Ypres

Article

For anyone else who has an interst in WWI history or considering a trip to Belgium, I found this very interesting article about Ypres:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/23/international/europe/23BELG.html

(There is a nice color photo at the top of the article)

The New York Times November 23, 2003
A Battlefield in Belgium Lifts a Curtain on the Past
By ELAINE SCIOLINO

YPRES, Belgium, Nov. 17 — The muddy trenches of death of northern Europe have long been buried in pastures and farm fields, the memory of the slaughter of World War I kept alive only in black-and-white photographs and silent film.

Yet in a small potato field on a raw and windy plain in Belgium, the past has suddenly reappeared. A small team of archaeologists has unveiled a once huge network of narrow dark trenches, providing grim testimony to the way millions of terrified youths struggled to hold on to life.

The trenches, fashioned from wood and iron, have also yielded the partial remains and belongings of seven soldiers, including a brass regimental badge and uniform fragments that are almost certain to identify one of them as a 21-year-old British lance corporal killed in the Battle of Passendale in 1917.

For many in the ancient Flanders town of Ypres, the trenches to the north are obstacles to progress, a sentimental barrier to building a four-lane, 4.5-mile elevated highway extension that will ease summer traffic to the sea. For the Belgian archaeologists and British historians engaged in a race against time, though, they are a window into the history of one of the most feared battlefields of World War I.

These trenches are also painful reminders. They recall the extensive use of chemical weapons in the war — for the first time in history — at a time of fierce debate about similar threats today.

They also underscore the devastating divisions of Europe's past as well, as the Continent embraces an ambitious experiment with unity.

Only an hour's drive away is the European Union headquarters in Brussels, with 30,000 bureaucrats, 80,000 pages of rules, a draft constitution and a plan to expand to 25 countries from 15 next year.

"When I saw the actual trenches with their wooden duckboards intact I felt the hairs rising on the back of my neck," said Nigel Steel, the chief of research at the Imperial War Museum in London, who has written a book on the battle. "If the Belgians could feel that this is an important part of their own history or world history, I would be overjoyed."

During the war, Ypres was held at tremendous cost as the last corner of Belgium in Allied hands. Because the fighting was so intense and the battle lines essentially did not move, the area remains a huge cemetery. Estimates of the total casualties vary, but the Encyclopedia Britannica places the number of Allied and German casualties in the three Ypres battles at 850,000.

Faced with mounting opposition to the highway, the Belgian authorities earmarked $214,000 last year and authorized the Institute for Archaeological Heritage in Flanders to dig. Using wartime aerial photographs and trench maps and the advice of British experts, Belgian archaeologists chose nine excavation sites.

At Crossroads, the current site, the wooden frames and corrugated iron sheeting that shored up walls of ocher-and-gray clay remain well preserved. The clay is so wet and malleable that it perpetually yields new discoveries, like an inchlong piece of what was probably part of a human leg that had lain unnoticed on the ground. Earlier this month, the partial remains of a soldier and a pair of leather boots were uncovered.

The site is important because this is the first effort in Belgium that has married the fine detail of British World War I archival history to modern archaeological techniques. Other World War I sites, like the trenches at Vimy Ridge in France, have been reconstructed and preserved with concrete — and a bit of imagination.

In an unheated, unlighted metal shed, Marc Dewilde, chief archaeologist at the institute, opened a box and carefully unwrapped battlefield artifacts protected in tissue paper.

He needed the help of Peter Barton, a self-trained British historian who works as an unpaid adviser to a battlefield heritage group in the British Parliament, to identify some of the artifacts: an ink bottle with bits of black ink plugged with a champagne cork, a cream-colored ceramic jar that once contained preserved meat, a blue enameled water canteen on a leather strap, a bottle engraved with the name "Flora Hotel" in London (which still exists).

"We have discovered much more than we could have ever imagined," said Mr. Dewilde, whose specialty is the Middle Ages. "To learn so much about daily life in the trenches, how soldiers ate, slept, went to the toilet, and to educate people about it has been enlightening for me. We are digging with the same precision we'd use to do a medieval castle."

The site has been touched by serendipity. In a private purchase, Mr. Barton bought the personal effects of the infantry lieutenant who designed the first set of trenches in 1915. Lt. Robin Skeggs's hand drawing, including a telltale bend and the names of the nearby farms, perfectly matches a 1917 aerial photograph and the bend in the trench itself.

Among the lieutenant's belongings is a handwritten list of items he asked his father to send him, including two tins of foot ointment, peppermint lozenges, shortbread biscuits and a pair of boot laces.

By contrast, identifying the human remains — five Britons discovered at this site, and a Briton and a French soldier at another — is difficult, in part because soldiers' identification tags were made from compressed paper and have rotted away.

The dig is to be finished in another year, when a final report will be presented to the Belgian and regional Flanders governments. The archaeologists have filled in and covered over High Command Redoubt, the site of German trenches on a nearby ridge, and turned the land back to the farmer who owns it.

If the Crossroads site were left in its current state, wind, water and frost would erode the wooden beams and flood the trenches, which had to be shallow (no more than three feet deep), because of the high water table. German trenches, dug on a nearby ridge, were much deeper and built as more permanent structures.

Highway supporters call the sudden concern about preservation hypocritical. Ivan Vanherpe, founder of the local pro-highway group, said a major industrial project in the area had gone forward in recent years even though the remains of 140 soldiers were unearthed.

"Please put everything into perspective," he said. "The traffic is dangerous for our children, for the old people. This is the only possible route for the highway."

So for the moment, Crossroads has become a place of pilgrimage for curious souls eager to witness something authentic in an era when many war memorials are little more than names chiseled in concrete.

"It would be wonderful to at least research and record all this," said Lyn Stanners, a 61-year-old retiree who had come from England to visit. "But how many miles and miles of trenches are there? You can't save them all."

Indeed, Philippe Descamps, whose grandfather bought the farm where Crossroads sits, is being paid $900 for the loss of one year's crop on the 1.2-acre parcel where the dig is being done. He said he expected to plant potatoes again next year.