Left Behind

 

Recently returned from the tour of WW1 battlefields I mentioned in a recent post.  Above is a photo I took of my friend looking at three unexploded shells along a small road near Ypres.  The pointing arm is that of our guide pointing out that this was still, more than a century later, live ordnance and that one of them was a gas shell.  He'd told us at the beginning of the tour that about 300 million shells(1), from mortar to heavy artillery, were fired in the 100 square miles of the Ypres battlefield between the fall of 1914 and September 1918, of which 20% did not explode, going on to warn us that it was possible we would encounter shells on our tour and that, under no circumstances, were we to touch them, regaling us with stories of the unpleasant results in recent years for folks who tried to remove the nose cones, which are valuable souvenirs.

Farmers and builders still encounter about 250 tons a year of these shells and put them by the side of the road for collection.  It was one of our fellow tourists who noticed these shells by the wayside and our guide quickly pulled over.

Flying in and out of Brussels, we saw, in order, the Somme, Ypres, Verdun, the Meuse Argonne - site of the great American offensive at the end of the war, and ended up at Waterloo, along with visiting the Museum of the Great War in Meaux, near Paris, the closest the Germans came to the city in September 1914, before being repulsed in the First Battle of the Marne.

At the Somme and Ypres we did all day tours with a guide.  At the Somme we were with four Australians, one whose grandfather was shot in the face during the 1918 battle, but survived to return home.  Although I knew Australians fought on the Western Front, I was unaware of the scale of their participation, with 46,000 dying along those lines.  At Ypres we spent the morning with four other Australians and two Brits, the Australians leaving us at lunch.  

The rest of the trip we served as our own guides, visiting museums and the battlefields on our own.  And the military cemeteries.  The endless cemeteries.  There are 410 military cemeteries at the Somme, and more than 250 at Ypres; the Meuse Argonne contains the largest American military cemetery in Europe, the final resting place for more than 14,000 soldiers.  We saw many as we passed by and visited British and Empire, French, German, and American cemeteries.

The scale of all this death and destruction occurring within a relatively contained geographical area is overwhelming.  During the entire American Civil War there were about 200,000 battlefield deaths while about 300,000 American died at on the battlefield or shortly thereafter during WW2.  During the 4 1/2 months of the Somme, 300,000 soldiers perished; during the ten month Battle of Verdun the same year, another 300,000 died.  In four years at Ypres the toll was another 400,000.  Including wounded there were between 2.5 and 3 million casualties at these three locations.

At the British cemeteries you will see many gravestones simply reading A Soldier of the Great War.  The German cemetery at Ypres contains a mass grave with the bones of 25,000 unidentified soldiers.  For many other tens of thousands not enough was ever found to bury.  On a wall at the Australian National Monument at the Somme are the names of 11,000 soldiers never found.  The British monument at the Somme is in memory of more than 70,000 who disappeared in the mud, the rain, and the repeated shelling (60-70% of Western Front casualties were from artillery).  The Menin gate at Ypres lists more than 50,000 soldiers of the British Empire who disappeared defending the city.

The bond between the people of Ypres and Britain remains strong a century later.  The Germans never took the city but it was completely destroyed by the deluge of German shells.  After the war, Ypres was rebuilt as it existed before 1914.  The city is filled with British, Australian and Canadians visitors and they receive a warm welcome.  Our hotel contained a small museum of artifacts recovered from the battlefield.  At 8pm every night since 1929 (except during WW2), a bugle band consisting of local volunteers plays at a ceremony at the Menin Gate.

Below are photos of the Tyne Cot British Cemetery at Passchendaele (Passendale) five miles from the center of Ypres.  From its low ridge, the towers of the Ypres Cathedral could be seen.  In 1917, the British, Australians, and Canadians launched an attack to capture the ridge.  It took 100 days and 75,000 lives to advance less than five miles, with the German suffering similar losses.  The cemetery is placed on top of the ridge at the limit of their advance.  On the photo at bottom, the wind turbines in the distance mark the approximate starting line for the British attack.

 

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(1)  Doing some further research, while I've seen the 300 million figure as well as 1.5 billion for the number of shells fired on the entire Western Front from 1914 to 1918, I have my doubts whether this is accurate.  I've found some smaller figures, as well as amounts of shells produced individually by Britain, France, and Germany.  There is no doubt that staggering amounts of shells were fired, for instance, one million by the Germans on the first day at Verdun on February 21, 1916 and 1.7 million by the British and French on July 1, 1916 at the Somme, but if 300 million were fired at Ypres, that works out to about 210,000 a day, which seems high given weather and campaigning variation, as well as that until mid-1915 all the armies had shortages of shells.  My sense is the number is less but still impressive.

A further note, at Verdun and the Somme, the first day artillery barrage was intended to destroy the enemy lines and allow large advances by the infantry.  In both cases, though much death and destruction was inflicted, the expected advances did not occur, as enough enemy survived to maintain resistance.