THE WAGES OF WAR: YPRES

“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.” – Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

WWI Cemetery

This year marks the 100^th anniversary of the end of WWI, or as it is known in many places in Europe, the Great War. And though no more veterans of that war are alive now, its scars are still vivid. Some are physical scars on the land. Some are emotional scars living deep in the psyches of towns and nations. Most are the scars of events that had their origins in the Great War, particularly the Russian Revolution that succeeded in large part in reaction to the toll WWI was taking on Russia at the time, and WWII which had its seeds in conclusion of the first world war.

 Nowhere are these scars more apparent that in the town of Ypres in Belgium. Site of some of the worst of the trench warfare that marked that war, the Ypres area saw five bloody battles over the course of four years. During this entire time, trenches were maintained and fought over on a sustained basis, with the enemies’ trenches often less than a mile apart from one another. The battle lines were known as the salient, and the salient moved back and forth through this time, with territory captured, lost, and recaptured in those five battles.

A German bunker that today is
surrounded by a cemetery of mostly
British Commonwealth soldiers

 It was in the second battle, in 1915, that gas was first used, as Germany unleashed chlorine gas on the allied trenches. Through these battles, the town of Ypres came under considerable shelling, and the gas began to drift into the town. After the gas attack, civilians were evacuated from the town, and by the end of the war virtually nothing was left standing. But the use of gas was not limited to the Germans—the allies subsequently used mustard gas, and thus came the advent of weapons of mass destruction.

This also was the first war in which air power was used. Zeppelins and airplanes dropped shells and hand grenades on troops in the trenches, and used aerial surveillance to monitor troop movements. Later in the war, the airplanes became capable of carrying and releasing bombs, thus introducing another means of mass destruction.

The battles here had somewhere between 900,000 and 1.3 million casualties on both sides. Most of the allied troops in this area were from Britain and various nations of the British commonwealths, but other nations were here as well. Cemeteries of identical white grave markers pepper the fields around Ypres, in the Flanders region. Some are vast, some are small. All tell the same stories—young men cut down in their prime, or even before they reached their prime, in battles now seen as senseless.

Most of the graves are for British soldiers, but interspersed between them are graves for soldiers from Commonwealth countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The British asked that their dead be buried where they died. Other nations asked for their troops’ bodies to be returned.

And the ages of the people killed are striking—most were in their early twenties, but many were just teenagers, including those as young as 15 or 16. Indeed, the British had started to recruit schoolboys for the army, assuring them that they could go through training with their school pals, and all be deployed together in the same regiment. And they stayed true to their word. Unfortunately, the result was that, when a regiment was attacked, these youngsters were killed. And the futures of entire villages killed with them. This policy was soon changed.

Grave of a 15-year-old soldier

 Another arresting thing about these graves is the information on them. Some have details of the individual’s name, rank, regiment, etc. Others state only nationality or rank or some other detail but no name. Far too many simply say “A Soldier of the Great War.” Efforts were made to identify each body, but often there were few to no clues as to who the person was. So each grave was marked with however much information could be gleaned from what remained of the person that was. Bodies are still being discovered today, often by farmers tilling their fields. Some can be identified with modern methods. But most cannot.

Contrasting levels of detail on gravestones

 Once Germany failed to take Paris in the early part of the war, the German military told that country’s leaders in 1914 that the war would be un-winnable. But rather than abandon the effort, the general delivering this news was fired and a new general was appointed to lead another four years of carnage. And as the years passed on the allied side, it became clear that a stand-off was the best they could do. Yet, nothing less than total victory was wanted, so the war waged on until that level of victory could be achieved and punishments imposed on Germany.

With the passing of those years came a shift in attitudes toward the war. Contrast this poem, written in 1915 by John McCraie, a Canadian doctor running a triage hospital on the front upon hearing of the death in battle of his friend, with the writings below:

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 us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Dr. McCraie's
triage bunker

This poem reflected the grief of loss, but still reflected belief in, and encouragement of, the war. By contrast, Siegfried Sassoon, a British decorated hero of the war, in 1917 wrote this letter of protest against the war that was read in the House of Commons on the day of the third battle in the Ypres region:

“I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those how have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe this War, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this War should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible for them to be changed without our knowledge, and that, has this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.

I am not protesting against the military conduct of the War, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them. Also I believe that it may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those as home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise.”

Ten years after the war, Ypres erected the Menin Gate, inside which the names of 54,000 soldiers missing in the war were etched. The gate now stands tall at the entrance to the city. But this construction infuriated Sassoon, who commemorated the occasion with this poem:

On Passing the New Menin Gate

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
the unheroic dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,-
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride
'Their name liveth for ever', the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
as these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.”

Menin Gate

Names inside Menin Gate

Today, Ypres has emerged from the ruins. After the war, the British had urged that the flattened city remain that way as a reminder. But the Flemish would have none of that. They were given three choices: to leave it flat, to build a new, modern city, or to rebuild it exactly the way it looked before the war. They made the third choice, and so today Ypres is a medieval-looking city that was built in the twentieth century.

A restored street in Ypres

Ypres town center, today