IEPER/YPRES from Paschaendale Ridge
SORRY everyone, the pace of our travels have been making it hard to get time to process and upload images to flickr --- they are going to have to wait until we are home in a couple of weeks.
BUT meanwhile ---- here is a picture from the final point of our pilgrimage to Belgium following my grandfather's steps in 1916/17. This is taken from the furthest point achieved in the attack on Paschaendale Ridge by the Battalion in which he served. [39th Battalion, 10th [Victorian] Brigade, Third Division AIF.
If you look closely, the spires of the [reconstructed] Cloth Hall and Cathedral in Ieper/Ypres are visible in the middle-left — silhouetted above the trees. Ieper is 8 Kilometres from where I took the picture. So, it took the Australians, together with British, NZ and Canadian troops, more than three months to cross that space and attack this ridge from which German artillery was pounding Paschaendale to a pulp of totally destroyed moonscape. The spires have only just been reconstructed.
The Australians never made it into Paschaendale village or its remains. They were thrown back with massive casualties from this spot where the cemetery now stands, and eventually the Canadians captured the site.
During those months of fighting it rained almost continuously. Artillery of both sides had fired over 6 million shells, which destroyed the ancient drainage systems built over centuries by Flemish farmers to drain the low-lying land, turning the farmland into a massive swamp. The water table is less than 50cm below the ground, so all trenches, shell craters etc were full of water, polluted by human & animal remains; and crawling with rats. Thick mud restricted movement to a crawling pace. Men who fell off the wooden walkways into shell-holes often drowned under the weight of their kit which was in excess of 35Kg.
There are conflicting figures as to the losses suffered by the respective armies but it seems that somewhere in excess of 500,000 men in total were killed or wounded during the 3 months campaign. Tens of thousands of these have never been found in the mud and chaos. Every year bodies emerge from the ground. Many of the burials we saw are unidentified: some have nationalities deduced from uniform or equipment relics found with their bodies, but many. many, many others are totally unidentified. The Tyne Cot cemetery where the picture is taken contains about 12,000 graves of which only about a third have names.
IEPER/YPRES from Paschaendale Ridge
SORRY everyone, the pace of our travels have been making it hard to get time to process and upload images to flickr --- they are going to have to wait until we are home in a couple of weeks.
BUT meanwhile ---- here is a picture from the final point of our pilgrimage to Belgium following my grandfather's steps in 1916/17. This is taken from the furthest point achieved in the attack on Paschaendale Ridge by the Battalion in which he served. [39th Battalion, 10th [Victorian] Brigade, Third Division AIF.
If you look closely, the spires of the [reconstructed] Cloth Hall and Cathedral in Ieper/Ypres are visible in the middle-left — silhouetted above the trees. Ieper is 8 Kilometres from where I took the picture. So, it took the Australians, together with British, NZ and Canadian troops, more than three months to cross that space and attack this ridge from which German artillery was pounding Paschaendale to a pulp of totally destroyed moonscape. The spires have only just been reconstructed.
The Australians never made it into Paschaendale village or its remains. They were thrown back with massive casualties from this spot where the cemetery now stands, and eventually the Canadians captured the site.
During those months of fighting it rained almost continuously. Artillery of both sides had fired over 6 million shells, which destroyed the ancient drainage systems built over centuries by Flemish farmers to drain the low-lying land, turning the farmland into a massive swamp. The water table is less than 50cm below the ground, so all trenches, shell craters etc were full of water, polluted by human & animal remains; and crawling with rats. Thick mud restricted movement to a crawling pace. Men who fell off the wooden walkways into shell-holes often drowned under the weight of their kit which was in excess of 35Kg.
There are conflicting figures as to the losses suffered by the respective armies but it seems that somewhere in excess of 500,000 men in total were killed or wounded during the 3 months campaign. Tens of thousands of these have never been found in the mud and chaos. Every year bodies emerge from the ground. Many of the burials we saw are unidentified: some have nationalities deduced from uniform or equipment relics found with their bodies, but many. many, many others are totally unidentified. The Tyne Cot cemetery where the picture is taken contains about 12,000 graves of which only about a third have names.