Day 3 was a move from the Somme to the Ypres Salient, about an hour and a half on the coach with Richard giving commentary for much of the way.

First stop was at Gheluvelt with a talk from Richard on the action here at the First Battle of Ypres in late October 1914, when the Germans came very close to breaking the British line.  Shortly after Gheluvelt was Hooge where time was spent at the crater and Hooge cemetery, seen right.  One thing that strikes you as you drive round this whole area of Belgium and Northern France, is the number of cemeteries.  The photo below, from Hooge, is inscribed “Six soldiers of the Great War”, some stones were for more than that.

From Hooge to Kemmel Hill, and I was surprised that where so many ‘hills’ are only metres high, Hill 60 etc, Kemmel was a ‘real’ hill with a tremendous outlook over the area, and it’s strategic worth is immediately apparent.  Picnic lunch, luckily no rain, but not warm either! From Kemmel to Spanbroekmolen, another crater blown by an enormous mine, now filled with water and known as the ‘Pool of Peace’. Photo below.

From here to Messines Ridge and the Stone Tower, the ‘Peace Tower’, built to commemorate all Irish men who died in WW1, from Catholic and Protestant persuasions. Unfortunately my camera developed a shutter problem in the middle of this film, so while I have a photo, it’s not one I would use.  The tower and its surrounds strike an immediate chord. I was particularly moved by the stone plinths on the way to the tower, each one inscribed with a poem or piece of prose.  I took the poem on the front page of this tour section from one of those plinths.

The photos above show the trenches at the Sanctuary Wood, or Hill 62, museum.  Owned and run by a character known to all on the trip by the sobriquet given him by Richard, ‘Black Jack’.

From Messines to Essex Farm cemetery, and also the remains of a concreted Advanced Dressing Station. John McCrae, who wrote that famous poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ worked at this dressing station, and has his memorial there (see photo below).  The youngest soldier to die in the Ypres Salient is also buried here, Joe Strudwick, just 15 years old.  I also noticed a number of headstones for members of the 2nd Battalion, York & Lancaster Regiment, most of them killed on the 20th or 21st April 1916. I have added a section on the action in which they died on the section that deals with the battalion.

A photo of the Dressing Station at Essex Farm by Malcolm Cooper.

Siegfried Sassoon wrote a poem ‘The Death-bed’ which is approriate to the dressing station location. The following is an extract from the poem.

‘He stirred, shifting his body; then the pain Leaped like a prowling beast, and gripped and tore His groping dreams with grinding claws and fangs. But someone was beside him; soon he lay Shuddering because that evil thing had passed. And death, who’d stepped towards him, paused and stared.....   Light many lamps and gather round his bed. Lend him your eyes, warm blood and will to live. Speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet. He’s young; he hated war; how should he die When cruel old campaigners win safe through?   But Death replied: ‘I choose him.’ So he went....

From here it was in to Ypres and our hotel, the Ariane.  Beautiful hotel, but the cooking in France was better!. In the evening, a trip to the Menin Gate for the evening ceremony, again, impossible not to get a catch in the throat when the bugle plays that last post.

There is a description of Ypres as it was in 1914, in Henry Williamson’s ‘Love and the Loveless’

“In October 1914, when the finest small army the continent had ever seen entered Ypres, the populations was seventeen and a half thousand. The people were chiefly tradesmen and artisans, with what we would call a comfortable middle class of old burgher families and property owners. There was also a limited society of the old nobility living in hereditary mansions in the town, and old chateaux in the surrounding country of farms.  A sleepy town, ‘a rose-red city, half as old as time’, with little ambition, small culture, her artistic minority living in the past, and caring for the towns historical relics, mainly architectural.  A town like any old English market town, its economy maintained by farming, which had taken on new cultivations of hops, tobacco, beet sugar, corn and fruit, in addition to the classic products of beef, mutton and butter. The butter market was indeed, until the summer of 1914, one of the most important in Belgium.”