I've got that melancholy feeling this morning, it could be that it’s the beginning of September or that school routine has begun in earnest. Or that I’m feeling the come down after my trip World War 1 study trip to Belgium. As the enormity of the human cost, the loss and the repercussions that came from the First World War, settles in.
For me growing up World War 1 was not part of my physic. I recall hearing the odd story of a great Uncle who had returned but had lost his leg. In church each year during remembrance Sunday an elderly gentleman would play the last post on a bugle while another elderly gentleman would walk up the aisle carrying a wreath of poppies and lay them at the front. A minutes silence was observed, he’d salute, turned and I could see his medals pinned to his chest and a look of determined sadness on his face.
In school what was taught as I recall were the reasons behind the war and who fought in it but it was not an in depth history.
Day one; we flew in to Charleroi and traveled by coach towards the town of Leper. Being from Donegal you notice the landscape first, so different to ours, mostly very flat and on a grey drizzly day I tried to imagine how it must have felt for our young men coming to this alien landscape, absent of glens, hills and mountains.
A quick bag drop and warm drink and the group set out to explore our host town for the nest few days.
Ypres French pronunciation, Dutch: Ieper is a Belgian town located in the Flemish province of West Flanders. Though Ieper is the Dutch and only official name, the city's French name Ypres is most commonly used in English due to its role in World War I when only French was in official use in Belgian documents, including on maps.
In WW 1 Ypres occupied a strategic position during World War I because it stood in the path of Germany's planned sweep across the rest of Belgium and into France from the north.
Following this we stopped in Saint George’s Anglican Church, built in 1928-1929 following the plans of London architect Sir Reginald Blomfield. This ‘Memorial church' holds many reminders of the First World War. There is barely a space on the wall that does not contain a brass memorial plaque. On every chair are hand stitched cushions with every regiment’s colors and emblem and from the walls hang the flags of each. Combined with the stained glass memorials everything was donated by British associations, regiments or individuals.
We stopped by the stunning Celtic cross of the Munster memorial.
This memorial is dedicated to the men from Munster in Ireland who died in the Great War of 1914-1918.The inscription on the memorial reads:“IN MEMORY OF THOSE MEN OF MUNSTER WHO DIED FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM “. A TRIBUTE ERECTED BY THE PEOPLE OF THE PROVINCE AND CORK ITS CAPITAL CITY”
Next we visited the Ieper Fury Memorial or The Ypres War Victims Monument is dedicated to 155 named civilian and military victims from Ypres who died as a result of the 1914-1918 war. There are also 21 names on two plaques dedicated to the later victims who died during the Second World War when Ypres was occupied by German Forces from 1940-1945. The monument is known by the local people as “The Ieper Fury”. This name comes from the fact that there was a riot on the day of the unveiling involving the State Police and members of the Flemish Veterans Association, a Flemish Nationalist pressure group.
We decided to return to our hotel, get dried off. And I was conscious that this was a luxury the men of the WW1 did not have and had to preserver no matter what the conditions were.
During dinner in the hotels cellar dinning room the owner told us how the like many places had tunnels linking up and how the resistance used them for smuggling out soldiers.
After dinner it was a dash to the Memorial service at Menin Gate. Our guide Wendy had advised us to be there early and come every night as each night was different.
The Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing is one of four British and Commonwealth memorials to the missing in the battlefield area of the Ypres Salient in Belgian Flanders. The memorial bears the names of 54,389 officers and men from United Kingdom and Commonwealth Forces (except New Zealand and Newfoundland) who fell in the Ypres Salient before 16th August 1917 and who have no known grave.
Standing among the crowds under its arches, my eyes scan down the lists of names. Names that read familiar to me and names that are not but there is row upon row of men’s names. Irish, British, Australian, Sheikh,Punjabi, Canadian an on and on. In silence the last Post is sounded and the enormity of this memorial sinks in. These are the men who didn't have a grave, the missing.
Every evening at 8 o'clock the Last Post is played at the MeninGate Memorial. This was started in 1927 and it has been played almost every night since except for a period in the Second World War when Ypres was occupied by German Forces it was then played in an army base in England.
Day two began early, grey and with steady rain as we boarded our coach and drove off through tree lined avenues, maize fields of unripe corn, stubble barley fields, drills filled with potatoes all on flat land. Red bricked homes with terracotta tiled roofs, shuttered windows and pastures of Belgium blue cattle. Trees, young not old like the silent giants like in Ireland the beginning of the landscape telling its story of the wars.
Our first stop was The Ulster Memorial Tower .It is a Somme battlefield memorial to the men of the 36th (Ulster) Division. It commemorates the heavy losses suffered by 36th Division on 1st July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. A warm welcome was given by Phoebe and Teddy who provide much need refreshments and a tour of the museum.
The Ulster Memorial Tower was one of the first official memorials to be put up on the Western Front. It is a replica of the well-known tower in Ulster, Northern Ireland, called Helen's Tower. Helen's Tower is located on the Dufferin and Ava Estate at Clandeboye, County Down. Helen's Tower was built by Lord Dufferin in 1867. He dedicated it to his mother, Baroness Dufferin, whose name was Helen. She was the grand-daughter of the Irish dramatist, poet and Member of Parliament Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816).
Helen's Tower was located in the center of the training camp where the volunteer Ulster-men of the 36th Division began their training following the formation of this new division from late August 1914. Thousands of men from Ulster answered Lord Kitchener's call for volunteers at the outbreak of war in August 1914. Many of them were members of the Protestant organisation called the Ulster Volunteer Force. The three regiments in the 36th Division were:
the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers
the Royal Irish Fusiliers
the Royal Irish Rifles
In July 1915 36th (Ulster) Division left Northern Ireland for England, spending three months training in Sussex before departing for France in the first Week of October 1915. A view of Helen's Tower would have been one of the last things they would have seen as they left the training camp in July 1915. Many hundreds of them would never return.
The tower over looks Thiepval woods where soldiers of 36th Division left the British Front Line at the eastern end of Thiepval Wood crossed No Man's Land and broke through the badly damaged German Front Line trench. They also captured the difficult obstacle of the large German stronghold at the Schwaben Redoubt just beyond the German Front Line.
A little way up from the tower is a small cemetery which I decided to visit as I knew that Cannon David Crooks from All Saints, Newtownc-ham, his uncle was laid to rest there. Walking by the fields at the end of the harvest I learn that each time farmers prepare the fields all kinds of things turn up from remains to metals and personal artifacts which are left in little heaps along the road where the authorities come along and collect them.
We left the quiet countryside and arrive at the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing. No photographs really grasp the enormity of this monument and we are dwarfed as we make our way to it. This memorial one holds special reverence to me and others in the group as we begin the search for the names of our family members.
The Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme battlefields bears the names of 72,194 officers and men of the United Kingdom and South African forces.
The Thiepval memorial serves as an Anglo-French Battle Memorial. It was designed as an arch representing the alliance of Britain and France in the Somme 1916 offensive against the German defensive Front.
These men died in the Somme battle sector before 20thMarch 1918 and have no known grave. The date of 20thMarch was the day before the German Army launched a large-scale offensive, codenamed “Operation Michael”, against the British Army Front in the sector of the Somme. Over 90 percent of those commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial died in the 1916 Battles of the Somme between July and November 1916.
The 72,194 names of the men missing in action on the battlefield of the Somme are inscribed on 64 huge stone panels, which form each of the four faces of a total of 16 piers for the building. The Thiepval memorial serves as an Anglo-French Battle Memorial. It was designed as an arch representing the alliance of Britain and France in the Somme 1916 offensive against the German defensive Front.
Here, I find my kin, Andrew Dunn. Private. Son of Robert and Margret Dunn of Gladstone, Manitoba, Canada, born Castleton, St Johnston, lived at Binion. Enlisted St Johnston, 14682. 11th Battalion, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. Killed. Battle of the Somme. 1st July 1916 age 26.
I draw breath, to see his name carved in stone no words can describe the emotions; silently I offer a prayer for the loss of his life along with so many young men. He’s there among so many local men, this information I had researched before leaving home in Paddy Harte’s book “County Donegal, Book of Honour, The Great War 1914-1918”.
There are no words to really explain the emotions that come from deeply recognising their deaths, the vastness of horror that went with these massacres.
Deep in thought we leave Thiepval Memorial to the Missing and on board the bus conversations flow on what we’ve seen so far. I could list the many words and adjectives as we try to make sense of it, understand our part in it as a country and the after effects.
We arrive at a shady area; tall scotch pines stand like night watchmen guarding the entrance to Newfoundland Memorial Park. Immediately your eyes are drawn to the trenches as you enter. I glimpsed and thought briefly were they staged trenches like you get sometimes when you visit historical site.
We are greeted warmly by a young Canadian guide, a student he explains doing a work placemen, a bit like a summer job.
Immediately he explains that we are on an untouched original battle site, the trenches are just grass covered now but otherwise remain the same as they were during the war.
As he leads us down along the green grassy covered trenches, it’s hard to imaging standing up to your knees in mud, trying to keep your head down and climb over the muddy sides to meet your foe in the tangled web of barbed wire the prongs that held the wire still remain curled like pigs tails.
Our guide explains how one of the most important jobs in the trenches was that of a runner. He carried the messages along the trenches and no matter who even the surgeons got out of his way, when he came charging through. He’d have to wear a white arm band, funny I thought the enemy would be able to pick him out but we are told the reason was so that his own men didn’t think he was a deserter running away and shot him. A runner’s life span was 3 – 4 days.
We can to a stand still by a lone dead stump of a young tree, just a couple of twigs of it left This was the only tree left in the area during the war and was used as a marking spot for advancement by the solider the guide told us.
As I scanned around the uneven pock marked green land that stretched out around us, I heard the words that I think will stay with me for always.
“This site is a burial ground, no bodies were recovered from here .They were all left were they fell”.
I thought of all those thousands of young men, so far away from home – their mums and dad’s not knowing this was their final resting place. A foreign landscape, strangers and friends, mud and gore, tears stung my eyes and a lump formed in my throat, for they were all still here.
We walked around the museum in relative silence after then boarded the coach after and onwards to Vimy Ridge. The Vimy Ridge national historic site of Canada is a tribute to all the Canadians who fought in the First World War, altogether more than 66,000 Canadian service personnel died in World War 1.
The monument is pale from the limestone used and huge, to the front carved from a single 30 tonne block is the sorrowing figure of a woman. She represents Canada mourning her dead and below her is a tomb draped in laurel branches and bearing a helmet and sword.
Around the site are pine trees, said to represent each solider. I thought it might be nice to go sit among them in quiet reflection until I notice the red warning sign. “Do Not Enter Unexploded mines “.
Next we made our way through grounds scarred with shell holes and mine craters to the under ground trenches.
The young Canadian guide, female this time tells us as we walked through the above trenches how concrete now replaces the wooden slates that would have lined the floors. We stop and peek through gun holes in rusted rectangle metal plates where soldiers came practically face to face with the young men in enemy trenches.
They were mere feet apart, separated by a gaping crater. Down steep descending staircase next that led us into the underground trenches.
They feeling a few degrees cooler than above, and I could not help but think these were not such a bad to have been in.
Till I saw the water pumps, that was continuously on. They didn’t have water pumps back then did they? That’s how some men died, drowned in the trenches and their captains got punished for the men’s trench foot or rot.
The walls are calk and flint and our guide explained how coal miners from Wales and Newcastle came to do the mining. I feel shocked this war I thought was like a well oiled machine. Nothing was un-thought of.
We saw how the electricity and communication lines ran along the walls but could not touch them for fear that the echoes would give their positions away to the enemy.
The sleeping areas were minimal, they weren’t build for longevity, just basic napping between shelling and shooting.
We talked about the Christmas truce, being so close to each other hearing prayers, tears and laughter no wonder they would reach out across no mans land in that seasonal time. But how do you go back into your warren and then pull the trigger and take the life of a young man you sang with, exchanged a gift or played a game of football. Mankind is full of mystery. ..
To be continued 
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