark on this Flanders landscape, like so many other parts of the Western Front. What we learn from visits like this can resonate so strongly in our own lives, seeing the sacrifice of both young and old, of men and women from many nations. Does it make us reflect on what we should do, what we should achieve in our own lives?

There's so much that we take away from these visits, and so much of ourselves that we leave behind. This, as ever, is the power. of the old front line. You've been listening to an episode of The Old Frontline with me, military historian Paul Reid. You can follow me on Twitter at Somcor. You can follow the podcast at oldfrontlinepod. Check out the website at oldfrontline.co.uk where you'll find lots of podcast extras and photographs and links to books that are mentioned in the podcast.

And if you feel like supporting us, you can go to our Patreon page, patreon.com slash oldfrontline or support us on Buy Me A Coffee at buymeacoffee.com slash oldfrontline. Links to all of these are on our website. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon.