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.
8th Royal Sussex Regiment Pioneers: Belgium 1917
The 8th Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment was a Pioneer battalion raised in Sussex in 1914. While many Pioneer units were raised in the Midlands and North of England where the male population was often used to hard physical labour and made excellent army Pioneers, those that lived and worked in Britain’s rural communities were found just as suitable. The men who joined this battalion in September 1914 were largely drawn from the rural towns and villages of West Sussex and were older than the average recruit; men in their late 20s and into their 30s. They trained at Colchester and then went to France in July 1915 as Pioneers to the 18th (Eastern) Division.
This photograph was taken in Belgium in the autumn of 1917; it is one of a number I have all with the same farm buildings in the background which were typical of the sort of structures found in the area around Poperinghe. The 8th Royal Sussex spent some time here in 1917 during the Third Battle of Ypres and it appears they invited a local photographer to take pictures of the whole battalion platoon by platoon, judging by the different examples I have. Unfortunately these images were not named, so while we know when and where the photo was taken, and what unit it was, we have no idea who these men were: a frustratingly common problem with Great War images.
Ypres: The Early Pilgrims 1922
When the early pilgrims to the Ypres battlefields in Flanders began to arrive from 1919, with a war shattered town and landscape finding accommodation for them was something of a problem; many stayed in nearby Bruges, Ghent or Ostend and motored down.
A testimony to the huge influx of visitors is shown in this image which is of the Hotel Excelsior in Ypres from around 1922. The ruined city was in its early stages of being rebuilt and this became one of the first substantial temporary buildings constructed, close to the railway station.
Battlefield pilgrims could stay here in basic rooms and as can be seen from the front of the hotel, it became a hive of activity for taxis and other touring vehicles who from 1920 onwards began to offer guided tours of the battlefields. Another reminder that the modern battlefield tour industry is far from new.
Flanders: The Devastated Ground 1921
When the civilian population returned after the Great War the villages, towns and landscapes they had known were reduced to rubble or a mass of shell holes. In the immediate post-war period no-one lived in any of the villages around Ypres; during the day the people returned to their communities to salvage and begin the rebuilding process and at night they slept in Ypres. One writer described the ‘ghostly silence’ on the battlefields after dark, in stark contrast to the war years.
This image from 1921 shows an old railway sleeper track running through what had been Chateau Wood, close to the hamlet of Hooge on the Menin Road. The overgrown by devastated nature of the ground is obvious, and the destritus of war not far away; several shells are visibile, all minus their copper driving bands and brass fuses – quite likely removed by civilians like those in the photo trying to make a small living from the scrap.
In most battlefield areas the serious rebuilding did not begin until 1922/23, which meant that the people in this photograph lived a very primitive existence, often in old wooden army huts, for several years until their shattered communities rose from the ashes.
Chinese Labour Corps 1919
The Chinese Labour Corps were formed in 1916; by this stage of the war the British were running low on manpower to provide labour work behind the lines – everything from building to unloading/loading stores and equipment. Manpower was found in every corner of the British Empire but it was still not enough, so following the example of the French, the British government recruited men direct from China under a form of contract to provide the labour required. More than 100,000 served in the Chinese Labour Corps, the first men setting sail from China in January 1917. Before the Armistice they only served off the battlefield, with a handful of casualties caused by shell fire. They suffered badly with Influenza in 1918/19 but were kept in France and Flanders to help clear up the battlefields once the war was over. The last men of the Corps returned to China in 1920, although some took their discharge in Europe and descendants still live close to the some of the old battlefields. Nearly 2,000 men of the Chinese Labour Corps died and are buried in WW1 Cemeteries.
I bought this image along with several others at a street market in Kemmel, Belgium, back in the early 1990s. They were in a box of old postcards found in a Belgian house. This image shows a group of NCOs sitting in front, with some workers from the Corps behind. It gives a good idea of the uniforms and badges worn by the Corps, and the setting is a ruined building in Flanders where this team is helping to clear the battlefield of munitions and the detritus of war, along with recovering the dead for burial in the cemeteries.
When I was buying the postcards an elderly Belgian gentleman tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to the images. “Chinese.”, he said, “Very dangerous!” They certainly look a very tough group!
Welcome to Great War Photos by Paul Reed
Welcome to Great War Photos, a new Blog/Website by Paul Reed. The site opens in January 2012 in the countdown to the Great War Centenary in 2014 and I will be using it to showcase some of the thousands of Great War images I have collected over more than 30 years. For many of them it will be the first time they have been published.
The site will be regularly publicised via my Twitter feed and you can also subscribe to it. Over the next couple of years at least one new photo will be added each month, and then between 2014 and 2018 the site will be much more active.
To read more about Paul Reed click on the About page.
