Flanders: The Lille Gate 1919
Yesterday we saw the Menin Gate as it was before the Great War; the Menin Gate was by far the best known exit from the centre of Ypres during the war but in fact arguably the most used was in fact the Lille Gate, pictured here in a British stereo image in 1919.
The Lille Gate dates back to the 14th Century and was so named as it was on the main route to Lille. During the Great War the Ramparts close by were used as headquarters – at one stage for Tunnelling units – and there was also medical facilities and a cemetery grew up on the Ramparts itself – one of several on the city walls. After the Second Battle of Ypres in May 1915 the Menin Gate was in direct observation from the high ground around Ypres and so the Lille Gate became the main route to get to the front line for troops passing through Ypres.
Today the Lille Gate has been restored and nearby is the Ramparts Cemetery and Ramparts Museum. The ashes of historian Rose Coombes were scattered in the Ramparts Cemetery in the 1990s.
Flanders: Menin Gate 1913
Today the Menin Gate is world famous as one of the most important British and Commonwealth memorials to the missing; here each night the Last Post is sounded in memory of all those who fell. But few have seen images of what it looked like before the war.
This unusual view is taken from where many modern visitors take photographs of the memorial; across the moat and looking back. In 1913 the Menin Gate was a gap in the Ramparts guarded by two Flemish Lions and took the traveller out of Ypres and onto the Menin Road; thus the name. Little known is that there was a pub set in the gap that was the Menin Gate (sadly civilians were killed in it by shell fire in the early years of the war, their bodies not found until the memorial was built in the 20s) – and the roof of it is just visible. The two lions can be seen to the right of the moat bridge; both of these survived the war but were given to Australia in 1936 and today are in the collection of the Australian War Memorial.
It is hard to believe that within a year of this photograph being taken Ypres was on the front line and the Menin Gate became one of the most famous – infamous – locations on the Western Front. The peace seen here would be lost forever and the name the Menin Gate would take on a new meaning as a place of remembrance and sacrifice.
Flanders: Polderhoek Chateau
Polderhoek was a small hamlet north of the Menin Road close to the village of Gheluvelt and not far from Polygon Wood. It saw fighting during the First Battle of Ypres in 1914 and then remained in German hands until after the end of Third Ypres in 1917; by that time the whole area was a lunar landscape.
Polderhoek Chateau was a medium sized chateau for this area. Little is known about it’s pre-war history but it appears to have been taken over as a headquarters and later a dressing station. This image dates from 1915 when the building had come under British shell fire – the amount of shrapnel damage to the building is evident by the impact marks on the walls.
During the Third Battle of Ypres it had been captured but then re-taken. Men from the New Zealand Division fought a tough and often forgotten battle here in December 1917; most of the dead from this battle are commemorated on the memorial at Buttes New British Cemetery. After the war the owners of the château never returned and thus it was not rebuilt. Today the whole area is covered in an industrial zone.
Flanders: Men of Plugstreet
We had a Somme week last week and we begin this week with a Flanders themed series of posts.
This image shows men of the 1/5th Battalion London Regiment (London Rifle Brigade) on the eve of leaving for Flanders in November 1914. They are already in the winter garb that would serve them well in the trenches of Flanders. Their war would take them first to the village of Ploegsteert – ‘Plugstreet’ to the British Tommy. In a typically flat lying area of Flanders, the trenches here were half trenches and half breastworks – positions built above ground level – and they soon became clogged with water and mud as winter set in. A brief respite came on Christmas Day 1914 when the men of the London Rifle Brigade took part in the now famous Christmas Truce and came out of their trenches into No Man’s Land for the first time since they had arrived at Plugstreet.
All but one of the men in this photo survived Plugstreet but the 1/5th Londons were very much a Middle Class battalion and several were commissioned and died as officers. But caught in time these ‘mud men of Flanders’ about to enter winter quarters south of Ypres looked relaxed, calm and prepared – at least for the weather.
Pozieres British Cemetery 1930s
Pozieres British Cemetery was started when a Dressing Station was established close to here in 1917. After the war the site was chosen to make a permanent cemetery and graves from the 1916 fighting for the village were moved in here. The Pozieres Memorial – the walls visible to the rear of the graves – was added later to commemorate those who fell in the March-April 1918 operations and had no known grave.
This image dates from the 1930s and shows the completed cemetery but with some of the original features still in evidence. Of particular interest are the wooden crosses crowded into one area; these are the original grave markers and there was no-one buried under them at this stage; headstones had already replaced them. Families visiting the battlefields at this time could claim original crosses and even apply for them by post.
The larger cross was a memorial to the 1st Australian Division which had been unveiled here on 8th July 1917. The Division had suffered over 7,700 casualties in the Pozieres fighting. The cross was later replaced with a permanent memorial and was taken back to Australia.
Courcelette Sugar Factory 1919
The small Somme village of Courcelette was captured by the Germans in September 1914 and would remain in their hands until it was liberated by Canadian troops in the Battle of Flers-Courcelette, when Tanks were used for the first time, on 15th September 1916. The Germans turned one of the village chateaux into a field hospital, built a substantial cemetery which eventually had more than 2000 burials and utilised the Sugar Factory close to the main Albert-Bapaume road as a strong point.
This image of the Sugar Factory is one of a small collection taken by a Canadian veteran when he toured some of the sites where he had fought in 1919.
Sugar Factories were commonplace in France at the time of the Great War; sugar beet was a major crop and almost every village processed them as part of the sugar trade. Today such factories are rare and the rebuilt Courcelette Sugar Factory has been a garden centre for many years.
Somme KNuts 1916
One of the most famous musical hall performers of the Great War period was Basil Hallam Radford. Otherwise known as ‘Gilbert The Filbert – The Nut with a K’ or the ‘KNut’. This humour seems very dated now but it was a phrase in common usage by that generation and appears on captions and sign-boards in many WW1 images. The ‘K’ was also often linked to Lord Kitchener during the war and in photos of Kitchener’s Army men they often refer to themselves as ‘KNuts’.
These Somme KNuts are from the 2nd Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment. They arrived on the Somme in July 1916 and took part in the fighting near Pozieres and later at High Wood where they took heavy casualties. While the 2nd was a regular battalion the majority of men in it by 1916 were wartime volunteers, which again here could explain the ‘KNut’ reference.
Many photos like this we taken in villages close to Albert on the Somme; in houses turned into studios or in back-gardens and even in the street. They show soldiers in an ‘Active Service’ look very different to photographs taken in training.
Somme Prisoners of War 1916
Continuing with the Somme theme, this is a German snap-shot taken by a soldier in the 26th (Reserve) Division showing British soldiers captured on the Somme in July 1916. It is believed the photograph was taken in the village of Miraumont, which appears to have been a processing area for POWs, and that these were men captured between Thiepval, Beaumont-Hamel and Serre. The Scottish Sergeant with his back to the camera seems to be marshalling the men and one man has a shell dressing on his face indicating a battle wound from the recent fighting in which these men were captured. In the early stages of the Somme many soldiers were captured in the German trenches when attacks went wrong, or got cut off in No Man’s Land and were unable to return to their own lines. The 26th (Reserve) Division was a Wurtemburg formation which had been on the Somme front since late 1914.
Somme Portrait: Civil Service Rifles 1916
There is something haunting about the face of this soldier; the image was taken while he was serving in the Loos sector, possibly in one of the photographic studios at Bethune. It shows Sergeant William George Clive, a 26 year old from Tooting in London. Clive joined the 1/15th Battalion London Regiment (Civil Service Rifles) in 1914 and by the time he went to France in March 1915 he was a Corporal. Before the Somme he was promoted to Sergeant and was killed on 15th September 1916 when his battalion took part in the attack on High Wood, suffering heavy casualties. Originally buried on the battlefield with other members of the unit, his grave was moved to Caterpillar Valley Cemetery after the war.
French Front: The Hunt for Lice in the Trenches
The problem of body lice in the Great War was not confined to any nation or group of soldiers; everyone who served anywhere near the front line or in billets was affected by it.
In this stereo-card a French soldier in a reserve trench is one of a number of soldiers who have removed most of their uniform and spread them about the trench while they hunt for lice. It is also likely they were using this as an opportunity to do some basic cleaning but obviously this sort of cleaning could not be done in the front or support lines. Although many British soldiers considered French trenches far more ‘dirty’ than their own, all front line soldiers were afflicted by lice, something many were still ashamed of to a certain extent when I interviewed WW1 veterans in the 1980s.
French Front: A French Machine-Gunner
Another from the French stereo-cards series, this shows a Poilu in a smashed position on the Western Front using a Chauchat machine-gun in an anti-aircraft role. The strafing of trenches by aircraft was a rare occasion in the Great War and this is no doubt posed. In fact there is very little this soldier could do even if an aircraft appeared as he has failed to load a magazine into the gun!
The Chauchat was a very cheaply made and produced light machine-gun used by the French Army from 1915 and was brought in to give French platoons some automatic fire capability. However the weapon would easily jam if it got muddy and had a poor reputation; made worse when it was issued to American troops in 1917/18. By the end of the war more than 250,000 had been produced.
French Front: Verdun Remembered
Today is the 96th Anniversary of the start of the Battle of Verdun. This defining Great War campaign cost France and German more than 700,000 casualties in 1916 and for the French Poilu it became the notorious ‘mincing machine’ as seemingly regiment after regiment was thrown into the fighting here to stem the German advance and make sure that ‘They Shall Not Pass‘.
This image from a wartime set of French stereo-cards shows French soldiers in the quarries near Verdun at the site of a ‘Poste de Secours‘ or Dressing Station. French stretcher-bearers are seen towards the rear in the area where sandbagged dugouts line the quarry. The men at the front do not look wounded but appear to have just been fed, so there could have been a supply point here or field kitchen as well.
Verdun remains the by-word for the Great War in France and today ceremonies will be taking place at various sites on the Verdun Battlefield.
French Front: In The Trenches With The Poilus
By 1916 the French Army was defending nearly two thirds of the Western Front and in many respects of all the combatant nations had reacted mostly quickly to the conditions of trench warfare; they were the first to adapt their conspicuous uniforms to wartime conditions with the implementation of Bleu Horizon, the first to introduce steel helmets with the Adrian helmet and during the winter of 1914/15 widely introduced trench weapons and hand grenades.
This image shows a typical French front line trench in 1916. All the men wear Bleu Horizon tunics and Adrian helmets. The image is not likely to have been taken in the front line as the men are too exposed, but it looks like a typical sap used in forward positions. The man holding up what looks like a rolling pin is in fact holding a Barbele Grenade that was used to cut paths in barbed wire defences. All the men are wearing French M2 Gas Masks; some 29 million of these were produced and could give five hours protection against phosgene gas. The man with the canister on his back is holding and using a Vermorel Sprayer; this was a pre-war piece of agricultural spayer used to dispense a solution that would help disperse gas. Both sides used them during the war.
;
;
French Front WW1: Horror in The Trenches
Over the next week I will be publishing a number of images of the ‘French Front‘ on the site. It is often forgotten that the French Army held more than 300 miles of the Western Front and by the close of the war the French had lost more than 1.4 million dead; twice the number of dead suffered by Great Britain for example. These particular images come from a series of contemporary stereo-cards produced in France during the war.
This image shows a French Poilu in a front line position in what looks like the Champagne. Contemporary accounts of the Great War often record trenches in French sectors being full of half-buried dead soldiers, or the sides of them being the fields graves of men who had died defending those very positions. When old trenches were taken over again in the final battles of 1918 the ground fought over had often been a battlefield earlier in the war, the bones of the dead soon revealed the bitter nature of the previous fighting. Here this Poilu stares thoughtfully at the camera while the remains of a former occupant of the trench lie almost casually around him.
Great War Portraits: The Veteran
Ending a brief look at some portraits this week we finish with this post-war image of a Great War veteran. Taken sometime in the 1920s, most likely in the man’s back garden of his house, he is dressed like any other man of the period – but tucked away on his waistcoat are the ribbons of the British War & Victory medals, the standard campaign medals for the Great War, and on his lapel the badge of Comrades of the Great War. He has a very expressive face and one wonders what his war had been and where; what had he seen and endured? Men like this survived, came home and tried to continue with a normal family life, but the experience of the war was always there somewhere; rarely would it surface with those who had never been there themselves – a sort of conspiracy of silence, which historian Professor Peter Doyle has written about on his blog. A silence today only hinted at with images like this.
Great War Portraits: Women’s Land Army
It is often not realised that the Women’s Land Army – something very familiar for WW2 – actually was founded in the Great War. With war volunteers, and then conscription, the farming community rapidly found itself stripped of a workforce and from 1915 women began to take the place of the men in the fields. By 1917 a quarter of a million women were working on farms across Britain.
This unknown Woman’s Land Army worker wears a typical uniform of the period; a wide brimmed hat with the Women’s Land Army badge of the period, a rubberised waterproof jacket very similar to an army despatch riders coat, jodpers, good shoes and leather gaiters. It was very much practical and not stylish.
Women like this did very important work in the Great War, now largely forgotten a century later and somewhat overshadowed by the more glamorous Land Girls of a later generation.
Great War Portraits: Salonika 1918
This week the site will feature a series of Great War portraits relating to different aspects of the war and different theatres.
This image of Private George Whiting of the 2nd Battalion Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry was taken in Salonika in 1918. Salonika, Macedonia as it was known – often ‘Muckydonia’ by the troops – is very much a forgotten front of the Great War. British troops served there from 1915 and fought Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian troops in support of their Serbian allies. The campaign was charactised by periods of intense fighting, static warfare just as on the Western Front, and huge casualties from disease; malaria from mosquitoes being the biggest problem. By 1918 the British Army had suffered 162,517 from disease along and over half a million men in Salonika were treated for non-battle injuries or sickness.
George Whiting wears a typical uniform of the warmer periods spent in Salonika; light-weight Khaki Drill (KD) uniform rather than the thicker woollen Service Dress, although that was worn here during the winter months, and shorts. In his hand is a Solar Topee or Pith Helmet, again part of the warm weather uniform worn by British troops here. On the band, or pugree, round the helmet is the badge of his regiment. Sewn on his lower right sleeve are two Overseas Chevrons indicating George had served in Salonika since 1916.
Wounded Tommies: The Cost of War
I was out yesterday at a local postcard fair and one of the images I found with this one. It is a small postcard image, badly creased and a little faded, and cost virtually nothing; the dealer almost gave it to me. But it is one of the more remarkable images I have rescued in a while.
Why? Photographs of the wounded, especially the seriously wounded, are far from common. It was a well known fact during the war that King George V would not visit military hospitals as it ‘upset him’. That attitude was shared with a large part of the British public not touched directly by the war. ‘Respectable’ wounded with light and less visible wounds, dressed smartly in hospital blues could easily be accepted but men with burns, or gas injuries and amputees were far less visible, and that extended to photographs as well.
This image shows three wounded soldiers who are all double amputees; with the terrible injuries caused by shell-fire in the Great War these men were far from unique but they are very much missing from the imagery of the conflict. Many veterans felt that the dead were more readily accepted that the wounded, and that those injured on active service were somehow forgotten. A century later soldiers who are double amputees just back from conflict are again part of our culture but thankfully they are accepted and treated with dignity in a way that the wounded of the Great War were arguably not; the future for the three men in this photograph was potentially bleak – a meagre pension, little chance of work and a drain on their family. Some interesting statistics on The Long, Long Trail show that of the the 2.2 million wounded serving with the British Army some 8% were discharged as invalids, as these men would have been; three of the more than 182,000 who fall into that category.
Flanders: A Veteran Returns
In the years between the First and Second World Wars thousands travelled to the battlefields in France and Flanders. Many were the families of those who had fallen, but some were also veterans of the war, going back to make sense of their past and perhaps pay their respects to an old comrade who hadn’t come home. Several of the veterans I interviewed had gone back in the 20s/30s and said it was hard even then to find some of the places they had known. Two veterans expressed their feelings in the poem The Road To La Bassée:
You’d never think there’d been a war, the country’s looking fine -
I had a job in places picking out the old front line.
You’d never think there’d been a war – ah, yet you would, I know,
You can’t forget those rows of headstones every mile or so.
This photograph from the 1930s shows one such veteran, at New Irish Farm Cemetery, close to Ypres. He looks down on a row of graves of two Royal Welch Fusiliers, a Machine-Gunner and an Irish Rifleman. Which one was the grave he had come to see? Was it a family member or a comrade he had left behind on the battlefield? We will never know, but it was clearly a defining moment for him, and one he wanted to recall by having the visit photographed. This is not a tourist snap; it is an insight into loss, regret and no doubt a little guilt, at having survived when this man did not. What was passing through his mind as he looked down on the white stone? The beauty of a simple image that poses more questions than it answers.
Royal Flying Corps: Egypt 1916
The Royal Flying Corps (RFC) is a formation not normally associated with campaigns outside of the Western Front, however this image shows men from the RFC in a very famous setting in early 1916. One of the main squadrons operating in Egypt at this time was 14 Squadron, and these men well be from them. They were based at a number of locations around the Suez Canal from 1915, keeping an eye on the Turks in Palestine and tribes in the Western Desert; towards the end of 1916 this involved in assisting T.E. Lawrence: ‘Lawrence of Arabia’.
The RFC men in the photo are wearing the familiar ‘Maternity Jacket‘ uniform which must have been fairly warm in desert conditions and possibly means they had not been ‘in theatre’ that long. I once interviewed a WW1 veteran who said that this location was the most popular place to have your photo taken in Egypt, with the backdrop of the Sphinx and Pyramids. The cost of the photo was relatively cheap and soldiers would be queuing up to have them done; a little board was placed in front of the camels with a number on (visible in this photo) and you then came back, quoted the number, and got your postcards to send home. I have since interviewed men who served in Egypt in WW2 and post-war and it seems little changed over 50-odd years!
A nice touch in the photo is that just below the chin of the Sphinx are some men of the Australian Imperial Force; Diggers whose iconic Slouch Hats are clearly visible. These could be from some of the AIF units then assembling in Egypt or some veterans just back from Gallipoli. Many of the famous Ancient Egyptian structures seen here are still covered in graffiti from this period.
Champagne Battlefields Pilgrimage 1925: Navarin Farm
Following on from yesterday we again feature some images from the photo album of ‘D.Lauder’ a young British woman who may have worked as a Nurse attached to the French Army who visited the battlefields between Reims and Verdun 1925.
Navarin Farm was a position on the Champagne Battlefields of 1915 which saw heavy fighting in the fighting of September 1915. French troops assaulted and captured the German positions here at great loss and it soon became a household name throughout France.
After the war it was selected as one of the sites to build a French National Ossuary. The ‘pyramid’ memorial to the Armies of the Champagne was unveiled in 1924 and not only contains numerous memorials to those who fought here but underneath are the bones of more than 10,000 men who fell on the Champagne battlefields.
Today part of the desolated ground around the memorial is still preserved but the view in 1925 (below, taken from the Navarin Farm monument) gives an idea what the war had done to battlefields like the Champagne.
The Original Bomber Boys: RAF 1918
This evening BBC1 will be screening The Bomber Boys about the men of Bomber Command in the Second World War. It is often forgotten that there were bombers operated by the RAF in the Great War, used to bomb targets on or behind the battlefield or much deeper into enemy territory.
When the Great War broke out aircraft were un-armed and used in a reconnaissance role. German Zeppelins brought the first bombs onto targets away from the battlefield, and by 1917 the Germans had developed the Gotha bomber capable of making bombing runs on Britain from bases in Belgium. By 1918 the British used a number of aircraft to bomb Germany, the DH9 being one of the workhorses and used in combat by, for example, 99 Squadron RAF who bombed the city of Saarbrücken in Germany in July 1918.
This image comes from a small collection owned by a veteran of the RAF who flew in 1918 and shows one of his fellow pilots with two 500lb bombs; again the size of bombs used in WW1 is surprising considering the nature of the aircraft. The early pilots and crews of these bomber squadrons paved the way for the next generation of Bomber Boys, many of whom had read the adventures of Great War pilots while at school in the 20s and 30s.
Scottish Troops Marching to the Front 1915
This image came from a small collection taken by a soldier of the Army Service Corps in France in 1915 with a Kodak pocket camera. Most of the photographs show the vehicles in his unit but this one is captioned ‘Highland troops’. As such they are likely to be from a unit in the 51st (Highland) Division.
The men featured in the photograph are wearing the leather 1914 Pattern equipment; with the huge influx of volunteers in 1914 the army could not equip every soldier with the standard 1908 Pattern webbing so a leather set was produced instead; many units wore it in France well into the end of 1916; it was not popular with the troops as it did not balance the load well and gave soldier’s back-ache. I can remember many veterans I interviewed in the 1980s saying they would ditch it at the first opportunity for webbing.
The men in the photo also appear to be going into action as cotton bandoliers of .303 ammunition can be seen; normally only carried to the front line at the time of an impending attack. The 51st (Highland) Division took part in several major engagements on the Western Front in 1915, most notably at Festubert and Givenchy, before they moved down to the Somme in the summer of 1915 and took over the sector at La Boisselle from the French Army.
2nd Queens in the Snow: Somme 1917
This image comes from the same collection I featured when Great War Photos began a month ago; it was taken by an officer of the battalion, Ron Short, who served with the battalion in Belgium, France and Italy 1917-1919.
At a time of year when snow is imminent, this photograph of men of the 2nd Battalion Queen’s Regiment, part of 7th Division, doing bayonet practice in the snow of the old Somme battlefields is particularly poignant. While the Somme front had been abandoned and British troops moved forward towards the Hindenburg Line, units out of rest would use the old Somme area and carry out training here, even in the cold and snow of winter. The late winter and early spring of 1917 was especially cold and snow fell well into April.
While bayonets caused less than 1% of the casualties in the Great War, bayonet fighting was something that was very much part of the British Army’s training of the period. One manual stated:
“The officers will take all proper opportunities to inculcate in the mens’ minds a reliance on the bayonet; men of their bodily strength and even a coward may be their match in firing. But the bayonet in the hands of the valiant is irresistible.”
