The Irish Farm Military Cemetery

Dear Chris,

(I´m starting a new thread on this topic)

We visited several military cemeteries with Irish connections, as we did Irish studies.  I´m afraid I cannot remember exactly which ones we visited, but we most probably did visit the Irish Farm military cemetery. As our guide we had Pieter Schielen. (Hope I got his name right)

At the bookshop of the In Flanders Field Museum, a friend and myself had bought a collection of poetry written by Frederick Ledgwick and it was shocking to find his very name on one of the gravestone in one of the cemeteries. 

We also visited Essex Farm, Dr John McCrae´s dressing station, and saw the stone with the "In Flanders Field" poem on a plaque of bronze. Before we left Ieper, we attended the Last Post Ceremony at the Menin Gate.

There was so much information to take in and hearing the sheer numbers of soldiers being killed, that was totally mind-boggling: tens of thousands of soldiers being killed in a single battle. 

Pieter Shielen told us that they knew where the land-mines were. Most of them had been defused, but one of them was still lurking in the ground. As it was deemed too dangerous trying to do something about it, it was being left in the ground and the area around it roped off. It may have been taken care off since then.

At the time, I didn´t know enough of the WWI and the times of the 1910s to understand everything we heard. The Oxford course about the English Poetry of the WWI, taught me so much about that decade. It feels tempting to do the new online course that Oxford now is doing: The WWI in Perspective to learn more about what happened, especially what lead up to this disaster. 

Best

Elsa

Dear Elsa

 

On your Ieper visit, did you by any chance visit the IRISH FARM military cemetery?

 

And did you go and see the POOL OF PEACE (Spanbroekmolen lake) in Wytschaete-Messines? The 'Pool' is one of the scars in the landscape of  WWI. It is a remainder (and likewise a reminder) of the British all-out attack of early June 7th, 1917, when around 20 massive underground mines were detonated along the Ypres Salient; this happened with a view to blowing the German army off the fortified belt of strongholds, which they held on the crests of the Salient. 

 

The unique thing about Wytschaete-Messines was that Regiments from both sides of the Ulster-Irish border (the 16th and the 36th) were involved in the attack. Unfortunately for most of these forces, the whistle that gave the sign for jumping out of the trenches was blown a few seconds before the mine was detonated and most soldiers were blasted to smithereens and pulverized.

That is why the LONE TREE cemetery, which is on the opposite side of the road (near some farmer's meadow actually), contains mostly 'SOLDIER(S) OF THE GREAT WAR (known unto God)'.    

 

Best regards,

 

Chris