The Postcard
A view of massive artillery damage to the Église de St.-Vaast in Laventie on a postally unused postcard that was printed and published by A. Guéquière of Estaires.
Monsieur le Curé is looking up in utter disbelief.
Sometimes enemy gunners used to take potshots at churches and cathedrals out of sheer boredom, although the main reason for targeting them was to reduce their height in order to minimize their value as observation posts.
Amazingly, despite the extensive damage to the roof and choir, the stained glass windows in the apse appear to have survived, at least in part.
The church was reconstructed after the Great War.
Visé Paris No. 5
The card bears the imprimatur 'Visé Paris' followed by a unique reference number. This means that the image was inspected and deemed by the military authorities in the French capital not to be a security risk.
'Visé Paris' indicates that the card was published during or soon after the Great War.
Edward Wyndham Tennant
The church features in a poem written in March 1916 by an English aristocrat named Edward Wyndham Tennant (1897-1916), the first part of which is as follows:
'Green gardens in Laventie!
Soldiers only know the street
Where mud is churned and splashed about
By battle-wending feet;
And yet beside one stricken house there is
a glimpse of grass.
Look for it when you pass.
Beyond the church whose pitted spire
Seems balanced on a strand
Of swaying stone and tottering brick
Two roofless ruins stand'.
Two days before he died aged 19, 'Bim', as Tennant was known, wrote the following to his mother Lady Glenconner:
'Tonight we go up to the trenches
we were in, and tomorrow or the
next day we go over the top ...
I am full of hope and trust, and I
pray that I may be worthy of my
fighting ancestors'.
Bim must have suspected that he was about to die, because towards the end of this, his last letter to his mother, he wrote:
"Your love for me and my love
for you, have made my whole
life one of the happiest there
has ever been.
Brutus' farewell to Cassius
sounds in my heart: 'If not
farewell, and if we meet again,
we shall smile'.
Now all my blessings go with
you, and with all we love.
God bless you and give you
peace.
Eternal love from Bim".
Such maturity for a man/boy still in his teens who was writing in the middle of a war zone.
The Death of Edward Tennant
Bim's foreboding was unfortunately fulfilled, because he was killed by a German sniper on the Somme on the 22nd. September 1916.
He was buried in the Guillemont Road Cemetery near his friend Raymond Asquith, who had been killed a week before.
The inscription on Edward's gravestone reads:
'Killed in Action in
his Twentieth Year'.
A memorial to Tennant, sculpted by Allan G. Wyon, was erected in Salisbury Cathedral. There are two inscriptions on the memorial, one above the low-relief portrait of Tennant, and one below. The upper inscription reads:
'When things were at their worst he would
go up and down in the trenches cheering
the men, when danger was greatest his
smile was loveliest.'
The inscription below the portrait has the following wording:
'In proud and unfading memory of Edward
Wyndham Tennant, 4th Batt. Grenadier Guards,
eldest son of Lord and Lady Glenconner, who
passed to the fuller life in the Battle of the Somme
22nd September 1916 Aged 19 years.
He gave his earthly life to such matter as he set
great store by: the honour of his country and his
home.
Laventie
Laventie is in the Pas de Calais, and is 10 miles northeast of Béthune and 12 miles west of Lille. In the Great War it was located on the La Bassée front, and was occupied by the Germans in 1918.
Nearby is the Laventie Commonwealth War Graves Commission Cemetery which holds the grave of Captain George McElroy, a leading ace fighter pilot of the Royal Flying Corps who was killed in action in 1918.
Abba Eban
"History teaches us that men and nations
behave wisely when they have exhausted
all other alternatives".
This was said during a speech in London UK on the 16th. December 1970 by Abba Eban (1915-2002), an Israeli diplomat and writer.
The Use of Artillery in the Great War
Artillery was very heavily used by both sides during the Great War. The British fired over 170 million artillery rounds of all types, weighing more than 5 million tons - that's an average of around 70 pounds (32 kilos) per shell.
If the 170m rounds were on average two feet long, and if they were laid end to end, they would stretch for 64,394 miles (103,632 kilometres); the line would go round the equator over two and a half times. If the artillery of the Central Powers of Germany and its allies is factored in, the figure can be doubled to 5 encirclements of the planet.
During the first two weeks of the Third Battle of Ypres, over 4 million rounds were fired at a cost of over £22,000,000 - a huge sum of money, especially over a century ago.
Artillery was the killer and maimer of the war of attrition.
According to Dennis Winter's book 'Death's Men' three quarters of battle casualties were caused by artillery rounds. According to John Keegan ('The Face of Battle') casualties were:
- Bayonets - less than 1%
- Bullets - 30%
- Artillery and Bombs - 70%
Keegan suggests however that the ratio changed during advances, when massed men walking line-abreast with little protection across no-man's land were no match for for rifles and fortified machine gun emplacements.
Many artillery shells fired during the Great War failed to explode. Drake Goodman provides the following information on Flickr:
"During World War I, an estimated one tonne of explosives was fired for every square metre of territory on the Western front. As many as one in every three shells fired did not detonate. In the Ypres Salient alone, an estimated 300 million projectiles that the British and the German forces fired at each other were "duds", and most of them have not been recovered."
To this day, large quantities of Great War matériel are discovered on a regular basis. Many shells from the Great War were left buried in the mud, and often come to the surface during ploughing and land development.
For example, on the Somme battlefields in 2009 there were 1,025 interventions, unearthing over 6,000 pieces of ammunition weighing 44 tons.
Artillery shells may or may not still be live with explosive or gas, so the bomb disposal squad, of the Civilian Security of the Somme, dispose of them.
The Somme Times
From 'The Somme Times', Monday, 31 July, 1916:
'There was a young girl of the Somme,
Who sat on a number five bomb,
She thought 'twas a dud 'un,
But it went off sudden -
Her exit she made with aplomb!'
