Its exhibitions are powerful and emotive, distressing and personal, thought provoking and compelling. ![]() Many will visit the ‘In Flanders Fields Museum’. ![]() Some are young and others are old some have made their way to honour a grandfather or uncle who did not return home, others have gathered in reverence to the men of their town or of all of the men who died in the battlefields of Ypres. From all over Britain and the Commonwealth they come. The shattering statistics of death and injury and their equally shattering effect on the British consciousness have ensured that Ypres has become a place of pilgrimage for the many who wish to pay their respects to those who died. Poppies on wooden crosses in the garden of the Hall of Memory. That was a third of all those who were killed in the First World War. From the First Battle of Ypres to the end of the Great War between 220,000 and 240,000 men from Britain and the Empire would die in the small space of the Salient. Together with Ypres they defined the British experience of the First World War.įollowing the first great battle there when a German breakthrough was thwarted, miles and miles of trenches were dug as the two sides came to face each other across the shattered fields of No Man’s Land. All of them call out of the death, destruction and misery of the Great War. Nearby locations such as Sanctuary Wood, Langemark and Zonnebeke were also held by the British, whilst the Germans occupied the Messines Ridge, Menin and Passchendaele. In recognition of the agonies its people had to bear, in 1920 Ypres was awarded the British Military Cross and the French Croix de Guerre. Within that salient lay Ypres itself, which the Germans desperately wished to take but which was defended resolutely against them throughout the war.īombed relentlessly for four years it was all but razed to the ground and became known as the Martyred City. A bulge punching out from the British lines into the German positions, it could be attacked from three sides – to the east, the north and the south. Many, many more would be added to that terrible toll.įrom this the First Battle of Ypres, a salient emerged. Between 14 October and 30 November 1914, the British lost 53,000 men whilst over 4,500 Indian troops were also killed, wounded or went missing. Their aim was to capture the Channel Ports and thus cut off the British Expeditionary Force from reinforcements and supplies from England.ĭerided by the Kaiser as “a contemptible little army”, the doughty troops of the British Expeditionary Force, helped by the valiant Belgians and French, held off a much greater German force. This metamorphosis of Ypres into a focal point of remembrance began in mid October 1914 when the area was overwhelmed by bloody fighting as the Germans strove to end the war quickly in a ‘race to the sea’. An historic cloth town lying in the flat landscape of northern Flanders, it has come to symbolise the sacrifice of a generation of young men in the Great War. ![]() Ypres is a place that has seared itself into both the collective soul and the communal memory of the British people.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |