Ypres: The Menin Road

Continuing our journeys along the roads which crisscross the landscape of the Western Front, we travel to Flanders in Belgium, and take the old Roman road between the city of Ypres and the town of Menin which follows the story of four years of conflict here in the First World War and discuss once more the 'culture' of The Old Front Line.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

The old Roman road that extended from the city of Ypres to the town of Menin took the men of both sides into the very heart, the dark heart of conflict in Flanders during the Great War. Here today, as we follow that route, what do we find of the culture of the old front line? We've spoken in a recent episode about the Albert-Bapon road on the Somme and how those main roads which cut across the landscape of the Western Front are perhaps taken for granted as we use them today to traverse that ground, but yet are themselves incredibly important as pathways to the past and are all part of how we access the past via that landscape of the present. And we've spoken about this and its relation to the culture of the old front line. And I do think that there is something in this idea of a culture. The battlefields have something about them that we know is tangible, but we can't always quantify. And I think our search for the understanding of that is all part of that culture. But those roads, they guide us, they lead us. They aren't simply a route from one place to another. And along them are the many layers of history by which we understand the Great War, and with it perhaps how we begin to put together the jigsaw pieces of that conflict and make sense of them. We discussed the Aubert-Bapome Road and what that means to the Somme battlefields of 1916, and another obvious one to explore and consider is the Menin Road at Ypres. A road and a name that is certainly very much part of the war's culture in Flanders, whether it be from the perspective of veterans, accounts written both then and later, or how we view that very central part of what was once the Ypres salient, but as it is today. For me, the Menin Road is a very evocative name. Almost a phrase, really, a byword for the Great War at Ypres. And I remember veterans that I interviewed in the 80s and 90s discussing it with me, talking about marching up that Menin Road with star shells cutting the sky in the distance over the ridges beyond, or gunners... galloping in their limbers across Hellfire Corner and straight up the Menin Road to get to the gun sites, to feed those guns, to continue with the bombardment, to fight another day in this massive industrial war of which they were all a part. And I can remember one or two of those men, when they used the names of the places around Ypres, including the Menin Road, it almost sent a shiver down their spine. If I could have somehow quantified and what they were seeing in their mind's eye. Who knows what we'd have seen? Who knows what darkness we'd have had an insight into? So I think these roads, the naming of them, the Albert-Bapaume Road and now, which we'll look at in this episode, the Menin Road, these are all parts of that layered culture of the First World War. The very names themselves taking us to those moments during that conflict. So in this podcast, we're going to follow another one of these roads, another Roman road, and see where it takes us and what we find of Flanders past as we travel along that highway in Flanders present. So where do we start on this journey along the Menin Road? Well, without a doubt, we start at the Menin Gate in Ypres or Ypres as it is today. This is essentially where the Menin Road begins and the gate, the Menin Gate today acts like almost no other beacon to the past of the Great War when it comes to those who make their pilgrimage here more than a century later. But we of course have to ask ourselves, what is the Menin Road and what was the Menin Gate? Well, roads have always been given names and with the city of Ypres built up, Over many centuries, fortified by the military architect Valba, turned into this kind of star-shaped fortification with the city within its walls. There were a number of gates, breaks in the ramparts, not necessarily a physical wooden gate itself, but a gap in the ramparts which could be defended and could be opened for the passage of ordinary people, and they all headed to different locations. There was one to Dixmuda, there was one to Lille and there was the one here to Menin and the road that took you out of Ypres to the nearest next main town which was Menin was of course called the Menin Road and the Menin Gate named after that road that passed underneath it that passed through it and took you out into that ground beyond this was a quaint city the city of Ypres before the Great War a medieval gem it was described at in one of the guides books published in that Edwardian period before 1914 and the Menin Gate was a gap in the ramparts by the eve of the Great War guarded by two Flemish lions the lions are a symbol of Flanders there was a pub right into the ramparts the walls at this point on the Menin Gate which the locals came to later destroyed and only uncovered when the foundations of the Menin Gate were memorial were eventually built here in the 1920s. The road itself was a main road, it would have owed its origins to the Roman period we can see that by its straightness and its directness of route between Ypres and Menin itself by 1913-14 it would have been a cobbled road with horse-drawn transport going to and fro and considering that Ypres had been very much part of the cloth trade had been a trade city then this itself was a trade route essentially as part of its history cloth was taken by barge up to the northern part of Europe. The Issa Canal was specially built to take those barges from Ypres up through that canal system along the Issa itself but things could be also transported by road. But by the eve of conflicts this was a route I suspect that took locals doing localised trade in whatever the crops were planted in the fields around the city of Ypres and close to the town of Menin and all kinds of other provisions besides so horse-drawn transport would have been going up and down this and there are some images of that in the EAP archives there was a local photographer Anthony of EAP that photographed what we would describe as Edwardian EAP in that period leading up to 1914 and we see this kind of thing very much expressed in the images that he took and are now part of the wider archives that are available in EAP today and there was a very good book published of his pre-war images some years ago and if that's something that interests you it's well worth looking out because he went on to take a huge number of wartime and then post-war images and they too have appeared in recent books as well so we're at the men in gate we know what that is gap in the ramparts and the road the men in road we know how that's named it would have passed through it and out into the countryside beyond but of course it became much more than just a road much much more than a gap in some city walls. It became really a highway in its own right to the front line in these four years of conflict here during the Great War. And in 1914, Ypres was largely occupied by French troops that were British, of course, close by, taking part in the First Battle of Ypres. And we know some British and perhaps even some Indian battalions marched through the Menin Gate and down this section of the Menin Road to take part in the fighting beyond up towards Zonnebeek or Polygon Ward or Gellerveld and many other places besides during that October-November 1914 period. At that stage the people of Ypres would have still been living here and they remained within the city until April of 1915 when the use of poison gas by the Germans made it impossible for the British to allow civilians to continue to live in the city of Ypres. But as the war went on While the Menin Gate was used frequently, by 1915 it was in full view of the enemy who occupied the high ground in a kind of semi-circular shape, the so-called salient, just outside the city of Ypres. So from the Pilkelm Ridge across to the Freisenberg Ridge and the Bellawada Ridge and Observatory Ridge in the beginnings of the Messines Ridge, the Germans could see movement around the Menin Gate area and that initial part of the Menin Road. So movement was only at night much more movement was done from the little gate something that we've looked at in previous podcasts but nevertheless to the soldiers who came to eat there was something symbolic about passing through the city going through this gate wrecked eventually by shell fire huge chunks of the ramparts blown out by large caliber shells there were casualties frequently here from shell fire often the bodies of horses that have been killed from some of the limbers and the wagons moving up towards the front line area around Hellfire Corner one of the main junctions as you move up onto the next part of the Menin Road which we're going to get to shortly in this journey we're going to take along the Menin Road but as the battle moved on as the war moved on by 1917 and the fronts following the third battle of Ypres captured those bits of high ground from Pilkelm across to Freisenberg and Bellowarda and the Menin Road Ridge, which we'll also come to in this journey. That meant that the Germans no longer had eyes on the Menin Gate and this initial stretch of the Menin Road, and it was used much more frequently. And when you read accounts of the Third Battle of Ypres, you see it referenced time and time again. It then become very much a conduit for troops going up onto that battlefield. No longer countryside with lanes and fields and copses and hedgerows but this huge morass this lunar landscape of shell holes that the battlefields around it became in 1917 as depicted for example in artwork by paul nash which we're going to use as the artwork image for this episode of the podcast and which we've discussed in another podcast on art of the great war and you can go back through the really a completely kind of different meaning in that last phase of the war because such a high percentage of soldiers came through here and that would continue up until April of 1918 when the Germans attacked in what would be later described as the Battle of the Lys and recaptured all of that high ground and got even closer to Ypres with Hellfire Corner becoming the front line and the gates was no longer used at that period because it was literally under the eyes of the enemy who were only now hundreds of yards away rather than on the other side of the ridges beyond the city itself and that would remain like that until the summer of 1918 when the beginnings of what became the fourth battle of Ypres in September and October of 1914 would take British and Commonwealth and American and Belgian forces across that Flanders landscape and following the line of the Menin Road finally to Menin itself and that would of course be the the final destination of our journey in this podcast. And when we today leave the Menin Gate and we walk through the gate, it's currently in its final stages of renovation. Most of the names in the central part of the memorial are visible. You can't go to some of the upper levels still yet. And you can still feel, I think, despite that, that sense of what the gate stands for, those more than 54,000 British and Commonwealth names names of men who were denied a grave, a sepulchre, due to the circumstances of war. Not all disappeared into the mud. Some are buried as unknown soldiers in the many cemeteries around Ypres, for example. And again, there is a previous podcast about the Mendingate if you want to find out more about that. But today, as we leave the gate and follow that road, no longer cobbled, a modern road that takes us up to a junction where we turn right and the road becomes more apparently straight and directional taking us out into the immediately begin to see signs of the past on this modern landscape. We look over the wall as we turn onto that first straight section of the Menin Road, over the wall of the neighbouring civil cemetery, and we can see a cross of sacrifice in the distance, and some white splash of stone near the gate, which are the graves in Eap Town Cemetery. And a little bit further down the road, we come across the first proper military cemetery, defined military cemetery that we see, which is the Menin Road South Cemetery. This was a battlefield cemetery, a wartime cemetery. There was in fact a Menin Road South and a Menin Road North Cemetery at one point, but the North was eventually closed and concentrated. But when we look at the burials in here, we can see some neat rows where graves have been moved in after the war, but we can see a lot of erratic burial styles, which is always a good indication of a wartime cemetery because the men were were not thinking about architectural style when they buried their mates in cemeteries like this one. They wanted to bury them, honor them, but not hang around too long in case the shells began to drop and they would end up joining them. So we see a lot of these kind of staggered graves indicating wartime, often hasty, burials of men, some of whom were killed going along this road, some of whom were killed just up the road at Hellfire Corner, and others brought in from the front line. So the trenches, which we're going to go up to that area close to Hoog, the trenches in that front line area there on the Bellawada Ridge and close to the Menin Road, men who were killed up there were often brought back here for burial in this cemetery so there's a plot for example of men from the 9th battalion the Royal Sussex Regiment in here who were killed on the 14th of February 1916 when a mine was exploding underneath their positions up on the Bellawada Ridge and the ones that could be recovered and brought back were buried in this cemetery here and their graves are quite close together indicating that this was a communal burial and following a mine explosion, I guess that's not difficult to understand. It's a cemetery that I'm sure we will return to, to have a look in greater detail at some point, but what it reflects really is the history of this part of Flanders. These wartime cemeteries are really important in that way, they're part of that culture that we've been speaking about because they tell us a lot. They are time capsules. They're not there by accident. The men are not buried in there by accident. And they're all kind of pathways and indicators to the events that took place here during the war. So knowing that in this part of the city of Ypres, close to the city walls, there were gun positions, it's not unsurprising that we find a lot of gunner's graves in here. And there was a lot of engineering and pioneer work going on to repair roads, work on buildings put in dugouts dig gun pits so it's not unsurprising that we find the graves of sappers from the Royal Engineers and men from later on from the Labour Corps who worked on the roads in this area so all of it kind of reflects what was happening in the wider landscape around where this burial site was located and there was medical positions here as well so we find the graves of Royal Army Medical Corps men if you look if you're there in the spring or the winter if you look in the garden of the rather posh house kind of small chateau that's right next to the cemetery there is the remains of a British bunker and they're a concreted structure that was part of the dressing station that was at this particular point where the wounded were brought in from the battlefield so some of the men buried in here died of their wounds in those medical facilities so again we're kind of seeing a pattern as to how these cemeteries evolve and this is true of so many of course on that landscape of the First World War and a little bit further up you can't see it today there's a very thick hedge I remember in the early days of going to Ypres it wasn't quite so thick and you could see and see on the left hand side of the Menin Road as you moved up towards Hellfire Corner that there was a big chateau in there and that is the replacement of what was called the White Chateau it was a chateau set in some very ornamental grounds and it was made out of a white stone thus its name it was the headquarters of Douglas Haig when he was a corps commander during the First Battle of Ypres in October and November of 1914, from which he could almost see the fighting up on the ridges beyond, knowing that his men were up there fighting just beyond the Menin Road plateau and Hooge, up towards Polygon Wood and Zonnebeek and places like that. And of course, commanders in 1914 were often a lot nearer to their troops on the battlefield because of the communications issue. This was an army, the BM the British Expeditionary Force that had come to war in 1914 prepared for a mobile war and in a mobile war without radio communication which they didn't have it was difficult to establish communications so it was only once the war became static that communications really came into their own and you could establish a proper network so in 1914 it was very important for generals like Haig to be in chateaus near to the battlefield so they could send staff officers out who didn't have very far to travel to find out what was happening. Dispatch riders could be sent out on motorbike to deliver messages to divisional and brigade and even battalion headquarters if need be but that was a kind of different philosophy from when the war did become static. Many commanders tried to remain near the front and in the battles of the following year of 1915 both at Ypres and then in northern France we see many of these senior officers becoming casualties because of this because they are too near the sharp end of the war and it's realised that really their task is to be away from that battlefield use the communications that can be built up in a static war the ability to talk to people by telephone communications this vast network of it that was built up and certainly between Menningate and up towards the front line there would have been a vast network of telephone communications constructed over the four years of conflict here but you could use all that to gather information and use a big building much further away from the battlefield to make your command decisions anyway we're kind of going slightly off the subject there but this then was a kind of beating heart beating hub of really command on the battlefields here during the first battle of Ypres in October 1914 and while we kind of whiz past the white chateau it's important to remember its significance in that early period of the conflict and of course staying on the road that brings brings us up to what was once one of the most infamous, perhaps most feared spots for the British soldier and the Commonwealth soldier on the Western Front, and that was Hellfire Corner. So-called because it was swept by shellfire, it was a main route up to the front line, the enemy knew that it was used, the Germans knew that it was used all the time, and it was hit by shellfire and gas and shrapnel and everything else that they could throw at it. And we've done an episode on Hellfire Corner, and how it worked, the approaches to it, how it changed over the course of the war. And again, if you want to find out more about the location, you can go and have a listen to that. In 1914, it was, despite the fact that the French were very much evident in this part of the battlefield, this was still a route up to the front line. Some of the early photographs in a period when there were no official photographers, and a lot of the images that we have from that period were taken by soldiers on the ground. There are images, for example, taken very close to Hellfire Corner, showing horses going up towards Hoog, further beyond Hellfire Corner itself, and then limbers coming back. And as the war goes on because of the importance of this spot it is photographed again and again and again and there is an iconic image from 1917 showing I think Australians coming down the Menin Road with limbers and troops and a little signboard by the side of the road indicating this hellfire corner so you kind of know where you are it's changed a lot over time again when we kind of look at this culture of the old front line and see how the changes have changed the landscape When I come here today, it's a very busy roundabout. It's a massive modern roundabout with bike lanes, with trucks and cars and coaches full of battlefield pilgrims coming to visit these sites in and around Ypres. When I first came here in the 1980s, 1982 in my school, it was a quiet junction. Traditionally, it had been a road and rail junction. And the railway line coming out of Ypres had crossed through here together with a network of roads. And although when I came here in 1982 the railway was gone it was now a footpath across the battlefields it was still an important road junction and the remnants of the railway were still there and the buildings and the layout was not really that dissimilar to what it once would have looked like in 1914 replacement houses replacement buildings replacement railway crossing but the actual layout was pretty much identical eventually by the 90s and into the 2000s all of that change and what we know today is the end result so that landscape has changed dramatically i think on one of the podcast episodes to do with hellfire corner or this part of the battlefields i put some of john giles's photographs for aerial photographs from the 1980s and you can see just how apparent the changes are by by looking at those and when i came here in 1982 the reason we stopped at hellfire corner was not just because of its historic significance but the there was a British demarcation stone here and these demarcation stones and it's still here today it's tucked in the corner of the roundabout just as you come out of the city of Ypres from that direction it's a stone about kind of two thirds of the height of an average human being with the shape in this case the shape of a British helmet on the top there are other designs some with French helmets on some with Belgian helmets on and they were designed by Paul Moreau Vautier. He was a veteran of the Battle of Dunn and in the 1920s came up with this idea of marking the Western Front. Again looking at the culture of the old front line we see it in the years immediately following the war already begin to develop because people like Vautier wanted to remember what the war was and remember and mark what this landscape had once been and by the placement of stones demarcation stones you are marking where that old front line had once run and his idea was to do it from the very top from the coast right down to the borders of Switzerland and hundreds and hundreds of these stones were planned now it's long overdue for us to do a podcast on the Vautier stones the demarcation stones we will get there but Standing here with this one, and the British ones are the rarest of them all, the majority have French helmets on, the purpose of the stones was to mark the limit of the German advance in 1918, because each of them states, here the invader was brought to a standstill, and in this case, it marks the nearest the Germans ever got to Ypres in April of 1918, when as we were discussing earlier, this became the front line during that period of the Battle of Ypres. the lease. Now this stone has been moved a few times I've got postcards of it in the 20s and 30s when I came here it was tucked up against one of the buildings on the left hand side of the road and it's now back on the corner of this junction in the road that comes out of Ypres itself but it pretty much still marks that front line of 1918 and acts as they all do as a beacon to the events here during the Great War and when we're standing here at on Hellfire Corner it's always worth pausing and stopping when you walk the battlefields that's really important it's not just the walk you need to stop and you need to look and you need to absorb the landscape and hear the sounds of the landscape, the modern world, the birdsong, everything else. But when you stand here and you look beyond Hellfire Corner, up that line, that straight line of the Menin Road, you can see the ground beginning to rise ahead of you. Over to your far left, the Pilkelm Ridge, close to Bozinger, and then the Freisenberg Ridge, the Bellawada Ridge, where we can see the trees and the top of the crest line there and the road itself rising going through the Hamlet of Hoog up onto the Menin Road Ridge over to our right the wooded area of Sanctuary Wood and Hill 62 and then Observatory Ridge and continuing round towards Zillebeek beyond that is Hill 60 and pretty much the beginnings of the Messines Ridge so it's an important vantage point and when we stand here today as a pilgrim to the We can see the importance of this ground as a conduit, as a route to the front line for men, supplies, ammunition and everything else. But we can also see how the landscape beyond it dominates it. Those ridges, which in most cases are no more than tens of metres above sea level, they're enough of a rise on this pretty flat landscape of Flanders for whoever occupies them to dominate the ground. And for a big chunk of the war from mid-1915 to mid 1917 it's the Germans occupying that ground so Hellfire Corner that nightmarish place that pretty much every soldier who came to Ypres at some point would have passed through it was that route to the front line for the wounded coming back it was their route to safety once they were beyond the Hellfire Corner they were getting nearer to the dressing stations nearer to having their wounds treated and nearer I guess in their hearts to going home and all Also in the post-war period, when this became an area of battlefield pilgrimage to those coming to visit graves and sites where they'd once fought, this became another kind of important route to take them up to a landscape now not of war, but of remembrance. And Hellfire Corner was a key stop on all of the interwar battlefield tours during WWII. that period. Much more difficult today unless you're walking it because of the fact it's such a busy, busy roundabout. So continuing beyond and continuing along the Menin Road, beyond Hellfire Corner, we begin our walk along this straight section of the road. Again, as we walk further towards the Hamlet of Hoogh, We can see the development of the ridges ahead of us but we come across pretty soon another military cemetery and this is Burr Crossroads Cemetery. This again was a wartime burial site where the dead who were killed in this part of the Menin Road battlefield were brought to for burial and then it was used post-war as a concentration site for dead from the surrounding area because there were quite a lot of farmsteads here where there were burial sites where there were gun positions where gunners who'd been killed are buried and again you see that kind of reflected in the burials here there were communication trenches close to here the famous one China Wall which was a long communication trench that went from near Zillebeek up towards Hill 62 and was built in a breastwork style with sandbags coming up out of the ground level creating a trench above ground level to enable men to walk through it in safety to get up to the front line area soldiers were killed by shell fire there and buried in field graves they had to be moved in and one of those field graves that was moved here from a position called Gordon House which was just south of Hellfire Corner was 2nd Lieutenant Raymond Lodge of the 2nd Battalion South Lancashire Regiment who was killed near here on the 14th of September 1915 so not during a major battle during a quiet period of that long long static period of trench warfare at Ypres and then his grave was concentrated here in the 1920s. So what's the significance of Second Lieutenant Raymond Lodge? Well he was the son of Sir Oliver Lodge who became one of the great spiritualists in Britain, perhaps one of the leading proponents of spiritualism in Britain during that period of the First World War. Many turned to spiritualism, this idea that you could talk to the dead, have contact with the dead because loss weighed so heavy they had to make sense of it somehow and for many they couldn't bear the idea that death was the end and many search for meaning in that. We will all have our opinions of what this means and what its veracity is but for people like Oliver Lodge and he was not unique it was very strong in their culture, their identity and I think it is a part of the culture of the old front line this unwillingness for people to accept that death was the end and that there was some way to still stay in contact perhaps to a degree we all feel that now when we return to the battlefields the connection we feel that we have to the men of that generation those that we've researched those in our own family tree those whose medals we have or photographs whatever it is we feel a strong connection with these men which in its way is a kind of spiritualism so I'm pretty much sure that this is really a part of what this culture if there is one of the old front line must really be but the interesting thing as well as apart from the whole story of Sir Oliver Lodge and he wrote a book called Raymond which was his conversations with his dead son was the inscription that he chose to put on his son's grave and it reads Raymond who has helped many to know that death is not the end and I think within that is this whole debate about the whole meaning I guess of both life and death and remembrance of and everything that we connect to the remembrance of the dead of the Great War. Not far away is a special memorial to Captain Harold Ackroyd, VCMC of the Royal Army Medical Corps. Harold Ackroyd was the regimental medical officer of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Berkshire Regiment and he'd served with them from the beginning, was awarded a military cross for his bravery at Delville Wood in July 1916. There's a part of the wood when you go to those Somme battlefields today where they've cleared a section of trench through the trees and you can walk it and you can certainly see it and that's very close to where Harold Aykroyd was and where he was carrying out these brave deeds of recovering and treating the wounded that resulted in the award of his MC. Amongst the wounded, when he got into the wood, he wasn't just treating the men from his own battalion, they found a lot of scattered wounded from the South African Brigade who'd been fighting in those desperate days of battle in the initial phase of the fighting for Delville Wood and he was particularly credited by them for the work that he did to save those South soldiers like Noel Chavasse who not far away at Guillemont was awarded the Victoria Cross for his bravery there under very similar kind of circumstances going out to rescue the wounded on the battlefield he was offered a safe job but as a medical officer the battalion was like his parish the connection between medical officer and Padre and again this kind of religious aspect of the Great War I don't think we can understate that really too much but he remained with his battalion and they fought in some of the later acts actions around Arras and then he moved up to take part in the 3rd Battle of Ypres and his Victoria Cross was for bravery on the 31st of July 1917 the opening day of the 3rd Battle of Ypres when his unit was fighting not far away just across the Bellawada Ridge further down the Menin Road and same period again as Chavasse who we mentioned who was just to the north on the Pilkelm Ridge near Wiltshire out there with the Liverpool Scottish recovering the wounded in the water filled shell holes in that area and And Harold Aykroyd, similar kind of man, similar kind of mentality. I mean, these medical officers, to say that they deserve our praise, our admiration, is a massive understatement. But he, like so many, believed his place was with the men and often... Simply, these men ran out of chances and his chances came to an end on the 11th of August 1917 when he was killed at Jargon Trench. So Chavasse is the more famous one. I mean, he was Victoria Cross and Barr, one of only three men to achieve that distinction. But he speaks for a multitude of medical officers, some who were decorated like Aykroyd with the Victoria Cross in his case and the Military Cross, others never decorated but yet carried out brave deeds. I always, always think of that statement that one of the veterans that I knew very well used to say, there's only two types of crosses, the Victoria Cross and the wooden cross and most got the latter. And I think that's true of so many soldiers' stories of bravery of the First World War. So leaving Burr Crossroad Cemetery, we continue along the next stretch of the Menin Road. It begins to rise visibly, and our journey kind of takes us up a bit of a slope then towards the Hamlet of Hoog. And it was a hamlet in 1914, just a small collection of houses right by the Menin Road. There was a chateau there where Baron de Vink lived, quite an ornate chateau taken over by the British staff. The scene of a major disaster when German shells interrupted a staff meeting there. took out senior commanders and staff officers, and the whole command structure on this part of the battlefield was suddenly obliterated in one bombardment. And men on the ground had to kind of pick up the mantle and take charge themselves. And that's when Brigadier General Fitz Clarence, formerly of the Irish Guards, now Brigade Commander, up near Polygon Wood, took command of the men in that area of the battlefield and appointed himself Officer Commanding Men in Road and filled that gap until it could be replaced further down the line. in his case not until after his death as a brigade commander leading his old regiment into action on the 11th of November 1914 right at the tail end of the first Battle of Ypres the whole area here at Hoog obliterated because While it was behind the British lines in 1914 and early 1915, following the German gas attack and the capture of the high ground, Hoog became this pivotal point. We spoke about the curvature of the ground around the city of Ypres, creating this kind of semicircle. At the easternmost position of that semicircle was Hoog on the Menin Road and that became the point of which really it was the pinnacle of the fighting, the day-to-day activities of trench warfare at Ypres for that long, long period from the summer of 1915 through to the summer of 1917 with lots of local actions here with charges with attacks and counter-attacks the Battle of Wye Wood and the Bellawada Ridge on the 16th of June 1915 when units of the 3rd Division attacked up the slopes close to where we're standing now to the high ground across to our left and then when the trenches settled down once more both sides went underground there was a lot of mining activity here from small scale mines up on the crest of the ridge and we can see the cross of the Royal Engineers grave where the men of the 177 Tunnelling Company were active for so long and if you want to find out more about that there's a video about that part of the battlefield on the Old Frontline YouTube channel but of course Hoog is famous for the crater the Hoog crater blown here in August of 1915 and many search for it it isn't there it's very close to where the Hoog crater cafe and museum is located. There's a little road that goes off to the side and then to the right of that road in the grounds of the Chateau and what is now the Bellawada Fun Park. That's where the 1915 crater was. No trace of it as such on ground level today. But who creates a cafe that sits at this point and will very quickly come up to it because on one side of the road is the cafe and the museum. It's an old girls school that closed in the 1980s and then was bought and turned into a cafe and a museum and Nick and Ilse, his wife, have been running it for many many years now it is in my mind the best private museum on the British part of the Western Front essential to any journey to Ypres and a place that you can go to for a bit of respite and some decent food and also look at the incredible array of exhibits which are added to all the time and I went earlier this year to stay at Nick's cottage that he's got on the high ground at Hoog there He showed me a whole series of stereoscope viewers that he just had installed into the museum which had once been part of the original Sanctuary Wood Museum and then when the original owner of that died some of them went to his brother who set up a rival museum eventually at Hill 60 and they remained there until that museum shut I think in the late 90s early 2000s and they've sat in a shed somewhere ever since and Nick has now got them and they're on display and they have some of the most incredible images of the First World War that you are ever likely to see and Nick is in the process of having them digitised so there's always something new there it's an amazing place Nick and his wife and his family are amazing people real credits not just to themselves but they are torchbearers of remembrance in this part of the battlefield and we owe them a lot of thanks for many of the things that they've done over the years all of us really and opposite of course which makes this such an interesting place to come to is the is the vast Hoo Crater Cemetery, one of the largest in the Ypres Salient battlefields, with this almost never-ending row after row after row of graves disappearing down the slope towards the site of Zouave Wood, which was never replanted, and what is now Canada Land, Canada Street, that runs from the Menin Road across to Hill 62 and Sanctuary Wood. When you wander in this cemetery, one of the things, rather than looking at the kind of named graves and the stories of some of the men that are buried in here and there are so many of them one of the things that always strikes me and as I've said previously in this podcast I find myself going to these graves more and more it's the vast number of unknown unidentified soldiers that are in here a staggeringly high percentage of them in this cemetery and also one of the unique elements of that here is the graves that are of multiple unidentified soldiers tens of men in one grave and in some cases. And it kind of shows how the Great War destroyed not just the landscape, but the bodies of those who lay on that landscape, even were buried in that landscape. They could be destroyed and were destroyed on such a regular basis. It's an insight, I think, for the average visitor, the casual visitor who comes here and walks to a headstone that says 18 unidentified soldiers of the Great War. It's a kind of reminder of the horror of what the Great War really was. And we mentioned the Chateau. You can walk further up the road just past Hoog Crate, a museum and cafe and the cemetery itself. And there is the rebuilt Chateau on the left-hand side, which is now a hotel. I stayed in there last year. Really nice place to stay. And in the grounds of it, there are some mine craters. They look like ponds, really, today. They aren't the Hoog Crate, although many books and websites say they are. They are in fact German mines blown underneath Canadian soldiers here during the battle for Sanctuary Wood and Hill 62 and Observatory Ridge in June of 1916. And I think it was the Canadian mounted rifles that were holding this part of the line when these particular craters were blown. So it's from a slightly later period than the Maine Hoo Crater but nevertheless part of the underground war story of this part of the battle fields there's a lot of battlefield detritus in around the mine craters today later bunkers were built into the side of the craters you can see those and there is a trench system in the woods here close to the chateau which is now the hotel they aren't original trenches again i've seen many websites and accounts that claim they are they were dug and i saw them being dug in the 1990s possibly along the lines of trenches that may well have been there but they are not and are original trench museum in the same way for example that Sanctuary Wood just down the road is. So pushing on along the Menin Road past Hoog we come into an area on the left where the vast Bellawada Fun Park is today. This family-friendly child-centric amusement park really for many people kind of leaves a bit of disquiet when they see it but this is a form of battlefield. Is there a better use of battlefield to create a place where children can laugh and be happy? I mean, I'll leave you to decide that one. But it dwarfs a memorial, though, just by the side of the road, which many pass by not even realising is there, and that is a memorial to the King's Royal Rifle Corps, the old 60th Regiment of Foot. And they served with distinction throughout their history, but in the Great War had a vast number of battalions, and many of them served at Ypres, and the details of them are noted on the memorial itself. It once overlooked open ground where some of these battalions had fought in almost every year of the war for example but today it's easy to pass it by and it was on the kind of tour itineraries of the interwar period because just up the road from it was a place called the Tank Cemetery now this is where during the third battle of Ypres in 1917 a number of tanks, Mark 4 tanks had moved up across this ground to go and take part in the fighting further up on the battlefield but had got stuck Stuck in the mud, got hit by shell fire and shed tracks and things like that. And there was a lot of tank wrecks here that remained here for the rest of the war and remained here as kind of monoliths, almost like monoliths to an ancient civilization in that interwar period. And these massive wrecks of rhomboid tanks sat there on the embankment of the road that we're walking up now. You can see to your right, it drops, visibly drops away quite sharply. and some of the tanks were up against that there's a little road that goes off to the left a bit further up just before the bend in the road and in that interwar period that is a place where pilgrims went to to find more of these wrecks and there are many many postcards and photographs of them almost every photo album that I have of a battlefield pilgrimage at Ypres during that period has pictures of these tanks in it because they were very much part of the culture of that remembrance landscape in that interwar period Sadly, no trace of them today. They were scrapped in the Second World War by the Germans, although battlefield archaeologist Simon Verdigham, when he was doing a dig very close to where we are now, found some artefacts from one of the tanks, including a signboard that told soldiers to leave it alone and they couldn't souvenir things from it. So beneath that landscape, that last witness of the Great War, the landscape itself, once again still has things to tell us. That brings us up to a road junction. There used to be some car showrooms on the left-hand side up here, and there was a book that came out in the late 70s, early 80s, which is kind of a photo book of the Battle of Passchendaele, and the author was a professional photographer, a guy called Paul Womble, and he photographed this bit, showing the kind of contrast between a modern car dealership and the lunar landscape that had once existed here in 1917. And over to our right in the trees, we have Stirling Castle, another one of these chateaus that was set in a kind of park ground. an area of very intensive fighting during the First Battle of Ypres. There's two memorials here as well. There's a kind of plinth on the left-hand side to the Gloucestershire Regiment, and the Gloucesters wore what was called a back badge, which was a badge that was worn at the back of their cap and later their helmet, and the memorial perpetuates that with a Gloucesters cap badge on the front of the memorial and a back badge behind it. It largely commemorates, although it commemorates all of the battalions of the Gloucesters that fought at Ypres, it's very close to where they were fighting the first Battle of Ypres in 1914 and on the opposite side of the road so this is a memorial to the kind of regular army the red little dead little army as Henry Williamson once called it and on the other side of the road is this another kind of plinth to the 18th Eastern Division which is a new army a Kitchener's Army Division formed in 1914 famous for its actions on the Somme where it has two memorials one at Trones Wood and another one at Chapvale indicating its involvement in the fighting there in July through to September of 1916 although it remained on the Somme for a much longer period then fought at Arras and then took part in the fighting here in the third battle of Ypres so on one side of Gloucester's monument really connected to 1914 the early phase of the fighting here and this one connected to the latter stage in 1917 during that critical period of the third battle of Ypres when this was sacrificial ground over which the British army was fighting in its engagements across these low ridges and it's brought us up onto another ridge the Menin Road Ridge and this was the scene of the battle of the Menin Road Ridge which the 18th Eastern Division was a part of Captain Harold Aykroyd who we spoke about earlier this was his division he was medical officer with the 6th Royal Berkshires in this unit so it connects us to him and it's also I discovered through collecting images of the First World War they can give us an insight into the kind of layered history of these places, I found some images showing a German gun crew with a Pak 37 set up right by the 18th Eastern Division Memorial in May 1940 during the fighting around Ypres in that early period of the Second World War. So it's all part of those criss-cross paths of the First World War and how they intermingle both with their past, the period before the First World War and the period yet to come, the later history in a second great conflict as well and continuing along the road here we come to the next really important village in this area which is Gellivert Gellivert sitting on a plateau the Gellivert plateau dominated this ground vitally important to the events here in 1914 the British army when they came to defend the ground around Ypres was able to take the high ground themselves and defend it so they chose the defensive points it was for them first battle of Ypres largely a defensive battle with the Germans coming straight at them heading towards the Channel Ports and because of its really dominant position this plateau around the village of Gellivert again became a pivotal point during the fighting in October of 1914 and at one stage the Germans attacked and overran most of the village of Gellivert surrounding what was left of a battalion of the South Wales Borderers the 1st Battalion commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Burley Leach and they were cut off a message had got back that they were still there still fighting and one of the local commanders during this period in which the senior officers had been wiped out in the Hoog Chateau disaster back down the road sent Major E.B. Hankey of the 2nd Battalion the Worcestershire Regiment to launch an immediate counter attack with what was left of his battalion his commanding officer had gone off to command a brigade he was now in charge of the battalion and he got what was left of his unit to launch an attack from near what became known as Blackwatch Corner on the edge of Polygon Wood across the field straight into the village of Gellivert and ahead of him was a whole load of farmland with agricultural barbed wire fences this was before the barbed wire of no man's land and all that kind of stuff this was just farm wire but it still offered an obstacle to his men so he sent the pioneers out with their wire cutters to cut that to allow a passage through across those fields they got into the edge of the village of Gellervelt and pushed their way into the park of the chateau at Gellervelt with Beinitz fix glinting in what was left of that autumn sunshine and they bumped an entire German unit that was so surprised by their arrival that they pulled back and that enabled Hanke and the Worsters to link up with the South Wales borderers and temporarily unfortunately retake that position Gellervelt was subsequently overrun captured by the Germans and would remain in their hands until October 1917 when British troops reached this point during the Third Battle of Ypres and what was left of a chunk of Gelavel was retaken by them at that point. We can come here today and we can see on this landscape of the present tucked away in a little side cul-de-sac are the memorials to the South Wales Borderers and the Worcestershire Regiment. There's a kind of plinth with a cross on to the South Wales Borderers and there was a plaque on an old soldier's home built for Belgian old soldiers that the Worcestershire Regiment had helped fund and the plaque was on there to honour their contribution to the fighting here at Gellervilt. Those two memorials are now together in this little cul-de-sac and you can stare in through the gates of the chateau into the chateau grounds it is a private residence you can't just go wandering in there but you can see where Major Hankey came into that ground with his men he was subsequently awarded the distinguished service order for his bravery there was a famous painting of the Worcesters at Gellervoort that was commissioned and a park in Worcester the Gellervoort park was named in the honour of this battle in the post-war period and there's another kind of similar connection to that in the church not to do with the Worcesters but to do with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment because when you go into Gellivert Church there's a plaque in there to Lieutenant Wilfred Evelyn Littleboy who was killed with the 16th Royal Warwick Birmingham Powers in the fighting near to Gellivert on the 9th of October 1917 and was originally buried near to Polderherk Chateau which is just to the north of Gellivert Village. His grave is in Hooke Crater Cemetery that we walked past earlier on in this journey. But as a further memorial to their son, Lieutenant Little Boy's parents, purchased and donated a plot of land in the town of Thornaby-on-Tees in memory of their son and it became known as Little Boy Park and it was opened to the public as a recreational park by his mother, Agnes, in 1930. So we can see through little tiny memorials like this, a plaque on a church wall in a village in Flanders links us to a park in Britain that was given in in memory of a son who died, it's all part of our understanding of the depths of grief and how people coped with loss and how they memorialised a generation that never, in their eyes, returned, although, of course, most men did come home. And when we go to the edge of Gellivert, we can see the view that was so important to both sides. We can look from the crest of the ridge of the plateau down into the ground beyond, looking towards the town of Men who we can now see in the far distance. We can see how vitally important this would have been to a British defence here in October of 1914 and why the Germans subsequently were so keen to hang on to it. It wasn't properly cleared and this view was not restored until the final battles here in 1918. But we'll continue along the Menin Road to the next village which has a very similar name to Gellerweldt and that's the village of Helua Gelui to the British troops who were very good at murdering Flemish names like this probably as I've just done but this village was the scene of some fighting in 1914 and then it was well away from the battlefield for most of the rest of the conflict it was a billeting area for German troops there were German cemeteries in this area and they built up their kind of own infrastructure that supplied their forward trenches but in the opposite direction to the British and Commonwealth troops. And when we come into the village today, it was eventually completely destroyed in 1918. Outside the church in the centre of the village, there is a memorial to that earlier period of the war. It's a recent bronze memorial to Corporal of Horse William Thomas Leggett of the First Lifeguards, who was killed here on the 14th of October 1914, aged 23. Now, the First Lifeguards were cavalry regiments part of the British Expeditionary Force but he wasn't British he was Australian he was one of 11 children whose father had worked on the Australian railways and he had left Australia in the Edwardian period and joined the British Army in 1912 this wasn't that uncommon when you look at the background of quite a lot of regular soldiers in the BEF in 1914 they come from all over the different parts of the British Empire because identity as Australian, Canadian, New Zealand was strong but many of these men kind of saw themselves as British as well or perhaps British first. It was kind of reality I guess of growing up in communities that had once been dominated by the whole essence, the sense of being British. But he's an important casualty William Thomas Leggett because he's one of the first Australians killed in Europe in the First World War. Probably the the first Australian killed in Flanders. There were other Australians, as I've said, in the BEF, and one of them, Lieutenant William Chisholm, was killed at the Battle of Le Cateau as an officer in the 1st East Lancashire Regiment in August 1914, so killed before William Leggett, but Leggett an important early Australian casualty here in Flanders. But this area in this village was an area that did eventually see combat, but during the 4th and final Battle of Ypres in September and October of 1918 when British units advanced down the Menin Road with to the north the Belgian army sweeping across places like Passchendaele and liberating finally liberating that area and also American troops taking part in this final phase of the fighting as well but in this area three divisions in particular were heavily involved in the battle and that was the British 29th Division the 35th Division and the 41st Now those are all veteran divisions by this stage. The 29th had been at Gallipoli in 1915 and then on the Somme, Arras, Passchendaele and all those many other battles besides. The 35th had been a bantam division originally made up of men of smaller stature and the 41st had been involved in the first use of tanks at Fleurs on the 15th September 1916. Now very few of the original members of any of these divisions were still serving here but we've got quite a few different accounts of men that were in these divisions amongst them Francis Hitchcock of the Leinster Regiment his unit was now part of the 29th Division and took part in the fighting in this area during that 4th Battle of Ypres and his book Stand To A Diary of the Trenches highly highly recommended as a fantastic memoir diary of an officer and his front line service in the Great War but this was an area that because it had been behind the lines didn't have exactly the same kind of network of trenches there were trench systems here there were quite a lot of bunkers and when you traverse this landscape around this village you'll find evidence of those bunkers and it's a village I've come to a lot over the years because I have a personal connection to it my great uncle Archibald Nibbs which is a fantastic name Archibald Nibbs he was a conscript who joined the army in 1917 was trained and then sent overseas as a post spring 1918 German offensive replacement for the casualties lost during that fighting and and he joined the 12th Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment that were part of the 41st Division, and he was wounded here in October 1918. I have his medals and his Civil War badge and a letter that was sent to his parents by a padre. He was admitted to the 3rd Casualty Clearing Station with his wounds being evacuated from where we are now, down the Menin Road into Ypres, and then from Ypres to Popperinger to Remisiding to Lissenhoek, and he was in the 3rd CCS there in October 1918. and the padre wrote to his mum and dad and said he's doing okay and wrote that in ink and then afterwards wrote in pencil so far and you can see the difference in the ink of the pencil and the parents must have looked at that and thought I wonder if he is doing okay but he did survive and he lived a long life although I never knew him he lived on until the 1960s I believe and I'm the custodian of his medals and papers and I mention him because he's typical of the men who were fighting these final battles here in that autumn of 1918 when we started at the Menin Gate we were talking about regular soldiers and with Ackroyd and the 18th Eastern Division volunteers but we've now got to a period of the war in which the vast majority of the British Army are conscripts men who are not there by choice they're there by necessity and Archie Nibbs my great uncle is really a very good example of that really and when we continue beyond this village we're coming into the final approaches to the town of Menin the end of the Menin road this is our journey's end really as we come into the outskirts of Menin we don't visit Menin do we Why not? Well, it's not a battlefield area. This whole area that we've just come through in this latter part of this journey, there are no British cemeteries on the scale that there are around Hoog and Passchendaele and Zonnebeek and Zillebeek and the Messines Ridge. There's no evidence as such of the war. There is a vast German cemetery in Menin with 48,000 dead. It is the largest German cemetery from either World War. A lot of people think that that's Langemarck or La Targette, but it's not. It's here at Menin in the Meninwald in the Menin wood that's on the far side of the town but Menin is important in the story of the Great War but not so much I guess in the British and Commonwealth story of the Great War because this was behind the German lines swept up in their advance of October 1914 used by them as a billeting town it had a good railway system they could bring in things by train it had a road system beyond which they could use to take supplies up towards their front wherever that was at different periods of the war in Flanders it was really part of their eternally turning wheel of war in the same way that Popperinger and Balliol the towns behind the front line in Flanders for the British and Commonwealth soldiers were so from a German perspective this was a vital important town that every German soldier who came to Flanders during the Great War would have known would have passed through the civilian population would have stayed here for most of the war And when you read some of the accounts of British troops liberating Menin in October 1918, they discover civilians in the process of doing that. Not everyone has been evacuated. But when it was right away from the front, when it was this billeting town for the German army, the streets would have been thronging with German troops. The cafes would have been full of German soldiers with pay in their pockets. And the same kind of behind-the-lines infrastructure and culture that had developed in places like Popperinger It would have been identical for the German soldiers here. I guess we could say that Menin was their Popperinger. I don't think that's an exaggeration, really. But it wasn't just a rest area. It wasn't just part of an infrastructure for the German army. Once it was captured, it became a battlefield fought over only for a matter of a very short period of time in October 1918. But then beyond it was the Scheldt River, and that was the scene of some of the last major battles in Flanders in November of 1918 involving Belgian troops, involving Portuguese troops, involving British and Commonwealth troops as well. So not only is Menin the end of our journey from Ypres, it is close as well to where those final embers of the Great War burned out, leading to the armistice. So this road, the Menin Road, has taken us across that tortured landscape of the past, a landscape of war, of sacrifice and suffering, and now the modern landscape, a landscape of peace and remembrance, where the people of Belgium live their lives just as they should. These roads on the Great War battlefields are so important, I think, so important in how we access the landscape of this conflict, how we discover it, understand it and see it through those different layers of the past. They act like veins across that landscape, our route to the history and all that means through the modern pathways of today. And we will return to them here again and again because these roads, well they are the true pathways of that old front line. www.oldfrontline.co.uk patreon.com slash old front line or support us on buy me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com slash old front line links to all of these are on our website thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon