Ypres, Messines and Passchendaele

I have written about the First World War before in this blog but a TV documentary about the fighting has once again appalled and moved me to write on the subject anew.

I think that it is the extremely high level of death, violence, sacrifice of life and seemingly total inconsideration, heartlessness and callousness by those "in charge" for human life that is so shocking. One is forced to realize that these people - and there must have been actual people in charge who made these decisions - did not view a solider as a living being with a soul and a right to live his life on this earth but rather as a commodity to be expended to the point of being killed if it was in the interest of strategy or policy.

It seems that if incidents or events lie more than 30 years in the past, we have a problem remembering them. Even in this age of image documentation (film, photographs) and recording of sound and vision, nobody actually remembers anything very much about the First World War, or of any individual events occurring in its duration and it is spoken of very little. The point is mainly, I think, that it has been completely eclipsed by that other terrible event, the Second World War, which is documented to a much greater degree, is still in the memories of many living people and to which even some level of glamor, thrill and excitement is attached.


There was nothing glamorous or thrilling about the First World War. It seems to have been one enormous festival of death. The actions and events of the First World War are utterly inconceivable today. The absolute annihilation, the brutality, violence, and abominable circumstances, not just of the actual killing but of the conditions in which those fighting were expected to exist. I recently saw a documentary which showed short films of shell-shocked soldiers. I cannot imagine that those soldiers I saw were ever able to return to normality. Some of them hid under hospital beds and refused to come out. One of them could not hear or understand any word except the word "bombs". So many of them died where they sat, in their trenches. When they went "over the top" they were scythed down by the artillery fire at knee level. Wave after wave, in their masses, they were cut down and killed, most of them probably in their prime. Thousands upon thousands, so many that they could not be buried or found and today lie in mass graves under fields of grass and wheat. All of these men were someone's son.

Ypres, Messines and Passchendaele were the scenes of incredible, appalling violence and death. The towns were virtually flattened again and again by bombing. Intense and sustained bombing left Ypres in ruins at the end of the First World War. Messines is full of craters (today filled in and prettified as ponds and integrated into golf courses) caused by huge mines that "vaporized" the German soldiers stationed there. Apparently, even now archeological work never reveals human bones and remains any bigger than a fingernail. Allied soldiers themselves who built the tunnels required to lay the mines worked in conditions incomprehensible for us, 90 feet below the surface in chalk, which made them snow-blind. And some of them lost their lives, even down there. Passchendaele was Ludendorff's revenge for Messines and has become synonymous with the useless sacrifice of life in the First World War.

With the reconstruction of these towns, partially in the same style as before they were bombed, it is hard to imagine that anything much happened at all. But let us try to remember these times, if only to remind ourselves never to repeat such events in any form.