Ypres 2006

This outing saw the first trip of the newly expanded (no jokes about our girth please) NMBS as a quintet. We headed for Ypres by Eurostar to Lille, picked up our vehicle for the journey and made base camp at the village of Meteren, on the outskirts of Bailleul. 

It was a beautiful location and a superb converted barn/farmhouse. I'd heartily recommend staying there if there are a few of you who fancy a trip. It's a big place, so maybe not suited to a couple. You can see the gite by clicking here.

The name of Ypres is synonymous with struggle, suffering and loss. Along with the Somme, the battles around Ypres are amongst the most infamous in the history of the British army. There were five major conflicts around the town, spanning the whole four years of the war. The Ypres Salient became a focal point for Allied tenacity and German determination.

We spent a week criss crossing the area of the Salient and beyond into the German lines. The Salient was named after the bulge it formed into the otherwise quite regular trench lines in the area.

The British stood in the way of the German attempts to get to the Channel ports, taking and holding Ypres in 1914 and clung on to it for the duration of the war along with the French, Belgian, Australian, Canadian et al allied armies.

We were just over the Belgian border and made the daily drive through the old border markets, stopping occasionally for extremely competitively priced alcohol and tobacco. Some of it makes you wonder how they make a living. They were practically giving the stuff away. After last years trip and the christening of our weird wooden hut as The Ponderosa, hilarity ensued when we saw a restaurant called Berg-en-Dal (the village containing our gaff) with a crazy golf course next door called The Ponderosa! Well, after I'd stopped gazing in wonder like a City fan seeing the European Cup the sheer coincidence hit home. Berg-en-Dal is a rather salubrious, although very small suburb of Nijmegen. Why a restaurant chose that name is beyond me.

Ypres itself is a beautiful town nowadays. It was proposed that it be left as a dead village as some in Verdun had as a lasting memorial to the dead. This was quickly reversed however, and the rebuilding began. The town was utterly devastated after the almost daily shelling by the Germans. Few walls, never mind building remain erect. The biggest project was the rebuilding of the Cloth Hall. This iconic building was recreated between 1933 and 1967 and once again dominates the surrounding countryside.

If you're ever passing by, even if you have no interest in the military aspect of the town, I'd strongly suggest a trip into Ypres (or Ieper as it is known today). There are many restaurants, bars, cafes and quirky independent shops around the compact town centre. A stroll around the old fortified walls makes for a lovely end to an evening, and seems to be the done thing judging by the numbers of people you encounter doing likewise. To read more on this delightful, and history laden town, click here. I would however recommend you stay for the Last Post Ceremony held every evening at the Menin Gate. You can't fail to be moved.

Over the days we spent there names of towns and villages that shouldn't be known to the wider world sprung up with alarming frequency. Some are only well known to the more ardent historian, but other such as Passchendaele have transcended into common knowledge. The villages have quite tongue twisting names, and the Tommies over from Grays, Nelson, Barry and Dudley struggled with Ploegsteert, Wijtschate, Dikkebus and Ypres and so they became Plug Street, White Sheet, Dickie Bush and Wipers respectively.

The towns behind the lines became sanctuaries for the men on their all-to-brief stints away from the front. Ale houses and ladies of questionable virtue made hay while the bombs fell, except in one corner of one town where a man of god decided to offer an alternative to the debauchery. In 1915 in the town of Poperinghe (or Pop to the Tommies) a Mister Neville Talbot and the Reverend 'Tubby' Clayton set up an establishment called Talbot House that offered spiritual enlightenment, tea and a good hymn to sing. It was named after Gilbert Taylor who was Neville's brother and had been killed at the fighting around Hooge earlier in 1915. The Talbot brothers were the sons of the then Bishop of Winchester. This institution went on to become the internationally renowned TOC-H. Call me old fashioned, but the birds and booze would have won for me.

The countryside is now unspectacular until you notice the plethora of signs pointing to cemeteries with the young men unfortunate enough to be born in the 1880s and 1890s buried in their thousands. Some are small, some are huge, but they all tell the sorry tale of war on a truly industrial scale. The war to end all wars sadly didn't live up to its name, and the initial rush to the war that would be "over by Christmas" soon became a dreadful slog. Nowhere exemplifies this more than Ypres. Next year we would visit the battles around the Somme and all the horrors that contained, but Ypres is much more compact and was such a cauldron of fire and death that its etched into the conscience of Europe.

To see the pictures of our trip, please click here. They're not all doom laden I promise...