All About Ypres

  “Far, far from Wipers I long to be.
Where German snipers can't get at me.
Dark is my dugout, cold are my feet.
Waiting for Whizzbangs to send me to sleep.”

                              - World War One Song

Yesterday and today: Photo of Ypres Cloth Hall and Saint Martin's Cathedral in ruins accessed from http://www.ww1westernfront.gov.au/ Color photo below by Tom Douglas.

The Flemish say I-per, the French say ee-pre, and the British soldiers of The Great War threw up their hands in frustration and simply called it Wipers. They even produced their own satirical newspaper in the area and named it “The Wipers Times.”

In 1914 the official name was the French “Ypres,” and since then most English-language people have tended to use that version even though the town is now officially Flemish-speaking. 

The original Celtic village stood on the site of today’s cobblestoned town square, called the Grote Markt or Grande Place. Over the centuries the square became a marketplace for stalls selling farm products, fish, and craft items, as well as a favorite spot to congregate for special events and festivals, parades and band concerts. 

From its earliest beginnings, Ypres gradually grew into a thriving metropolis of 40,000 and became the center of Europe’s textile trade. Its magnificent Cloth Hall, completed in 1304 after a century of construction, was one of the largest commercial buildings in Europe. It served as a warehouse, a bazaar for international trade, and a place to hold the meetings of industry guilds. Close to the Cloth Hall was Saint Martin’s Cathedral, and from the towers of these massive edifices the view stretched across the ridges and plains of West Flanders all the way to the North Sea.

Reversals of the fortunes of Ypres began as early as 1316 when the town was hit hard by the plague known as the Black Death.

The year 1337 brought the start of the French-English Hundred Years’ War, in which Ypres sided with the King of France against Ghent, which had allied itself with England. In 1383 Ypres withstood a siege, but suffered so much destruction and population loss both in the town itself and in the surrounding area its cloth trade suffered crippling destruction. Many weavers who fled Flanders to escape the conflict settled in England and began to offer serious competition to their former countrymen.

Although the subsequent centuries brought more invasions and destruction from various invaders, Ypres managed to retain most of its ancient buildings. By 1914 the town was growing and prospering once more, with the number of residents approaching 18,000. Textiles were a mainstay industry again and the district’s farms and villages made Ypres an important market town and trade route. Cobblestone roads, a railway, tram lines and canals connected the small city to communities in outlying areas in all directions, helping to make it a popular tourist destination. A project begun in 1895 to restore the aging historical buildings had been all but completed except for some last touches to the Cloth Hall, where wooden scaffolding still hung on the exterior walls.

On October 3, 1914, an 8000-strong advance party of Germans entered the city. They helped themselves to jewelry, money, clothing and any other portable items they deemed valuable, but when they heard that a large body of French and British troops was closing in they withdrew without doing any serious damage to the town’s public buildings and private houses.

The German units that had been bombarding the fortresses around Antwerp had finally prevailed. King Albert and his remaining Belgian troops had withdrawn to the coast near Nieuport, where the Yser River flows into the North Sea. There they settled in and prepared to defend the last remaining patch of Belgian-controlled territory.

The French took up positions between Nieuport and Ypres, and in mid-October British troops moved into the textile town, providing a link with the French armies to the south, in France.  The Allied objective was to protect the Channel ports of Calais and Dunkirk, where supplies and fresh troops were arriving daily, some of them brought to the front by London’s double-decker buses.

Ypres is bracketed on the east by a semi-circle of ridges that afford a view of the town as well as the plains of Flanders and a host of nearby villages. What the Allies didn’t know was that a new German army of reservists was massing behind those ridges, and although these troops were young – most were still in their late teens – and had been trained for just six weeks, they were energetic and enthusiastic.

And there were a quarter million of them.

In what has come to be known as the First Battle of Ypres, or alternatively the First Battle of Flanders, both sides engaged in offensive actions until October 20, when the Germans launched a major assault against a sixty-mile line on the northern section of the Western Front.

The British commander had decided on an offensive of his own to drive the Germans out of Belgium, but besides being up against far greater odds than he realized, he had another problem on his hands. One of his officers had been captured by the Germans, who found to their delight that he was carrying all the detailed attack orders.

The Allies were forced back into defensive positions and could have suffered a pivotal defeat, but while the British commander had underestimated the size of his enemy, the Germans had overestimated the number of Allied forces. They called off their offensive prematurely, missing the moment that could have led to a victory.

The “Old Contemptibles” once again proved their mettle, convincing another wave of German attackers that the Brits were equipped with machine guns rather than their trusty Lee-Enfields, but their numbers were few and by the end of the First Battle of Ypres they had been completely wiped out. Like the young Germans, the fresh British recruits who replaced the original BEF had the advantage of youth and vigor, but their lack of experience would cost all too many of them their lives.

On October 22, Belgium’s King Albert, still fending off German assaults on his defensive position in Nieuport, reluctantly ordered the opening of the floodgates at the mouth of the Yser River and the dynamiting of the sluice gates in Nieuport, inundating the plains all around that area with seawater.

The action meant that land reclaimed from the ocean over many painstaking years and transformed into fertile farm country would once again lie under crop-destroying salt water. Farmers and villagers were turned into refugees struggling to escape to The Netherlands, their livelihoods and homes obliterated.

But Albert’s desperate last-ditch action worked. The Germans were stymied, unable to get past the flooded fields. Thousands of them drowned as their trenches were inundated with seawater. The survivors retreated, leaving guns and mortar behind in the mire.

They turned their attention back to Ypres, not only to get past the town to reach the French coastal ports but to keep their enemy from going on the offensive. If the Allies could push eastward from Ypres, they could get control of the German railway supply lines across the Flanders plains.

The Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915 is bitterly remembered for the Germans’ first release of chlorine gas into the Allied lines. Six thousand French and Algerian troops died within ten minutes of exposure and many more were blinded.

When the Germans released another cloud of the gas toward the Canadian lines, word was passed among the troops to urinate in their handkerchiefs and press them to their noses and mouths to counter the effects of the gas. They managed to hold the line until May 3 at a cost of 6000 wounded or dead. 

In June the Germans used another new weapon, the infamous flamethrower, a hose-like device that shot burning fuel into the enemy lines, inspiring stark terror in the Allied trenches.

The Second Battle of Ypres ended in another standoff, causing the Germans to step up their artillery barrages on the hapless city.

The Third Battle of Ypres, also known as the Battle of Passchendaele, was fought between June and November 1917 as a determined Allied bid to take control of the ridges from the Germans once and for all. 

The village of Passchendaele was on the last ridge east of Ypres, five miles from a railway station that was an important link in the German supply chain. Additionally, control of this ridge would allow long-range British guns to disrupt enemy communications with its submarine bases on the coast at a time when German U-boats were causing serious havoc on the seas.

Passchendaele is remembered partly for the unprecedented rainfall that turned the battleground into fields of treacherous mud that sucked men down like quicksand. It’s also the place where the Germans first used mustard gas, causing excruciatingly painful external and internal blisters and slow, agonizing deaths. British and Canadian forces finally captured the village on November 6, but the offensive has been criticized to this day as an unnecessary bloodbath where the human losses were far too great to justify the minimal strategic gains achieved. 

Ypres and its surrounding areas continued to be the scene of intense fighting right through to the weeks leading up to the Armistice, and by the time the war ended there was precious little left in the area except bombed-out shells of what had been flourishing communities.

Many of the area’s former residents had started to make new lives for themselves elsewhere, and those who did return faced some difficult decisions.

The destruction was so profound that some people believed it wasn’t worthwhile even to try to rebuild what had been lost. Winston Churchill, among others, suggested that the devastation in Ypres, for example, should be left just as it was as a monument to the depredations of war.

Those who opted for restoration won the day, however, and after much debate about whether to rebuild the Ypres that had been or create a new city using modern architecture, the traditionalists prevailed and the ancient edifices rose again in all their original glory. 

Ironically, because it took decades to complete the work, this picture-perfect medieval town that delights so many of its visitors with its ancient spires and Gothic towers is actually younger than many a 20^th century North American suburb.

Passchendaele photo by Tom Douglas

   Today, the Cloth Hall and Saint Martin's Cathedral are often the backdrop for festive activities

                                                                                                                                   - Tom Douglas Photo

                        

 

Comments

[D]

Beautifully done, Tom & Gail. Thanks. I've shared it with my FB followers on 'In Praise of Canadian History.'

[POKO]

Makes you stop and think about the tenacity of our grandparents. Linked it on my blog www.manitoulinislandindex.com/justsaying.html
Best,
POKO