Marple Remembers 2003 - Day 2 part 1

TUESDAY 16th APRIL 2003 (Day 2, part 1)

I was up and about for 07.30 and quickly downstairs to breakfast leaving Robin to get up at his own pace. The dining room was almost empty and totally devoid of any staff. I filled a plate with scrambled eggs, bacon and sausages, poured a large glass of fresh orange juice and sat down to enjoy it. Some time later another member of our group came down and a member of the hotel staff, now in evidence, directed him to a separate room. It seems that I was in the wrong place and enjoying the wrong breakfast - oops!

By 09.00 almost all of us were on the coach and ready for what was to be a very full day. A quick count by Pete discovered that we were only two people short and further investigation solicited the fact that Darryl was still in the shower. He must have moved like lightning because he was out of the shower, dressed and on the coach before 09.10.

If yesterday had been pleasantly warm and bright, today was to prove to be very hot and sunny. Although still only April the temperature made it more like high summer. By the late afternoon the thermometer was reaching 28oC and those members of the group who had not packed for all eventualities were feeling quite uncomfortable. We had good weather for the trip last year so I had expected this year to be more seasonal. However, no one is complaining about this year's early summer.

ESSEX FARM CEMETERY

During the greater part of the war the British trenches near Boezinge village directly faced the German front line on the east side, but further south the British line was several kilometres east of the canal. A little less than midway from Ypres to Boezinge there was a farm building in the narrow space between the road and the canal bank known by the army as Essex Farm. The land south of the farm came to be used as a dressing station cemetery in April 1915 and it remained in use until August 1917.

There are now over 1,000 casualties commemorated in the site. Of these over 100 are unidentified. The 49th Division memorial is immediately behind the cemetery. On the canal bank just beside the cemetery are some concrete dugouts that were used as a dressing station between 1915 and 1917.

The first stop of the day was at Essex Farm cemetery, the site of yet another dressing station. In this case it had been very close to the front line and was used by the units manning the fire step only a few hundred yards away. Men of the same battalion are laid side by side and by following the sequence of the dates on the headstones it is easy to follow the progression of regiments that followed and replaced each other into the sector. The cemetery frequently came under enemy shellfire. A certain Harry Kendall of 1st King Edward's Horse, stationed here during the Third Battle of Ypres, wrote:

I was stationed for some time on these crossroads near the Essex Farm graveyards. Fritz had a bad habit of sending over shells and ploughing up the graves. For many weeks there was often little peace at that end of Essex farm road - for even the 'glorious' dead. Often a dozen times a day we were smothered over with mud from the graves torn by Fritz's exhuming shells� Possibly the worst phase of this post by number four bridge was the eternal review of dead men before one's tiring eyes. Slaughtered men lying about in all shapes and forms around this unholy post of ours.

We visited two specific graves. The first was that of Private Thomas Barratt VC of the South Staffordshire regiment. He died on 27th July 1917 at the age of 22. By all accounts Barratt was a hard, unpleasant man having been brought up in orphanages that gave him but a poor start in life. For his own reasons he enlisted for the war and quickly established a reputation as a hard fighter. The citation for his Victoria Cross reads as follows:

On 27 July 1917 north of Ypres, Belgium, Private Barratt, as a scout to a patrol, worked his way towards the enemy under continuous fire from hostile snipers, which he stalked and killed. Later his patrol was similarly held up and again he disposed of the snipers. When a party of the enemy were endeavouring to outflank the patrol on their withdrawal, private Barratt volunteered to cover the withdrawal which he did, his accurate shooting causing many casualties and preventing the enemy advance. After safely regaining our lines this gallant soldier was killed by a shell.

The second grave at which we paid our respects was that of Rifleman Valentine 'Joe' Strudwick. He was killed along with several of his fellow riflemen on 14th January 1916 which would be sadly unremarkable were it not for his age. He was only 14 years and 10 months when he died. Amazingly Joe was not the youngest soldier to fight and die in the Great War. That unwished-for record belongs to Private John Condon of the 2nd. Royal Irish Regiment who died on 24th May 1915 aged barely 14.

Adjoining the cemetery is a large concrete bunker where the medical staff of the dressing station had plied their trade, often under heavy fire, always under extreme pressure. One of the doctors who served there during 1915 was Canadian, Major John McCrae. He was an experienced soldier having first seen service with the Artillery during the Boer war. On one occasion, exhausted and dispirited from overwork, he was observed by one of his sergeants to be scribbling something on a scrap of paper as he sat on the tail step of an ambulance. Recalled to his harrowing work, McCrae casually tossed the scrap aside and that would have been that had not the concerned sergeant picked it up to see what his officer had been up to. He had, in fact, been writing a poem that so impressed the sergeant that he sent it off to the news magazine Punch which published it on 8th December 1915. That poem was "In Flanders Fields" and was destined to become one of the most memorable poems of the Great War.

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with those who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

From the imagery of this poem was taken the symbol of the poppy for the Haig Fund, set up to provide for injured ex-servicemen and to remember those who gave their lives in the Great War and all subsequent conflicts.

McCrae was later promoted and by 1918 was a Lieutenant Colonel at a base hospital near Boulogne. Having worn himself out, he died of pneumonia in January of that year and is buried in the military cemetery at Wimereux.

At the rear of the cemetery is a mound capped with a tall obelisk. It is a memorial to the men of the 49th West Riding Division. Around the base is a list of the various places in France and Belgium where the division had fought. One of them was Valenciennes in northern France. This struck a cord in me as that was the place where my father was badly wounded in 1940 while serving in another Yorkshire regiment, the East Riding Yeomanry.

On the way to our next stop we passed Cement House Cemetery, much like all the others except that in one corner we could see several new gravestones. Even after all this time bodies are still being discovered and still being awarded the courtesy of an honourable interment among the remains of their fellow soldiers. It is in this cemetery that the remains discovered during the Boezinge excavations were reburied.

VANCOUVER CORNER

On April 22nd 1915, a warm, sunny Thursday, following a lull in a four-day barrage aimed by the Germans mainly at the areas north and east of Ypres, the shelling restarted on the French and Canadian troops north of the town, around Langemarck and St. Julian. At around 17.00 two French divisions of Algerian Turcos and African Light Infantry watched a strange yellowish-green cloud (un nuage jaune-vert) slowly sweeping towards them. Preceding it, a vast horde of rats swept out of no-man's-land, through their positions and on into the rear areas. Nobody knew what to make of the cloud. Then, as it reached them, the French soldiers began choking, gasping in agony; many collapsed, suffocating to death, their eyes, noses and throats burning as though seared with acid. More than 160 tons of chlorine gas had been released from specially placed cylinders in the German trenches. The French troops broke and ran, abandoning their trenches. It was the first use of poison gas during the Great War. The French retreat left a four-and-a-half-mile unguarded gap in the front line.

Fortunately the Canadians, whose flank abutted that of the French colonial troops, had been less affected by the gas and, in particular, men of the 13th Canadian Battalion were able to slow down the German advance. The Germans had been taken somewhat by surprise by their startling success and were not in sufficient numbers to make the most of the breakthrough. Nonetheless, the position was dangerous. The battle went to and fro but by 20.00 the 10th and 16th Canadian battalions had launched a counter-attack against the Germans near Kitchener's Wood with some success. Nevertheless, before daylight on the 23rd April although the gap left in the allied line was no longer fully open, the position was far from satisfactory. Fighting of some intensity involving Canadian forces continued until 4th May. A second German gas attack against the Canadians on 24th April was repulsed as they were able to take rudimentary precautions with basic gas masks that involved wrapping urine-soaked rags over their mouths and noses.

This action marked the start of the second Battle of Ypres.

We next pulled up at the St. Julian Memorial, more commonly known as Vancouver Corner. This imposing monument, often referred to as "The Brooding Soldier" was erected after the war to commemorate the fighting qualities of the Canadian troops who held the line after the first gas attacks of the war, suffering some 2,000 casualties in the process. Atop an immense white column, the obelisk gradually blends into the head and shoulders of a tin-hatted soldier, his head bowed over his reversed rifle. Against the clear blue sky it was an outstanding sight that could not fail to impress.

After describing the horrors of the attack, Andy asked Robin to read a very appropriate poem by Wilfred Owen.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime�

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Finally Andy took the group's photograph - with everyone's camera�a time consuming job.

Just down the road from Vancouver Corner is Springfield, the site of a concrete German bunker, part of their elastic defence line. In August 1917 in a dawn attack, the 8th Royal Warwickshire Regiment, supported by tanks and under the cover of an artillery barrage, finally captured the bunker. It was soon lost to a German counter-attack. The withdrawal by the Warwicks was rapid and they were forced to leave a great many wounded companions out in no-man's-land. These unfortunate men sought what cover they could in deep shell holes. That night there was a torrential rainstorm. Slowly the shell holes filled with water leaving the sheltering wounded with only two choices; stay in the holes and drown or vacate the cover and be mown down by the German machine-guns that swept the area. All through that long night the soldiers of the regiment back in their old front line trenches had to endure the pitiful cries for help from their dying friends, cries that gradually grew fewer and eventually ceased as they drowned, one by one.

Further along is Cheddar bunker, another captured German concrete construction. When built, its door faced away from the front but after its capture and the change in the position of the front line the door now faced the enemy. The bunker became a regimental aid post for the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. The Germans shelled that area heavily and almost inevitably a shell eventually found the door of the bunker, exploding inside and causing terrible destruction. Most of the wounded and the medical staff who were tending them were killed.

THE SECOND BATTLE OF YPRES - 22nd APRIL to 25th MAY 1915

The Second Battle of Ypres, often referred to as simply 'Second Ypres', really comprised only one major attack. It was intended by the Germans primarily to divert attention from their operations on the Eastern Front and, it has been suggested, so that they could test their new terror weapon, poison gas.

The battle commenced on 22nd April 1915 with a preliminary artillery bombardment. In the late afternoon the guns fell silent only to commence again with renewed vigour at about 17.00. At the same time, to the north of Ypres, the Germans opened 5,700 canisters containing 168 tons of chlorine gas. This greenish-yellow cloud was carried by the prevailing breeze towards the Allied trenches, manned at this point by French North African and territorial troops. The stunned soldiers fled in panic leaving a four-mile-wide gap in the front line. The gas affected 10,000 soldiers. Half of them died within ten minutes of the cloud reaching their trenches.

Perhaps fortunately for the Allies the Germans were not prepared for the amazing success of their new weapon. Two corps advanced warily into the gap but they were unsupported by any reserves. They were halted after an advance of only three kilometres by fierce British and Canadian counter-attacks.

Two days later, on 24th April, a second gas attack was directed against Canadian troops. The Canadians improvised gas masks by wrapping urine-soaked rags over their mouths and noses. Unlike the French troops two days earlier, the Canadians did not crack but they were gradually forced back by the German follow-up assaults. Over the next few days, in confused and sometimes desperate counter-attacks, the Allies managed to hold and in some cases to win back some of the lost ground.

Repeated German attacks on 8th May and again on 24th May, once more supported by gas, failed to break the Allies' hold on the Salient. Eventually, towards the end of the month, a shortage of supplies and reinforcements obliged the Germans to call a halt to their attacks and revert to the use of artillery to try to reduce the Salient.

It is estimated that Second Ypres cost the British 59,000 men and the French 35,000. The figure for the Germans is around 35,000 men. It was clear that poison gas could be a powerful weapon in this war of attrition.

Then it was back into Ypres to visit the famous "In Flanders Fields" museum. This museum, housed in the Cloth Hall, attempts to tell the story of the war, particularly in the Ypres Salient. It uses a variety of means to do this but I feel that it falls somewhat short of its aims. As an example, on entering one is given a card bearing a name and a bar code. When it is placed in a terminal there appears on the screen the details of the man or woman whose name it is and the story of what they were doing before the war and how they became involved in it. This is an excellent idea and should get the visitor more deeply committed to the experience. Unfortunately there are only two more terminals. One gives the details of the person's actions in and around Ypres while the third one tells what finally happened to them. It creates only a superficial involvement with the story. Perhaps more, smaller chunks of the story specifically linked to parts of the exhibition might work better.

Other exhibits are interesting in themselves - the story of the Christmas truce, the use of poison gas, the war poets - but the displays often fail to draw any connections. Language is one of the problems. English, French, Flemish and German are used with sometimes little translation except for a booklet issued on entry. It is not an easy document to follow. All this is a pity as it is an important story to tell and a great deal of ingenuity has gone into the creation of the individual exhibits. The result is interesting without being riveting.

After spending some money in the museum's shop I joined Kath and Alan for lunch of an excellent ham omelette in de Kollebloem, one of the many caf�s, bars and restaurants that ring the Cloth Hall and the Market Place. Looking around it is hard to believe that everything, including the Cloth Hall, dates from after the end of the Great War. The town was all but destroyed by 1918 and the decision was made to rebuild most of it exactly as it had been in 1914, before the destruction. In fact the Cloth Hall itself was not fully rebuilt until the 1960s. Some buildings bear two dates; presumably the oldest one is the date when it was originally constructed and the later one the date of its reconstruction. Most reconstructions date from the early 1920s. Thus de Trompete, another restaurant, carries on its frontage the dates 1602 and 1922.

As I ate my omelette I thought of the hundreds of thousands of men who, on a brief respite from the front line, would seek out an estaminet among the ruins where the height of luxury was a glass of van plonk and an omelette. What would those men have given to share my multi-egg creation, filled with ham and enjoyed in the sunny open air, free from Five-Nines and shrapnel and the stench of death?