It's about much more than poppies.

Fred, my granddad, died in the First World War. He was 32. He died of war wounds on January 2^nd 1918 which was the day after his son's, my father's, 3^rd birthday. So when I went to Bruges last week it seemed the perfect opportunity to see for myself the scenes of some of the battles I'd heard about, Passchendaele, Hill 60, the Messine ridge, and Ypres itself where my granddad was killed.



  grenades and  shells at a farm gate



I thought I knew a little bit about the war but I was still shocked. Firstly because, even 100 years later, Belgian farmers are still digging up weapons and ammunition. They call it “The Iron Harvest” and every day they leave these unexploded bombs and grenades by the side of the road to be collected by the army. The day we were there we heard 3 loud explosions as the latest crop were safely detonated.







Even more surprising to me was the small area being fought over on this part of the Westen Front. The Ypres Salient was a bulge in the front line where British, Irish, Australian, Canadian and South African soldiers fought to prevent the Central Powers (Germany/Austria-Hungary) getting access to the ports of Calais and Boulogne just across the border in France. In this bulge, this piece of land smaller than Kent, every day for 4 years hundreds of men died, and on bad days thousands of men died. They were shot, blown to bits by artillery shells and tens of thousands drowned in the mud and the shell craters and just vanished. So many bodies are simply missing that two memorials to them, at Tyne Cot and the Menin Gate, record the names of, respectively, 34,888 and 54,896 men who have no known grave.

Most harrowing of all, even on a sunny August day, are the cemeteries themselves, 160 of them, where the other 130,000+ Commonwealth dead are buried in identified graves. Some are small, others like this one at Hooge Crater have almost 6,000 simple headstones recording the name, age and unit of each man. You would need a heart of stone to be unaffected by death on such a scale; every man someone’s son, brother, husband, father, grandfather.

Hooge Crater cemetery

I am not qualified to comment on the decisions that led to this slaughter; and anyway it no longer matters. Sufficient to say that there was no real victory, just an armistice as, with around 9,000,000 (yes, nine million) soldiers dead, the combatant nations fought each other to a standstill and signed a peace treaty which almost guaranteed another World War just 21 years later.

The final place I visited was a relatively new memorial dedicated to all the soldiers from the island of Ireland who died in the Ypres Salient. It is a very simple and moving place, with views across the fields to the city of Ypres and the battlefields, the only markers being stone slabs engraved with words and poems written by the soldiers themselves.



Memorial to Canadian Soldiers

“So the curtain fell over that tortured country of unmarked graves and unburied fragments of men. Murder and massacre. The innocent slaughtered for the guilty, the poor man for the sake of the creed of the already rich.
The man of no authority made the victim of the man who had gathered importance and wished to keep it”

David Starret. 9^th Royal Irish Rifles

Obviously I never knew my granddad. More importantly my dad never knew his own father and, although he was a good and kind man and I loved him dearly, I am sure that this left its mark and influenced his own relationships throughout his life. Multiply that 9 million times and, even after almost a hundred years, it’s still about much more than poppies.