Flanders 1914

The Flemish town of Ypres is in the west of Belgium in a district known as Westhoek. Prior to the outbreak of the Great War in August of 1914 it was a prosperous market town which had built its wealth on the wool trade during the middle ages.

Its geographical location bordering France and its close proximity to the Channel ports meant that over the years it had been fought over by successive European armies and was no stranger to war.

The German armies swept through Belgium in August 1914. By October the conflict had reached a stalemate with the trench lines spanning a distance of over 480 miles, extending from Neiuport on the Belgium coast through Northern France to the Swiss border.

The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had arrived in Belgium to rest in late October following weeks of intense action in August and September. They were situated around Ypres and came under intense attacks from the German army. The line was held at enormous cost to both forces and at times it was very close to being a disaster for the British.

The effect of this action was to create a salient, or a bump in the line, around the town. The Germans soldiers occupied the high ground on three sides to the north, east and south and the British held the low ground to the west, close to the town.

The British defended the town for the entire duration of the war.

They did so because of the town’s political significance to the British Government, being the last Belgian town to remain in allied hands. Occupation of the town also protected the BEF’s withdrawal route to the Channel ports in the face of a breakthrough by the Germans.

Both attacking and defending armies suffered great human losses in the defence of this small Belgian town. The British army lost close to a million soldiers throughout the war and a quarter of these, nearly 250,000, died during the continued defence of Ypres.

The town of Ypres is surrounded by over 150 cemeteries and memorials, ranging from the tiny cemetery at Belgium Battery corner to Tyne Cot the largest Commonwealth War Grave Commission’s cemetery in the world, with nearly 12,000 burials on the slopes leading to Passchendaele village.

The missing

The scale of human losses is difficult to comprehend but the tragedy is compounded by the enormous numbers of soldiers that have no known grave. This was as a result of battlefield conditions predominantly created by the intense use of high explosive shells and the movement of battle lines as the war progressed.

Nearly a million men were killed serving with the British army and its Dominions such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and India.

Of these, nearly 250,000 were killed in the fields surrounding the small Belgium town of Ypres during the four years of war. It is further estimated that as many as 90,000 have no known grave.

Even during the war it had been identified that arrangements needed to be made for the appropriate recognition of those soldiers that had no known grave together with the burials of those that were identified. A series of memorials to the missing were proposed.

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