The Postcard
A postally unused carte postale published by Callewaert of Ypres. The church was reduced to little more than a pile of rubble by sustained enemy bombardment during the Great War.
The statue is of Ernest Louis de Gonzague Vandenpeereboom, who was born in Kortrijk on the 12th. July 1807, and who died in Ypres in 1875 on what was 43 years later to become Armistice Day, the 11th. November.
Ernest was a Belgian doctor in law; he was also a textile industrialist, and a liberal politician.
The statue was knocked from its pedestal by the blast from an artillery shell. To see the statue lying on the ground, please search for the tag 38YVS42
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!'
Ypres
Ypres is a Belgian municipality in the province of West Flanders. Though the Dutch Leper is the official name, the city's French name Ypres is most commonly used in English.
During the First World War, Ypres (or 'Wipers' as it was commonly known by the British troops) was the centre of the Battles of Ypres between German and Allied forces.
The famous Cloth Hall was built in the 13th century. At this time cats, then the symbol of the devil and witchcraft, were thrown from the Cloth Hall in the belief that this would get rid of demons. Today, this act is commemorated with a triennial Cat Parade through the town.
-- Ypres in the Great War
Ypres occupied a strategic position because it stood in the path of Germany's planned sweep across the rest of Belgium and into France from the north (the Schlieffen Plan).
The neutrality of Belgium, established by the First Treaty of London, was guaranteed by Britain; Germany's invasion of Belgium brought the British Empire into the war. The German army surrounded the city on three sides, bombarding it throughout much of the war. To counterattack, British, French, and allied forces made costly advances from the Ypres Salient into the German lines on the surrounding hills.
-- The First Battle of Ypres
In the First Battle of Ypres (19th. October to 22nd. November 1914), the Allies captured the town from the Germans. The Germans had used tear gas at the Battle of Bolimov on the 3rd. January 1915.
-- The Second Battle of Ypres
The Germans' use of poison gas for the first time on the 22nd. April 1915 marked the beginning of the Second Battle of Ypres, which continued until the 25th. May 1915.
They captured high ground east of the town. The first gas attack used chlorine. Mustard gas, also called Yperite from the name of the town, was also used for the first time near Ypres, in the autumn of 1917.
Vera Brittain was an English Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, writer, feminist and pacifist who made the following observation in her 1933 memoir, 'Testament of Youth':
“I wish those people who talk about going
on with this war whatever it costs could see
the soldiers suffering from mustard gas
poisoning.
Great mustard-coloured blisters, blind eyes,
all sticky and stuck together, always fighting
for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying
that their throats are closing, and they know
they will choke.”
-- The Third Battle of Ypres
Of the battles, the largest, best-known, and most costly in human suffering was the Third Battle of Ypres (31st. July to 6th. November 1917, also known as the Battle of Passchendaele), in which the British, Canadian, ANZAC, and French forces recaptured the Passchendaele Ridge east of the city at a terrible cost of lives.
After months of fighting, this battle resulted in nearly half a million casualties to all sides, and only a few miles of ground won by Allied forces. During the course of the battle Ypres was all but obliterated by artillery fire.
-- Lieutenant-Colonel Beckles Willson
In 1920 Lieutenant-Colonel Beckles Willson wrote:
'There is not a single half-acre in Ypres
that is not sacred.
There is not a single stone which has not
sheltered scores of loyal young hearts,
whose one impulse and desire was to fight
and, if need be, to die for England.
Their blood has drenched its cloisters and
its cellars, but if never a drop had been spilt,
if never a life had been lost in defence of
Ypres, still would Ypres have been hallowed,
if only for the hopes and the courage it has
inspired and the scenes of valour and sacrifice
it has witnessed'.
-- Ypres Today
After the Great War the town was extensively rebuilt using money paid by Germany in reparations, with the main square, including the Cloth Hall and town hall, being rebuilt as close to the original designs as possible (the rest of the rebuilt town is more modern in appearance).
The Cloth Hall today is home to the 'In Flanders Fields Museum', dedicated to Ypres's role in the First World War and named after the 'Poppy' poem by John McCrae.
Ypres these days has the title of 'City of Peace' and maintains a close friendship with another town on which war had a profound impact: Hiroshima. Both towns witnessed warfare at its worst: Ypres was one of the first places where chemical warfare was employed, while Hiroshima suffered the debut of nuclear warfare.
Ypres hosts the international campaign secretariat of Mayors for Peace, an international Mayoral organisation mobilising cities and citizens worldwide to abolish and eliminate nuclear weapons by the year 2020. It didn't happen.
