Ypres in the First World War

Ypres, Ieper in Flemish, an old cloth town in western Belgium, was throughout the war the last sizeable town of free Belgium in Allied hands. From the autumn of 1914 it was ringed by a salient in the front, jutting out towards the Germans, and five great battles were fought over this scrap of ground, the last in 1918. The Germans never took the town, but their artillery turned it into a ruin. For the British, Ypres became the symbol of their whole war in the west.

A town on the road to the sea (1914)

Before the war Ypres had about 17,000 inhabitants and lived on the memory of its medieval splendour. Its monument was the Cloth Hall, built in the 13th century, one of the largest secular Gothic buildings. In the autumn of 1914 the town found itself in the path of the armies racing to the sea.

On 7 October German cavalry rode in. Officers occupied the town hall and took the municipal funds of 62,000 or 65,000 francs, and the next morning the troops rode off to the west. In the middle of the month the British arrived, and French territorial divisions took up positions beside them.

From 19 October to 22 November the First Battle of Ypres was fought. The Germans threw a new army into Flanders, made up largely of volunteers, to break through to the ports on the Channel. The British and French held the front, but the old regular British army bled to death outside the town. On 22 November German shells set the Cloth Hall on fire. The battle left behind a salient surrounded on three sides by the Germans, whose artillery on the surrounding ridges could shell almost every point in it.

The Ypres salient (1915–1916)

The inhabitants held on for a long time in the town, into which thousands of refugees had poured at the start of the war. As the shelling grew heavier, those who could left, first for Poperinge, Kortrijk or Ostend, while the rest sheltered in cellars and in shelters in the ramparts. According to the historian Pieter Trogh, eight months of shelling killed hundreds of civilians, and during the Second Battle of Ypres the last inhabitants were evacuated. By May 1915 the town belonged to the army alone, and its people were scattered across Belgium, France and Britain.

From 20 April 1915 a German 42 cm mortar shelled Ypres, and on 22 April, on the northern edge of the salient, the Germans released a cloud of chlorine. It was the first gas attack on the Western Front meant to kill. In the Second Battle of Ypres, which lasted until 25 May, the Germans reduced the salient by several kilometres and took heights from which they could see almost all of it, but they did not take the town. In those weeks the Canadian doctor John McCrae wrote the poem “In Flanders Fields” near Ypres.

The ruins shook even those who had already seen other wrecked towns. The American writer Edith Wharton (PL), who got there in 1915, wrote that there was not a soul in the streets and that she had never seen a town like it. British soldiers mangled the name into “Wipers” and published a trench newspaper, “The Wipers Times”.

For almost three years the salient was held by the British Second Army of Herbert Plumer. There were no great offensives, but the losses never stopped. The fighting was for single rises and mine craters: for Hill 60 south of the town, under which British sappers blew mines in April 1915, or for Mount Sorrel, taken by the Germans in June 1916 and retaken by the Canadians.

Passchendaele and the last German attack (1917–1918)

In 1917 the British set out to break out of the salient. On 7 June 19 mines went up under the German trenches on the Messines Ridge south of the town, and the Second Army took the ridge in a single day. On 31 July Douglas Haig opened the Third Battle of Ypres. The attack on the hills east of the town bogged down in rain and mud, and when on 6 November the Canadians took Passchendaele, the front had moved only a few kilometres. Each side lost roughly a quarter of a million men in the battle.

In the spring of 1918 these gains were lost within days. During the German offensive on the Lys, on the night of 15–16 April Plumer gave up the Passchendaele Ridge without a fight and fell back to a line just outside the town, and on 25 April the Germans took Mount Kemmel. Yet they did not take Ypres, and the shortened salient survived. On 28 September the Belgians and British under King Albert I attacked from the town and in the Fifth Battle of Ypres retook in two days all the surrounding hills that had been fought over since 1914.

Ruin and rebuilding

The war brought the complete destruction of Ypres. According to accounts from the end of 1918, a rider could look over the rubble to the far side of the town, and the Cloth Hall lay in ruins. In January 1919 Winston Churchill declared at a session of the Imperial War Graves Commission that the shattered Ypres was a symbol of the suffering of the British Empire, and he wanted to leave its centre in ruins as hallowed ground. He said there was no more sacred place in the world for the British. The Belgian government at first backed the idea, but the inhabitants and the burgomaster René Colaert wanted to rebuild their homes as quickly as possible.

They had their way. From the spring of 1919 returning residents lived in wooden huts on the Minneplein field below the ramparts, while the town was rebuilt from old plans and photographs in its pre-war style, with German reparations and donations from all over the world. Most of the houses went up in the 1920s, but the rebuilding of the Cloth Hall was completed only in 1967.