Great Escape: In Flanders Fields
100 years have passed since the Battle of Passchendaele. Niall Hampton heads to Ypres to find out more and pay his respects
Join Niall as he tours around Ypres and its locality, where many great memorials commemorate those who fought in the battles of WWI
The Menin Gate in Ypres lists the names of 54,896 Allied soldiers who have no known grave
While taking a break from pootling around the countryside east of Ypres in our Vauxhall Insignia Grand Sport, a Google Maps alert popped up on my phone. If I left now, it said, I would be back in Twickenham in four hours. It clearly hadn’t taken the cross-channel ferry into account, but it was still a reminder that even though we were abroad, we were very close to home.
This was presumably a feeling shared by the British soldiers fighting here alongside those from the Empire 100 years ago, trying to halt Germany’s invasion of Belgium. A conflict that was supposed to have been over within four months had instead become a stalemate, before grinding down into a war of attrition with loss of life on a scale we find hard to comprehend 100 years on.
I’ve always found the history of the First World War fascinating. Although I don’t have any family connections to the fighting in Belgium, I was determined to pay a visit to the West Flanders area (referred to locally as Westhoek) in the centenary year of the Third Battle of Ypres, better known as the Battle of Passchendaele. This battle is infamous for shifting the front line by five miles, for half a million casualties over 100 days of fierce fighting.
Our van for this tour was a Caravelair Antarès 496, exclusively available at Marquis Leisure’s 12 dealerships in the UK. Performing towing duties was our latest long-term test car, a Vauxhall Insignia Grand Sport SRI in fetching Lava Red.
With its unchallenging terrain plus the fact it’s a quick and easy drive from the Channel ports, West Flanders is ideal for touring by caravan. One can sail on a lunchtime ferry and be supping a local beer in one of Ypres’ many bars before tea-time.
I’d been joined on the trip by our Claudia, but as the 496 has only one large fixed bed (a front double), she made alternative overnight-accommodation arrangements. So having arranged a return crossing from Dover to Dunkirk via DFDS, and opting for using the VIP lounge, we made our way in glorious sunshine from Camberley Secure Storage to coastal Kent – a traffic-free journey that took a little under two hours.
Just so close to home
Following a smooth crossing and prompt disembarkation, we made our way to the Belgian border – and were stopped for a routine check. Belgian motorways are much like those in France, so there wasn’t much of a transition. With the van loaded close to a 75% match with the car, the Vauxhall made light work of the Caravelair, and on quieter roads, it barely felt like there was a caravan on tow. My base for the week was Camping Jeugdstadion, situated close to the centre of Ypres – signposted Ieper – and easily accessed via a ring road. This municipal site is mainly patronised by motorhomes and is fairly basic, but the location is excellent. A 15-minute walk takes you to the Menin Gate, and that’s where we found ourselves not long after unhitching the Vauxhall and pitching up the Caravelair.
A short walk from one of Ypres’ bestknown landmarks takes you to another – the Cloth Hall, originally dating from the 14th century. It’s a testament to how prosperous this area once was. Well positioned for the Channel sea ports, Ypres was a major trading hub for textiles – the height of the belfry is a marker of the town’s former wealth. Like the rest of the town, it was virtually destroyed by shelling during the war, but was fully and faithfully rebuilt afterwards.
The square around the Cloth Hall is bustling, with many bars and cafés to choose from; although many are closed on Monday night, when we arrived. After sampling some local beer in the Old Tom bar – one of many establishments to have a name referencing the First World War – we headed for the nearby De Trompet restaurant and bar for our evening meal. Belgium is well known
for some tasty dishes, but we eschewed the mainstream staples – such as pricey moules-frites – and instead went for Flanders stew (beef in beer) and salad, which was as delicious as it was fortifying.
Stepping into the past
An ideal jump-off point for exploring Ypres and the surrounding area is a visit to the In Flanders Fields Museum, in the Cloth Hall. So that’s where we found ourselves the following morning. A €2 supplement to the €9 entry fee buys access to the belfry, which I took advantage of. With 231 steps to the top, it’s not for the weak-of-knee, but the panoramic views are ample reward for the increased heart rate. Looking out towards Passchendaele, just over the horizon, you get a real sense of the topography east of Ypres; the land is mainly flat, gently rising from the town to a ridge over a distance of about seven miles.
The museum tells the story of the three battles that took place around Ypres between 1914 and 1917. The German army’s invasion of neutral Belgium in the summer of 1914 paused on the ridge, creating a bulge in the front line around the town that became known as the Ypres Salient.
The bocage landscape (small, hedged fields with groves of trees) restricted visibility, so a war of attack soon made way for a more defensive approach by both sides. Holding the higher ground, the Germans knew that their opponents would literally have to fight an uphill battle to dislodge them.
Organised battlefield tours are widely available, but we opted instead for visiting locations featured in Ypres Salient Tourist
Car Route 14-18 (€6 from the In Flanders Fields Museum shop). A map inside
(which points due east) shows all the main landmarks and how to reach them, should you choose not to follow the 70km loop that starts and finishes from Ypres train station.
Our first stop was next to a railway line, around five kilometres south-east of Ypres: Hill 60 and the Caterpillar Crater. Hill 60 – so called because it’s 60 metres above sea level – was formed from spoil displaced by railway cutting excavations in the 19th century, and was some of the most fiercely contested land throughout the war. It’s also infamous for the huge mines that were detonated under German positions by the Allies, in 1915 and 1917.
Leaving the Vauxhall in the adjacent car park, we entered the now-verdant site through a gate, walking over wide wooden duckboards towards the railway line.
The battlefield trauma is still visible on the topography, with its pronounced undulations, but what’s really jarring are the metal markers that show the front line – it changed hands here seven times, for thousands upon thousands of lives lost.
Farther on, across the railway line, is Caterpillar Crater, blown up as part of the Battle of Messines Ridge in 1917. It’s an incredible 80 metres wide by 15 metres deep. By 1917, undermining enemy positions had become a sophisticated endeavour, taking its place alongside the other innovations of this first industrialised war: heavy artillery, poison gas, tanks and flamethrowers.
In Flanders fields
Our next stop, Hooge Crater, is associated with the latter. In July 1915, the British blew another large mine under the German positions on the site of Hooge Château, but were unable to progress much farther than the resulting mine crater. The Germans replied later that month with a flamethrower attack – a new horror for Allied troops to get to grips with. The Museum Hooge Crater occupies a 1920s chapel built next to the crater site but we opted instead for the outdoor museum (donations welcomed in the box by the gate) slightly farther along, to see the remains of a trench system and a concrete-reinforced German bunker.
Close by – but due to shut soon after we arrived, so we couldn’t enter – is the Sanctuary Wood Hill 62 Museum, which
I’m told houses an unusual collection of wartime artifacts. Behind the museum are some preserved British trenches, which form one of the most visited sites in the Ypres Salient. A hundred metres away is Sanctuary Wood Cemetery, where 60% of those interred are unidentified.
A total of 54,896 unknown soldiers are dedicated on the Menin Gate in Ypres, where the inscription reads: ‘To the armies of the British Empire who stood here from 1914 to 1918 and to those of their dead who have no known grave’. The daily commemoration here was our next stop.
It takes place every evening at 8pm, with soundings of the Last Post by the town’s fire brigade either side of presentations of poppies. Claudia and I joined at least 200 people gathered to pay their respects. It’s impossible not to feel a lump in the throat during this impeccably observed ceremony.
Afterwards, we wandered around in search of an evening meal. Ypres has a decent variety of places to eat, although the prices can be as frothy as the local beer – snacks such as croque madame or croque monsieur will set you back at least €10. On this occasion, though, we opted for something more adventurous by choosing the Dépot restaurant/bar-cum-department store. Claudia got the chance to try a peach beer, which she pronounced “very fruity”.
I chose a Wipers Times, a blonde beer named after the satirical newspaper produced by British soldiers serving in the area (‘Wipers’ being the typical Tommy’s pronunciation of Ypres).
The lay of the land
The next morning Claudia and I set off for the Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917, in Zonnebeke. Given the centenary of the battle, an additional attraction had been opened – a British dugout system built in early 1918 under the then-ruined Zonnebeke Church. Five metres underground and accessed via a steep staircase, the dugout was dank and cramped, but it would have offered welcome shelter from artillery barrages. Our guide explained that water had to be manually pumped out by soldiers taking shifts of 20 minutes each.
Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917 is located in the grounds of Zonnebeke Château. Battlefield artifacts, including uniforms, weapons, equipment and soldiers’ personal effects, are well explained in English and there’s free parking on site.
The middle section of the museum features a recreated Allied trench dugout system showing several different aspects of life underground, including accommodation for soldiers and officers, a dressing station, cookhouse, latrines and bunks. After rooms with munition and weapon displays, and a cinema with regular screenings of a film about the battle, the museum concludes with an outdoor section of faithfully reconstructed German and British trenches and shelters, laid out in chronological order.
The village of Passchendaele was one of the objectives of the Third Battle of Ypres, intended as a decisive push through the German lines, then farther on to secure the sea ports of Ostend and Zeebrugge. The battle commenced on 12 July 1917 with a two-week bombardment that fired four million shells on German positions. The shelling destroyed the drainage systems of this reclaimed land, so when the worst rainfall in 30 years arrived, during August, the ground attack soon became bogged down. Passchendaele was eventually captured on 6 November, and not at the end of August as per the original plan.
On their way to this breakthrough, the Allied troops had to get past the German bunkers at Tyne Cot, halfway between Zonnebeke and Passchendaele. These were part of a fortification called the Flandern I Stellung, and the fact that there are 11,956 Commonwealth soldiers buried here – in addition to 34,957 soldiers who have no known grave listed on the memorial – underscores the ferocity of the fighting. Today, three of the five German bunkers have been incorporated into Tyne Cot Cemetery: the central command bunker is located under the Cross of Sacrifice, with the other two forming the foundations for a pair of the cemetery’s shelters. A new visitor centre was opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 2007, and offers commanding views across the battlefield and beyond towards Ypres. From here, it’s clear why the Germans did not want to give up such a strategic position. Tyne Cot Cemetery is well signposted and parking is available behind the visitor centre. A pathway guides you to that visitor centre and from there, there’s a track around to the main entrance. With its flint-faced walls and entrance portico, it looks like a patch of England in a Flanders setting – but little prepares you for the scale of what awaits upon entering the cemetery. Lines of gravestones stretch out before you, many bearing the legend, ‘A soldier known only unto God’. As you walk slowly – there’s no other way – towards the memorial at the rear, the columns and columns of names – so many were in their early 20s – really bring home the extent of the sacrifice they made. The fact we were there 100 years to the very day that Australian troops took the bunkers at Tyne Cot made our visit even more moving.
So many lost on both sides
Four German soldiers are also buried in Tyne Cot, and we spotted one more in our next location, Polygon Wood Cemetery. This is across a lane from the Buttes New British Cemetery, itself adjacent to the memorial to the 5th Australian Division, which captured the wood in September 1917. A Cross of Sacrifice is mounted on a ‘butte’, part of a pre-war army shooting range, which became a strategic point during the war. The large burial ground to its right was established after the Armistice, with soldiers from the battlefields of Zonnebeke laid to rest here.
Curious to see a German cemetery, Claudia and I drove to Langemark, five miles away, where one of only four German cemeteries in Flanders is located. On maps this location is given as ‘Studentenfriedhof ’ (student cemetery), because it is the resting place of more than 3000 student volunteer soldiers killed between October and November 1914 during the First Battle of Ypres. More than 44,000 German soldiers are buried at Langemark, 25,000 of them in a mass grave. Three restored German concrete shelters form part of the memorial, similar to the way the bunkers were incorporated into Tyne Cot Cemetery.
On the way back to Ypres, the statue of The Brooding Soldier appeared as we approached a crossroads. Officially known as the St Julien Canadian Memorial, this commemorates the 2000 Canadian soldiers who fell here in German gas attacks during the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915. Hewn from granite and standing 11 metres high, this is one of the best-known First World War memorials, depicting a soldier with head bowed and ‘reversed arms’ – his hands resting on the butt of an inverted rifle, referencing a ceremonial gesture made at military funerals. You are never far from a sombre reminder of how battle-scarred this region once was; the scattering of cemeteries sometimes reflects their proximity to the field dressing stations where casualties died.
Time for reflection
Later that day, during our second visit to the ceremony at the Menin Gate, Claudia and I reflected on how moving this short tour had been. Until you’ve visited several cemeteries to take a look at the roll call of the fallen, it’s hard to get a feel for how many soldiers from Britain and its Empire paid with their lives – some fighting so close to home but who never made it back. Indeed, signs for English-named cemeteries crop up in all directions travelled around Ypres – Bedford House, Essex Farm, Hyde Park Corner, Nine Elms and Oxford Road were just some of many examples we saw.
Driving around this gentle, fairly unremarkable countryside given over to agriculture, it’s difficult to comprehend the epic scale of the destruction and death in and around Ypres and Passchendaele 100 years ago – the locals referred to it as the verwoeste gewesten (devastated lands). With the land resembling a moonscape rather than the dense, green terrain from the start of the war, little wonder veterans of the first two battles of Ypres sent to fight in the third one could not recognise where they were.
During our three full days exploring the Ypres Salient, we’d only scratched the surface. Those who can stay longer, and also tackle parts of the route by foot or by cycle, will be able to immerse themselves even further in a fascinating historical context and its deeply moving aftermath. And, most important of all, they can pay their respects to the many who fell in Flanders.