Ypres is unique in British folk memory. Like Agincourt, Trafalgar and Waterloo it is a name to stir patriotic pride, though for different reasons and remembered in a different way. They were victories of a single day, celebrated in modern times by films and, at appropriate anniversaries, by the waving of flags and firework displays. By contrast, the struggle in Flanders is commemorated every evening by a simple ceremony in Ypres itself when the haunting sound of six bugles echoes the Last Post down silenced streets from under the arch of the Menin Gate.
Ypres was a defensive victory won by endurance and dogged determination in a series of battles, not by the master-stroke of one feat of arms. Although the first hours of the Somme brought heavier casualties than on any morning at Ypres, the fighting in Flanders became the longest campaign in modern British history and the costliest in lives. The first battle, at the onset of winter in 1914, destroyed the core of Britain’s old professional army and exposed the realities of total war to volunteers who, less than a year back in time, never imagined they would find themselves on a battlefield. Between October 1914 and October 1918 seven soldiers from King George V’s armies perished in the Salient for every hour the fighting continued. Tens of thousands more who returned home bore for the rest of their days the physical and mental wounds of their ordeal. Ninety years after Passchendaele, Ypres remains a national legend hallowed by mass sacrifice.
The Salient, the 35-mile bulge in the Western Front that covered Ypres, was the sector of line closest to England’s shores; at least one officer is known to have downed a mug of breakfast tea in the trenches and dined that evening at his London club. With the return of peace, visitors from Britain began to travel again to Flanders, modern pilgrims to a town whose mediaeval splendour lay in ruins. At first they were advised to take the 61-mile sea voyage from Dover to Ostend aboard a Belgian steamer. Soon, however, they had the option of sailings by night to Zeebrugge from Hull or from Harwich.
I remember all the excitement of that Continental Train from Liverpool Street station to the coast and a night crossing from Parkeston Quay, Harwich, made shortly before my seventh birthday. My father had served in Egypt and Salonika not on the Western Front, but two of his brothers fought in Flanders (and survived). From Heist, where we were spending a holiday beside the sea, my parents took me on a trip to Ypres. I have a faint memory of the Flanders tower at Dixmude (by then Diksmuide), the original IJzertoren, a Celtic-style cross dedicated to the Flemish war dead. More sharply I recall trenches on Hill 60, a British tank preserved in Ypres, the pristine whiteness of the Menin Gate and watching work on restoring the Cloth Hall, with the belfry encased in scaffolding and walls that still – in 1933 – looked like a line of broken tooth stumps. This holiday fired a liking for Belgium and an admiration for its peoples I have retained all my life.
Since 1994, visitors are more likely to come by Channel Tunnel train and car than by sea, though there are still night sailings from Hull to Zeebrugge, while from Dover ferries cross to Calais and hydrofoils to Ostend. Young people – a little older than I was seven decades ago – take guided school trips to the Salient, seeing for themselves the contours of battle and the awesome cemeteries. They scramble into trenches preserved in Sanctuary Wood, peer into bunkers, stand beside mine craters, cast their eyes over guns, shells and helmets in local collections. At the In Flanders Fields Museum, on the upper floor of the restored Cloth Hall, computer technology enables them to trace the fate of individual soldiers and some civilians who stayed on, too. They hear the sounds of battle, and even the night sky is re-created for them. Educationally this is an excellent venture. The museum does not glorify war: it honours sacrifice by a sombre realism that is in keeping with modern Ieper’s role as an international Town of Peace.
In its darkest years Ypres was of course an international Town of War, and since the early 1920s pilgrims have come from many lands other than the United Kingdom. Cemeteries on both sides of the Belgian-French frontier contain the graves of Americans, Australians, Belgians, Canadians, Chinese, French, Indians, Irish, Newfoundlanders, New Zealanders, Portuguese, South Africans and soldiers from the islands of the West Indies. ‘Ypern’ also became a name of sorrow and pride beyond the Rhine: over 100,000 soldiers of the German army lie buried in Flanders, more men than the Treaty of Versailles allowed the post-war German armed forces, the Reichswehr, to maintain. When in 2005 I saw for the first time the Grieving Parents monument at Vladslo, sculpted by Käthe Kollwitz, a Berlin mother mourning a son of 18, I was moved by her artistry and deeply pacifist sincerity. Her two kneeling figures must surely be the most poignant evocation of family suffering in any war cemetery.
It was with some hesitation that I decided to write a book about the Salient. At heart I have long been an ‘Easterner’, particularly interested in the history of central Europe, the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire, rather than a ‘Westerner’. Moreover, there have recently been so many fine compilations based on diaries, letters and sound-recorded reminiscence that it seemed doubtful if anything further could be said about the fighting in Flanders. I found from conversation that many younger people, stimulated by these books and by television, were seeking to put their newly found sympathy with the men in the trenches into a wider context. They were asking questions often pondered in my mind. How did the episodes of which they had read relate to policies and plans shaped in the preceding years of fragile peace? Why in 1914 did Ypres, of all Belgian’s half-forgotten historic cities, become a crucible of war? Was there an alternative grand strategy, to avoid what Winston Churchill called ‘chewing on the barbed wire of Flanders’? Should the Salient have been abandoned for a shorter, more defensible line? Were conditions for the German soldiery as bad as for the British? And how far did the Great War in Flanders shape the subsequent history of both Belgium and Europe? I decided to attempt a book that would seek answers to these questions and others as well.
The Salient therefore draws on published sources that range from the journals of leading statesmen and military commanders down to the diaries and letters and oral reminiscence of the ‘other ranks’ in the trenches. At times the book necessarily goes well beyond specifically military history, and it covers far more than the 400 square miles of salient shown on the maps. It looks also at Mons, the Marne, the Aisne and Antwerp, and treats fighting down the Yser to the sea as integral to the better known events around Ypres itself.
The narrative is not confined to the four years of the Great War. It goes back in time, for the dead hands of a German field marshal and a Belgian general helped determine strategy in the first two months of the conflict, and it is impossible to ignore lessons learnt by the French in 1870 or for the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), more recently on the South African veldt. My account continues beyond the Armistice, with a chapter on the aftermath of the long campaign during the inter-war years and ends with what is essentially an epilogue looking at the events of 1940, for they provide both continuity with and a contrast to the earlier clash of arms. Almost a century later, grievances raised in the Yser ‘trenches of death’ still find an echo in Belgium’s current political controversies.
Fashions change in historical writing and prejudices with them. Although I hope to do justice to other peoples, inevitably I write as an Englishman, born into a generation that respected tradition and authority, though not uncritically. I am not prepared to look for ‘bunglers’ or ‘cowards’. As for my heroes and heroines, they are not always mentioned by name. They abound in collective memory, serving in the trenches or in hospitals behind the lines, challenging death in single combat in the skies and, in their thousands, waiting anxiously at home for news week after week, in pride and in dread. All honour to them.