Veterans Day honors a peace paid by soldiers in Ypres – Press Enterprise

Next week, Tuesday the 11th of November, marks a day of great significance to western civilization. This is Armistice Day, the day when the guns fell silent and World War I came to an end.

Known today in the United States as Veterans Day and in Britain as Remembrance Day, Nov. 11 is a solemn hour. Although today we know that the loss of life in World War II would be even greater, at the time, the sheer carnage of World War I was unlike anything Europe had ever seen.

One of the most horrible sites in that conflict was around the city of Ypres, the center of the Belgian Province of Flanders. In the war, the territory was the center of an area known as the Ypres Salient, or a large bulge in the Allied lines surrounded on three sides by the Imperial German Army, and the politics of the war made it significant.

The war had begun with the German invasion of Belgium, whose neutrality was a pillar of international politics. But the eastern defenses of France were sufficiently strong that the German high command thought it was better to violate Belgian neutrality than face the opposition in the east. The German advance was sufficiently ferocious that the Allies were caught off guard. By the autumn of 1914, Ypres was the only Belgian province which Germany did not hold, and it was determined to get it. Overcoming Ypres would also give the Germans control of the channel ports which supplied the Allied armies.

From the French and British perspective, Ypres must not fall. The justification the countries used to rally the population to support the war was the violation of “gallant little Belgium” and lurid propaganda posters showed German troops doing beastly things to innocent women and children. The Allies sought to make Ypres a sacred conflict, a battlefield of good versus evil. One British officer after the war wrote:

“There is not a single half-acre in Ypres that is not sacred. There is not a single stone which has not sheltered scores of loyal young hearts, whose one impulse and desire was to fight and, if need be, to die for England. Their blood has drenched its cloisters and its cellars, but if never a drop had been spilt, if never a life had been lost in defense of Ypres still would Ypres have been hallowed, if only for the hopes and the courage it has inspired and the scenes of valour and sacrifice it has witnessed.”

Ypres is properly pronounced “yee-prah,” although the British infantry just called it “Wipers.”  Between 1914 and 1918 it was the site of five battles, which amounted to one long ongoing battle.

In the first battle, the Allies held the line against the German advance, and resolved to fight in trenches with all the horrors that involved. In the second battle, the German forces first deployed poison chlorine gas. In the third major battle, known as Passchendaele, Canadians and British forces tried to force their way around German lines, which resulted in a bloodbath. Almost 240,000 Allied troops perished and 230,000 Germans fell. The situation was made infinitely worse by unrelenting rains which flooded trenches, supply lines and drowned men and animals. By the fourth battle, the German spring offensive forced the Allies back to the sea and endangered the whole line. The fifth and final encounter was the Allied drive to remove the Germans from Flanders, as the German lines began to collapse in 1918. It was in this final push that the U.S. Army fought.

Today, much of Ypres has been meticulously rebuilt, since most of the city was leveled. But there is one spot which holds great interest. On the western part of the city there was an ancient gate. Over its ruins, a huge memorial was raised after the war, known as the Menin Gate. It was through this spot that many of the allies marched never to return. But this is not a memorial simply to the fallen, of which there are a great many in the city. The Menin Gate honors the 90,000 men whose bodies were never recovered or identified, and so have no other tombstone but this. But the interior walls of the gate — which is more like a long, triumphal arch — hold over 54,000 names. The rest are memorialized elsewhere.

The names on the gate are a cross section of British and Commonwealth culture. There are members of Parliament, rugby and cricket players, doctors and craftsmen, writers and poets, winners of the Victoria Cross and a great many ordinary people. One poignant name is the Canadian Sgt. Harry Band, who is recorded as having been crucified alive by laughing German soldiers on a barn door. At the peace congress at Versailles, the German government denied this ever occurred. The Christian symbol of supreme martyrdom is not hard to discern.

At one end of the memorial are the words, “Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, (To the greater glory of God) – Here are recorded names of officers and men who fell in Ypres Salient, but to whom the fortune of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death.” One estimate is that 30,000 more men are believed to have died here whose names are unknown.

The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig praised the memorial saying that it was “more impressive than any triumphal arch or monument to victory that I have ever seen.” The English war poet Siegfreid Sassoon said that the dead of the Ypres Salient should “deride this sepulchre of crime.” Worth looking up on Wikipedia is the 1927 painting by Australian Will Longstaff, “The Menin Gate at Midnight,” which depicts a ghostly army marching across the fields in front of the gate. Longstaff recounted that he had seen a vision of some kind of these lost soldiers, and made the painting as a result.

Today the veterans of that war are all gone, and many of the monarchies of kings and emperors who sent them to their doom have been overthrown. But time cannot erase the notes of sadness they left behind. Perhaps, gentle reader, one might offer a prayer for these lost soldiers on Nov. 11.

Gregory Elder, a Redlands resident, is a professor emeritus of history and humanities at Moreno Valley College and a Roman Catholic priest. Write to him at Professing Faith, P.O. Box 8102, Redlands, CA 92375-1302, email him at gnyssa@verizon.net or follow him on Twitter @Fatherelder.