Ypres Salient

Sat 20 March Sheila and I awoke to the clatter of shopkeepers setting up their open air stalls in the square below our window. It's like a mini mall really selling fresh meats and vegetables, flowers, leather goods, clothing, jewelry, CDs and the like. At 9:30, we met Andre, our guide from Over the Top Tours. Sheila and I had him all to ourselves for the morning. There is something about this war in its tragedy that touches me like no other conflict. It was such a waste, and it was so unnessary. I have looked forward to this tour since we started planning our trip here, and I was not disappointed. In military terms, a salient is a position surrounded on three sides by the enemy. For obvious reasons, it makes it a difficult defensive position. You have to fight on three fronts. After a short drive, we stopped at the Essex Farm Dressing Station and cemetery. There are 163 of these cemeteries in this area. We noticed that gravestones are often grouped together in twos, threes or more the victims of a shell blast or a machine gun spray. Frequently, men were buried where they fell. Most of the men in the cemetery were unnamed. The British used stiff cardboard dog tags. These were often destroyed making identification impossible. Letters home were impersonal where an official crosses out the inappropriate reason for death. It was most frequently: "Missing in action. Presumed dead. At the Menin Gate, there are 53 thousand names. At Tyne Cot 34 thousand. At Langemark there is a mass grave with 25 thousand Germans The monument also contains the names of tens of thousands more dead yet unidentified soldiers. These monuments listing the names of the fallen are all over. Men or parts of men as young as 15 and as old as seventy are buried beneath Flanders Field wrapped in a blanket, the usual method of burial. You get the point, the extent of the devastation is staggering. Nothing in anyone's experience could prepare you for this kind of horror and destruction.The dressing station, no more than a dank low ceilinged bunker designed to help those they could help, and triage the rest. It was so small there was no way they could have kept up with the casualties in one of the most destructive wars in history. There were six of these facilities near here. Only one remains. We visited a German bunker, a shelter from intolerable bombardment with steel reinforced 2.5 meter thick concrete walls capable of withstanding a direct hit. The allies had nothing like it. The Germans took much better care of their troops. We went to Langemark, the German cemetery, which, in part, served the Nazi propaganda machine commemorating what they called the slaughter of the innocents. As they tell the story: Kaiser Wilhelm, believing that the Germans would break through the Allied lines, sent a group of school children to witness it. The Nazis claim thy were gunned down holding hands and singing. In truth, they were running toward the German lines singing in the hope they wouldn't be mistaken as attacking soldiers by the Germans. Who gunned them down is lost in the fog of war. We visited the Canadian Memorial at St Juliene. It was here on April 22, 1915 the Germans released thousands of pounds of chlorine gas the first use of lethal gas in warfare. When the allies realized what it was, they ran creating a huge hole in the allied lines. The Canadians were called in to fill the breach. Some 2000 died here. Fortunately, there were two chemists among the Canadians. They knew that alkaline neutralized chlorine. The only readily available alkaline: urine. The Canadians were instructed to pee on cloth and hold it to their faces for protection. Later, of course, as both sides used gas phosgene then mustard gas, gas masks were developed. Ironically, a German Jew developed these gasses and Zyclon B for the Germans. A short drive later, Andre stopped the van and pointed to two objects beside the road. " Those are hand grenades. Those were not there yesterday," he said. We stopped the van to look. Unexploded ordinance is all over the place here. When something is found, people put it alongside the road and the army comes by to pick it up. We pulled into a farm and went into a barn. There were all kinds of WWI artifacts here: Royal Enfield rifels, parts of machine guns unexploded cannon shells in enough state of rot that we could see the musket-like lead balls that scattered upon detonation tearing to shreds plants animals an men. Chilling. Next, we stopped at Tyne Cot, the British Memorial to the Third Battle of Ypres or Passchendaele. The area is barely above sea level and is kept dry by a complex drainage system. Continuous bombardment destroyed this system. That coupled with a very wet Winter and Spring made the area a quagmire of soupy mud. Men and material had to move along duckboard cat walks. Were a man, wearing up to 100 lbs of gear, to fall into a mud filled shell hole, he would drown before he could be rescued. The fighting was severe and constant. It took the allies 2.5 months to take Passchendaele Ridge. The Germans recaptured it in 3 days. I've read that it cost one human life to gain about 2 inches of territory, but this cost 500,00 lives for no gain whatsoever-a testimony to the futility of war. More later. Love to all.