Ypres: A Walk on The Bluff

Step onto the Western Front in Flanders as we explore the area near to Ypres known as The Bluff. In this episode we uncover the story of the fighting here in February-March 1916, when British and German forces struggled for control of the high ground overlooking Ypres. Using contemporary accounts and battlefield evidence, we explain why this small rise in the landscape mattered so much and how the battle unfolded.

The Bluff was created from spoil dug out during the construction of the Ypres–Comines Canal, forming an artificial ridge that dominated the surrounding trenches. In early 1916 German forces seized the position, threatening the British line south of Ypres. A determined counter-attack followed, with units of the British Army fighting bitterly through shattered woods and cratered ground to retake the heights. We look at how the battle developed, the tactics used, and the human stories behind the fighting.

Walking the ground today, we visit several evocative battlefield cemeteries that still mark the front line of 1916:

• 1st Battalion Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry Cemetery – closely linked to the men who fought and fell during the struggle for the Bluff.
• Hedge Row Trench Cemetery – a small but powerful reminder of the trench lines that once crossed this area.
• Woods Cemetery – surrounded by the landscape that witnessed intense fighting in WW1.

We also explore the mine craters that still scar The Bluff and follow the line of the Ypres-Comines canal itself, where the battle-damaged locks remain as a rare survivor of wartime destruction here.

This episode combines battlefield history, on-the-ground exploration, and the stories of the soldiers who fought here, helping us understand how a small rise in the landscape became the focus of a hard-fought battle in the Ypres Salient.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

I was aiming for a Verdun episode this weekend, it being close to the hundred and tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Verdun in nineteen sixteen, but having just returned from a week in Eap with wet Flanders flu, a stinking cold, and you can probably still hear that in my voice, unfortunately that put me behind a little. So instead we will visit an area I walked when on that Flanders trip, and which we referenced as part of an answer, a wider Eat Walk in a recent Q ⁇ A, and an area that saw fighting a hundred and ten years ago, not in the Battle of the Somme, not in the Battle of Verdun, but in the fighting in Flanders in nineteen sixteen, in one of the lesser known battles of that year. So where are we? Where do we begin this walk? Well we're south east of Eap, in an area that became known as the Bluff. Today it's a bit of ground known as the Paling Peak. So what was the Bluff in in the context of the First World War? Well this was an area in the years before the Great War where there'd been the construction of a canal, the Epe Commine Canal. And there'd been a lot of problems in the construction of that canal. Sections of it had never really functioned properly, and pretty much the canal by 1914 was silted up and not used. But in the construction of sections of it that had to dig deep into the Flanders landscape and throw up the earth around it, creating these artificial mounds, and that area of rising ground that had been constructed, effectively created by the building of the canal, was this bit of ground between the village of Zillabeek and Kleinzillabeek, and across towards the village of Saint Loire, across a rising bit of ground that would later become known as the Messines Ridge and near to a hamlet called Verbranden Molen. And when the Great War began and the fight eventually came to Flanders in that autumn of 1914, this was a bit of ground that was in the French area of responsibility at that time. So in the initial battles, it was French troops fighting the Germans here, including French territorial soldiers, and then gradually the British took over. And this became close to what was the top section of the British fronts following that first winter of the war of 1914-15, when the British front line ran from around Saint-Éloir, across the border into northern France near Armontier, Armentiers, and then down to the La Basse Canal. And this bit of ground, which when you look at the French records, often just refers to that hamlet of a Brandon Molen, was a position called the Bluff. I don't think it was a name given to this area before the Great War, but I guess the Bluff, what they meant by that was a bit of rising ground, a steep high bank or slope, and that was the kind of definition of what a bluff was. And that's the name that you see being used pretty early on by the British in this sector. Now, following the initial fighting here during that first Battle of Eat period, both sides dug in the Germans on the crest of that high ground, occupying most of the bluff, moving across to the next bit of high ground that would become later known as the Caterpillar and Hill 60 closer to Kleinzillabeek and Zillabeek itself. And the British then constructed a whole system of trenches here, taking over the very basic trench system that the French would have constructed initially once the fighting ended and the advances on both sides were going no further, and that whole infrastructure here developed either side of that old Ypcomine Canal, dominating and being dominated by that rising ground of the bluff itself. And what you see here really throughout the course of the next few years is what we could describe as kind of classic trench warfare, with units of both sides often very close together, not hundreds of yards apart, but in many cases tens of yards apart, using classic trench warfare weapons like grenades and rifle grenades and trench mortars and localized artillery rather than necessarily the big stuff, because if you send over big bombardments and you're that close to the enemy, you can end up having drop shorts, shells dropping short of their target, landing on your own men, and of course raiding, and with the nature of the geology beneath this site, it was also suitable for mining operations and tunnelling and the explosion of mines on the bluff became a key feature of operations. But when we visit it today, we can see and understand the importance of so-called high ground here in Flanders. I mean when we look at a position like the bluff, it is only tens of metres above sea level. But here on what is essentially a flat landscape, you can see for miles, and certainly as you walk this ground today, you get quite a few fantastic views back into Eape itself, and you can see the spires of the Cloth Hall and St. Martin's Cathedral and St. Jack's Church near to the Menningate, and you can get a good orientation and an appreciation of what German troops would have been able to see from this position, not just into the city itself, but dominating the entire ground between the British frontline area and their reserve area, and beyond that back into the infrastructure of Eape itself. So this whole war in Flanders, as I've mentioned many, many times, really, to the key to understanding that war in Flanders is that it was a battle for the possession and repossession of so-called high ground, and this is a classic, classic example of that. Now I mentioned that the ground around the bluff has a connection to events of 110 years ago. 1916, that year dominated by the big operations at Verdun and the Somme. That didn't mean that nothing was happening on other parts of the line. And we're going to dip in and out of those lesser-known elements of the 1916 story over the course of this year, I hope, both here on the podcast and on the YouTube channel as well. But here on the bluff, as I walked it last week, I was very close to the anniversary of operations here in February and March of 1916. Now this was after the Second Battle of Eap in April and May of 1915, when both sides, following the German advance and the capture of much of the rest of the high ground, particularly in the eastern and the northeastern side of the battlefield, meant that they were now totally really dominating the battlefield here in Flanders. This would mean that the Germans would remain dominant on that landscape for the next two years in this so-called quiet period between the end of the Second Battle of Eap and the fighting at Messines and Third Eap in 1917. But as we know from studying the Great War, and as you probably realize through listening to this podcast and no doubt many others, there was no such thing as all quiet on the Western Front, and day-to-day activity in sectors like this would result in huge numbers of casualties on a wider kind of area, potentially thousands of men a day being killed and wounded, and in the colder periods of the year going sick as well. Now in 1916, you see, following the static months of static trench warfare, you see on both sides an attempt to kind of up the game a little bit, and that's essentially what happens at the bluff in February and March of 1916. And as units rotated through the Eape Salient, coming to Eape, using it as it was then as a nursery sector to train units up in trench warfare, the 17th Northern Division moved into this bluff sector after some months on active service, but they had yet to take part as a division, a wider division, in a major action. The 17th Northern Division was a Kitchener's Army, a new army division. By its name you can sense that it's recruited from Northern Regiments, I mean not just Northern Regiments, but a lot of them. So there's a very heavy representation from Yorkshire. So there were battalions of the East Yorkshire Regiment, the West Yorkshire Regiment, the Yorkshire Regiment itself, the Green Howards, the York and Lancaster Regiment, the Duke of Wellington's, the West Riding Regiment, plus there were battalions from regiments like the Manchester's, Northumberland Fusiliers, and the Lancashire Fusiliers. So it had a kind of an identity based around a northern command area. So its records office would have been in the north, dealing with all these different regiments, and there was a bit of a connection like that. But in terms of a cohesive unit, they had an identity, but they'd not yet kind of put that identity and that cohesion into practice by taking part in a major operation, and they were about to have one thrust upon them. So on the 14th of February 1916, German troops from their 27th Division, now that was a Wurtemberg formation. When I went to the Wurttemberg archives in Stuttgart many years ago, I remember coming across a lot of material to do with this action on the bluff, photographs, maps, air photos showing what to me was then a completely new kind of idea that the Germans had gone on the offensive at YPA 1916 and captured quite a lot of ground because the images showed captured British trenches, bunkers, prisoners of war, and lots of other stuff connected with their advance there. So the 27th Division, Wurttemberg unit made up of Wurttemberg regiments, launched on the 14th of February 1916 a massive bombardment onto the British lines, and they blew several mines on the front that was then held by the 10th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers. Now these weren't the first mines blown on the bluff. It was a kind of continuation of the tunnelling operations in that area, but these were quite big mines that were blown. And the forward positions held by that battalion were overrun and taken by the Wurdenburg troops, along with many prisoners, and it pushed the British line back quite some way from near Verbranden Molen through the wooded area and across to the area close to the canal itself. And in that 17th Northern Division sector there on the bluff, there were over 1200 officers and men who became casualties in that fighting on the 14th of February 1916, so not insignificant losses, and of them more than 300 were missing, many of them prisoners of war, no doubt the Tommies that I saw in those photographs in the Stuttgart archives. A counter-attack was then launched a few days later on the 2nd of March. This had been a bit of a shock against the 17th Northern Division. A plan was drawn up to try and retake that ground, and a British bombardment to assist the troops going forward was greatly aided by the use of trench mortars, and again, kind of reflecting the way that the bluff is classic trench warfare. You're seeing the use here with trench mortars of an increasingly important battlefield weapon. The implementation of mortars, trench mortars, whether they're Stokes on the British side or Minnenwerfers on the German side, really do begin to make a difference in these close quarter battles, in that close quarter fighting that trench warfare was turning into. And during that operation, which was successful for the British, the ground lost had been taken, in fact, it was retaken in just a few hours, caught the Germans completely by surprise, and in that case, just as hundreds of British prisoners had been taken in the first operation, in this one over 250 German soldiers were taken prisoner in this 2nd of March 1916 attack. The Germans then, as they always did, attempted to counterattack and regain that ground, but the ground held supported by artillery, and again this is part of the changing nature of trench warfare. Units on the battlefield were only as good as the artillery that supported them, and increasingly having observers embedded with infantry units on the battlefield meant that they could react to the conditions on the battlefield much more quickly, and when the Germans send in counterattacks, they can drop artillery fire onto them and send those counterattacks back. But this minor operation there to retake this ground in March 1916, 110 years ago, it drifted eventually into obscurity, but that final assault had cost the British over 1,500 casualties in the operations here on the bluff in the spring, early spring of 1916. So it's important to remember this year, as we we do focus understandably on those bigger battles, that there were these kind of things happening as well. So that's a bit of the history here. I mean the operations on the bluff didn't end with what happened here in 1916, they continued on until the Battle of Messines in June 1917, and there was fighting here again in 1918 as well, and I'm sure we're going to come back to that. But in terms of walking this ground today and what I did last week, it was a walk that I've done many times on my own with ledger groups and with friends, as I did on this occasion. It's a walk that features in my book Walking Eap, and it's an area that I went to on my very first trip to EAP back in 1982. It was open farmland then, it's not quite like it is today. And we walked the school group that I was with with my teachers. We walked up the slopes of the bluff to go and visit the isolated cemeteries that we're going to see as part of this walk. And I'll put a map onto the podcast website so you can see where we go. And we walked up there across that open farmland, and it just been ploughed. And one of the students in my group, one of my mates, bent down and picked up what he thought was a coke can, threw it at one of the teachers, and as I looked up, going through the air, just about to land at the feet of the teacher, was a German stick grenade. That was my kind of opening shot, quite literally, my first encounter with the iron harvest on the battlefields of the Great War, and you can imagine the rocket that the teacher gave my school friend. But today the landscape here has changed. As I mentioned earlier, this is now part of the Paling Beak. It's a kind of nature reserve and a park, it's a public space, and it's really welcome to see this. And when I was walking there last week, there were a lot of locals walking the area, walking their dogs. I had a long conversation with a lady who brought her dog into one of the areas where we were, and we were speaking about how important it is that the people who live there connect to this landscape, see these cemeteries and memorials, and it becomes part of their life, and that helps those places to be treasured, to be honoured, and to be preserved as well. So what we're going to do, we're going to walk in in part of this. And what we did last week is park up in a car park area where there's a visitor centre which tells you the kind of the natural history side of that area that they've planted with trees, there's an observatory up there as well. Like a lot of things in Flanders, it's well thought out and a good use of public space, and it helps us to see how the modern landscape, how it's used today, overlaps with that landscape of the past. And since you know I first went there in 1982, it is now largely woodland. You can see amongst some of the wooded areas, particularly the older ones, the shape and form of the battlefield at ground level. You're not going to see trenches here, but you will see evidence of shell pulverized ground, which is very common from for most of the salient in that post-war period as the war had come to an end and the legacy of what when people came back, this is what they inherited. And when you walk up from that car park area and you can follow the Commonwealth Wargraves Commission signs pointing to the cemeteries that are essentially up on this ridge where the bluff is, the first one you come to is the first DCLI cemetery at the bluff. Now the first DCLI is the 1st Battalion, Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry. They were a regular army battalion that was part of the 5th Division. They've been in France since August 1914, taking part in the Battle of Mons, the retreat from Mons and the fighting on the Marne and the Aisne in September and October of 1914, and then had moved north into the Le Basse sector and taking part in the fighting there and near to Armand Thiers. The cemetery here was started by 1st DCLI in April 1915, during that period of the second Battle of Yep, when in the following months they buried 51 of their dead, not from big battles, not from going over the top, but men killed in the day-to-day activities of trench warfare. And in April 1915, when they took over the bluff sector in the wooded area close to the Brandon Mole and that little village, that hamlet really, they witnessed from there the mines being exploded on Hill 60 that month. If they'd have looked to their left, which I suspect they probably couldn't avoid doing, they'd have seen this massive eruption on the hill and the first of some of the very big mines being blown there. But this burial ground that today sits in an area that's just been cleared, and you've got quite a good view over a bit of the landscape there, surrounded by trees, very much part of the natural world there today. You're sitting in an original Eap cemetery, and there aren't that many of those in some respects, because if we look at the 174 British and Commonwealth cemeteries that surround Eape today, originally there was well over 500 of those, most of them very small burial grounds like this, that were then usually closed and moved into the bigger ones. So the fact that up here we've got some original burial grounds that give us an insight into how these kind of cemeteries were constructed and used during the Great War, I think it kind of makes them all the more important. Now, when we look at a cemetery like this as it's tied to a particular unit, we can then go into the archives to discover a bit more about what was going on. We can look at the battalion's war diary, we can look at the casualty figures, we can look at the details of the men that are buried here to get us an idea of the kind of men that were serving with this battalion at that time. And what we discover is that they continued to bury their dead here while they occupied this line from April through to July of 1915. So it's a snapshot of their period of service. And when we look at that war diary, it shows that most of the men buried here were killed by shell fire or trench mortar fire in the front and support lines. So those two positions, the forward part of the battlefield, often quite close to the Germans, as we said earlier, perhaps only tens of yards from the German front line where the British front line was located. Then you've got men who are vulnerable to shell fire, daily hate, shells coming over at a kind of regular time, or just random shell fire, and then more commonly trench mortars being lobbed over at different points during the course of the day and indeed night. And when we look at the rows of the men that are in here, there's a good sprinkling of ordinary soldiers and some commissioned officers as well, and among those is Captain Charles Woodham, who was a long-serving officer of the regiment. He was killed by a sniper while touring the support trenches. So if you think of this position being on a rise with the Germans on the high ground, the support trenches would be beneath that, and if you were in a position that was slightly exposed, touring those trenches, talking to your men, making sure that everything was correct, you are then putting yourself into a vulnerable position, and Captain Wardham was killed by a German sniper. Now we often hear about German snipers, it's almost as if every German soldier in the entire German army was a sniper, but it's definitely correct that at this stage of the war in 1915 the Germans really had the upper hand when it came to sniping, which led to the establishment of scouts and sniper sections in infantry battalions and the training of snipers behind the lines by individuals like Heskith Pritchard, who was a big game hunter brought over, and he would eventually write a book on that subject, certainly a subject in its own right, which is a story for another day. The war diary, though, when we look at Captain Woodham, it mentions that he was buried in the Regimental Cemetery, as they called it. So during the war it wasn't necessarily called First D C Lye Cemetery, they referred to it as the Regimental Cemetery, which I guess then translated into that first DC Lye Cemetery, given its name. And he was buried the next day, which wasn't uncommon. Soldiers weren't necessarily buried the day that they were killed. Their body would be placed on a stretcher in a day. Out or in a shelter somewhere in the trench, and then when was convenient, you'd take them to a regimental cemetery like this for burial close to the line. You'd never bury the dead in the front line or support line or reserve line because that would create problems for those who would come after. They'd have to work on the trenches, shells would blow the trenches apart, and if there were bodies buried in there, the whole trench could be full of the dead, which would create all kinds of problems in terms of disease and sickness. So to see the mention of the regimental cemetery in the war diary, it's quite a nice contemporary mention of a cemetery which is still there on the landscape today. Now, when we look at the ordinary soldiers that are in here from the DCLI, it reflects something that I found many years ago when I was occasionally researching lads from the DCLI and I was collecting medals when I lived and worked in London, I'd often see a lot of medals to the Duke of Cornwall's Line Infantry, and I couldn't understand this. What were medals to Cornishmen doing in London? But what I discovered was that the DCLI seemed to have set up a recruiting office in London, and a huge number of Londoners served with the Duke of Cornwall's Isle Infantry. And when I look through the next of kin addresses of the men buried here, some of them regulars, some volunteers from the beginning of the war, we see that reflected in those men. So it's not necessarily the case that a Cornish regiment like this one is full of Cornish soldiers, although there are men from Cornwall buried here as well. And it just shows what you can take from a small little plot of men, look at their records, look at their details, and you can discover lots of different aspects of the social history of military service through researching these men as individuals. Now when I came here in the late 90s walking the projected routes for my book, what was initially called Walking the Salient and then Walking Eap, published by Pen and Sword. When I came up here, I made notes on the cemeteries by looking at the cemetery registers before I came here, pick out interesting individuals, and then when I came to cemeteries like this, I began to kind of read them, look at them, study them, see if I could see patterns, anything unusual. And when I came here, left and right of the cross of sacrifice in this cemetery are burials brought in here after the war. So they cleared a wider area, there were isolated burials, and this was a site that was selected for those burials to be brought to. And I noticed there were quite a lot of men from the 9th London Regiment, the Queen Victoria Rifles. Now I knew that in April 1915 they'd been in action at Hill 60, and one of the headstones was an unknown captain of the Queen Victoria Rifles, which intrigued me. Why hadn't this man been identified? I thought, well, maybe there's more than one captain who died with this battalion who's commemorated on the Menningate. So that night, after I'd done this walk, done my research, I went to the Manningate that night and looked at the QVR's panel, the Ninth London panel, and there was only one captain on there, Captain Gilbert Fazakeley Westby. So I wrote to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, pointed this out, gave them some evidence, but at that time they wouldn't accept that it was him. When I wrote the book, I told his story. And I speculated on could this be his grave, and then kind of forgot about that, and then a few years later I came back and then planned a walk for a ledger group here, and coming into the cemetery I suddenly noticed there was a new headstone, and where that headstone had been for an unknown captain and the QVRs, it now bore Gilbert for Zachalie Westby's name, and of course it still does to this day. So he was killed on Hill 60 on the 21st of April 1915, age 32. He was a pre-war member of the battalion, came out with them in November 1914, and his body was found on Hill 60. When you look up the map reference in his concentration report, it's very close to where the mine craters were on the hill at that time. His body was found there, not identified at the time, and then moved in here after the war, and it kind of all connects up. And there was another officer I seem to remember who was also subsequently identified, and the headstone was changed. So I don't think this is a result necessarily of my inquiry. Perhaps it prompted a few more inquiries, or someone within the commission to look into it themselves, but it's good to see these men properly commemorated on the site of their graves now. So that's a good positive outcome of that. And from here, I mean it's very pleasant to sit in a cemetery like this and look at the names, read all of the names, take in the landscape that surrounds you. I heard my first chifchaffs of the year in the distance as I sat here on the base of the cross of sacrifice, and it's one of those places I think where we can come to to reach out and touch and connect to that wavelength of the Great War. Then we can go out the entrance back onto the path, and we walk up through a small wooded area with a pathway between on rising ground, and we can begin to see how sloped the bluff is at this point up to the next battlefield cemetery, which is in a kind of circular shape with a wall round it, and this is Hedgerow Trench Cemetery. Now, this cemetery was located much closer to the front line. The first DCLI one was probably just behind the reserve trenches in that area. This is a little bit closer to the forward positions. And Hedgerow Trench Cemetery was started in March 1915 when Private William Drury of the 2nd Battalion, Duke of Wellington's, the West Riding Regiment, was killed and buried here on the 24th of March 1915. Now he was from an Irish family with connections to Bradford and Leeds, and he was a regular soldier, he'd been in France since August of 1914. So Drury was the first burial. Hedgerow Trench Cemetery eventually took its name from a nearby communication trench which ran up to the front line at a trench called Trench 32. A lot of the trenches in this area didn't have specific names, they had numbers. So this took you past where the cemetery is today, up the communication trench from the reserve to the support to the front line, and this would have put you in the wooded area close to that hamlet of the Brandon Molen. Occasionally the cemetery was also known as Ravine Wood Cemetery. And if you look at some of the Canadian maps of this area from later on, then it does show quite a few of the positions here named after that ravine wood area. Graves were then added as the long years of static trench warfare followed, although they often suffered from shell fire. So this cemetery being close to the battlefield area, the Germans weren't targeting it, but shells were pitching over, missing the trenches, landing here and knocking over crosses and destroying graves, perhaps even disinterring the dead and causing all kinds of problems. And this was not uncommon right across the battlefield areas of the Western Front. And the last burials took place here with the Battle of Messines in June of 1917, with the final burials in August of that year. The records show that this is quite a small cemetery with 94 British, two Canadian, and two whose names and units are unknown. Private Walter Alfred Stokes of the 3rd Battalion Rifle Brigade is the youngest soldier buried here. He was only 17 when he died on the 29th of October 1915. From Walworth in Surrey, he'd only been in France two months when he was killed, one of those hundreds of thousands of teenage Tommies that were serving on the front line at that time. There's also, when you look at the headstones, this is all part of reading a cemetery, you can see a significant representation of men from the East Kent Regiment. And when you look them up, they're in the 8th Battalion of the Buffs, and they died here in November 1915. And this was a unit that had been sent up here following the Battle of Lewes in September 1915, when that battalion had suffered catastrophic casualties in the fighting there. So a lot of these men were replacements who had probably only been with the battalion just a few weeks before they were killed in a so-called quiet part of the line. And like the first DCLI earlier that year, when we look at the 8th Buffs War Diary, it shows us that most men who were buried here from that battalion were killed by shellfire and trench mortars. Later in 1917, units of the London Regiment from the 47th London Division were buried here. Among them Captain Harold Walter Joel of the 1st Surrey Rifles, the 1st 21st London Regiment, and he was killed in the advance on the Battle of Messines on the 7th of June 1917, aged only 20. So he was a company commander leading a company into battle, aged 20 years old. From Petersham in Surrey, he was the son of a watchmaker and an antiques dealer. He'd been an early member of the Boy Scout movement before the Great War, and like so many of that generation that served in the trenches and died on the Western Front and other theatres of war, he has that connection to the Boy Scout movement that was very much part of the culture of those young men of that period. Again, it's a very peaceful location here. You can pause and rest and think and connect with the stories and connect with the wider landscape around you as well. And when you walk away, go across the area that's just recently been cleared. I guess they replant trees here on a regular basis now. You can follow the pathways through to our third and final battlefield cemetery here, which is the wood cemetery at the bluff. Now, this is closer to that wooded area that was much more wooded during the Great War, at the beginning of the Great War itself, and nearer to Verbrand Molen. The wood was on a slope just behind the British positions. Quite a lot of the British trenches here were breastworks, so they were a mixture of trenches dug into the ground with positions built up above the ground level itself. And again, if you look at the trench maps, the lines often converged quite closely, and there was a position here where there was an old wooded ride, a forest ride, where essentially the British, later the Canadians, were one side of it, and then the Germans were just on the other side. And this cemetery, like the others that we've been to, is essentially another regimental burial ground where units in the line here have brought their dead back for burial. So it's very much a battlefield cemetery. Woods Cemetery was started by the 1st Battalion, the Dorsetshire Regiment, and the 1st Battalion, the Surrey Regiment, in April 1915, again during that 2nd EP period. Both of those units have been involved in fighting in the wider area beyond this, but they were both again units from the 5th Division, so that's the same unit, the same division parent formation that the 1st DCLI were a part of, and it's from the same time period that they were here, just on the flanks of these units, bearing their dead in their own regimental burial ground. The cemetery then remained in use by many different units that rotated through here until September of 1917, by which time it was behind or quite some way behind the British lines, and I suspect there were gun positions that were firing beyond the British trenches towards places like Hollobeek, for example. But for most of the actual fighting in this area, it was very close to the front line trenches on this northern side of the bluff, and men killed in the front line once again were brought back here for burial by those serving in this sector. When we look at the burials, they are particularly dominated by Canadian and London Regiment units. We can see the Maple Leaf of Canada and the many different cat badges of the London Regiment that were part of the 47th London Division that served here for quite a long time. In total, there's 212 British burials, 111 Canadian and 3 Australian. Of these, 32 are unknown. So it's the largest cemetery of the three that we've visited here on the bluff. And among the early 47th London Division burials is Sidney Moxon of the 1st 15th London Regiment, the Civil Service Rifles, originally recruited from civil servants working in London, and he has the unusual rank of Sergeant Bugler. Now Sid Moxon was from Soho, he was the son of a goldsmith and was fluent in French, it was said, and an accomplished musician, and he had joined the London Symphony Orchestra in 1907, and outside of London often performed at places like Margate and even on Hastings Pier, so there's a nice little Sussex connection there as well. He was killed on the twenty fifth of October nineteen sixteen, aged thirty-eight, helping a wounded comrade into safety, and given his rank as a musician, as a sergeant bugler, it's possible that he was part of the battalion stretcher bearer section and had gone out to bring this man in as part of his duties, but laid down his life for his comrade. So he's one musician buried here, but in many respects we now know from the time of the centenary, it's a kind of a musician cemetery because there's another musician buried here whose work resulted in a unique ceremony here during the centenary itself, and that's Richard Spencer Howard. He was killed with the 10th Battalion the Dukes, the West Riding Regiment, in the Battle of Messenge on the 7th of June 1917, and he was from Leeds. Before the war he was a music hall star and he made violins, and decades after the Great War, a musician called Sam Sweeney found one of his violins in pieces in an envelope and set about restoring it. And with those pieces was the details of the man who had made it. He discovered that he was killed in the Great War, and this led Sam Sweeney on a journey that saw him completely renovate, reconstruct this violin, and not just do that, but bring it to Flanders and stand at Richard Howard's grave here at Wood Cemetery on the centenary of his death in 2017. I mean it's an amazing story. I remember reading about it when I was living in Yorkshire, it was featured on the local news, the BBC News, and one of the reasons I wanted to come up here onto the bluff last week was that I hadn't actually had a chance to come back here since that was broadcast in 2017. It's kind of off-the-beaten track and not a place that I come to necessarily that regularly. So it was nice to finally come here to reconnect with the cemeteries once more, but also in particular, in the case of Richard Howard, to come to his grave. There's a low wall just opposite where he's buried, and we sat on that, and I looked up on the internet the story of this to show the lads that I was with, and I found on YouTube a video of Sam Sweeney playing that violin, and we played it at the grave. That was really quite something to hear. That music from that violin that had been built originally, constructed by the man who was buried here, and those plaintive tones from that incredible playing of his violin by Sam Sweeney. We sat there and it echoed round the cemetery, interrupted only by those chifchaffs in the distance. A special moment, one of many special moments we often have on these battlefields of the Great War. So these three cemeteries then I think are really important because they tell the story of that long period of Stanic trench warfare, that it's not all big battles, it's not fixing bayonets and going over the top. There's a lot more to the story, and we find those stories in cemeteries like this one. And leaving Wood Cemetery behind, you can then continue, take the track once more, go up into the area that would be close to where the British front line would have been, and the Germans not far away, and then cut across to where the main kind of body, if you like, the slopes of the bluff were close to the Ype Commine Canal. And what you come to here is one of three entry points into the Yape Salien. And again, this is a legacy of the centenary. The local authorities built these locations to help you come into the battlefield area and understand what you're seeing. There's one at the Zvanhof in the northern part of the battlefield near to Bosinger and Yorkshire Trench. There's one at Hoo Crater outside Nick's Cafe and Museum, and there's the one here at the Bluff. Now, this is an unmanned one, I mean they're all unmanned essentially, and it's got a short film that you can watch. There's maps and photographs, and it kind of sets the scene for where you are. And then just beyond it, for many years it was very difficult. When I first came here and when I was walking this ground for walking the salient and then eventually walking Eap, they hadn't cleared much of the ground, so you couldn't really see the first world war landscape that was beneath the bushes and the undergrowth and the trees, but that's been cleared now, and there's a wooden walkway that you can follow that takes you around the different craters that are here. I think that you would be surprised how big some of these craters are. We're talking, in some cases, small mines of a few thousand pounds of aminol that were blown underneath positions here, but in many cases there were much bigger charges that literally cut the bluff wide open and created these huge craters that remain here on this landscape to this day. And again, what that then tells us, just like being up on the wooded area on the Beloada Ridge, where there's mine craters there, it gives us that fascinating insight into the war underground. And it's why I kind of chose this area when we were doing that QA episode a few weeks ago as a place to come to to reach out and touch the past. It's much harder, I think, because of development of the building of houses and factories and businesses, and that's all important. That's how countries continue to thrive and develop. But if we want to find the past here on this landscape, this is a good place to come to, and the Belgians are to be congratulated for having turned this into this vast nature reserve that has helped to preserve it and open it up in a much better way for people like us to go and visit. And I know that many local people come here and connect with this as well. But it's not just the mine craters and the first world war landscape that we can see at ground level when we walk here. If you drop down into the area where the canal itself is, you'll see some of the locks here smashed to bits by shellfire during the war. And they are crumbling ruins that date from that Great War period. And this was an area that saw fighting at different points. The London Division advanced in June 1917, went through here, but then as I mentioned, the fighting returned here in 1918. In April 1918, the Germans attacked during the Battle of the Lees, pushed the British back in that northern area of the Eape Salient around Passchendale and over the Brunseiner Ridge and back towards the Eap and Hellfire Corner, but in this area the British units that were defending this ground were pushed back, and amongst them was the 13th Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment, the 3rd South Downs Battalion. And Lieutenant Colonel H. T. K. Robinson, who had served in at least two of the battalions of the South Downs, he'd been there at Rischborg on the 30th of June 1916, he'd witnessed Nelson Victor Carter bring the wounded in under fire and then get killed and recommended him for a posthumous Victoria Cross. He'd served on the Somme and at Passchendale, and now he was commanding the 13th year. This close to here is where his command post was and where they were overrun and he was killed, and his body was never recovered. So maybe he is still part of this wider landscape of the Great War here on the bluff today, along with so many men of both sides, and just on the other side of the canal here, there's been some recent archaeological work near to the golf course that's over there, and several soldiers of the Great War have been recovered there. So once more those pages of Great War history keep on turning. So standing here amongst these mighty craters here on the bluff and the smash ground where the bitter fighting once raged here through so many years of the Great War, more than a century ago, we're perhaps reminded that even in places like Eap, visited by so many so often, there are places where we can walk and reach out and touch the past, find that eternal landscape of the Great War, and all that it continues to offer us and connect once more with To those lesser known pathways of the Old Frontline. You've been listening to an episode of the Old Frontline with me, military historian Paul Reed. You can follow me on Twitter at Somcor, you can follow the podcast at OldFrontline Pod. Check out the website at oldfrontline.co.uk where you'll find lots of podcast extras and photographs and links to books that are mentioned in the podcast. And if you feel like supporting us, you can go to our Patreon page, patreon.comslash oldfrontline, or support us on buymea coffee at buymeacoffee.comslash oldfrontline. Links to all of these are on our website. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again soon.