During the First World War, Ypres (Wipers!) became a symbol of resistance; Ypres - the last small piece of Belgium saved from German conquest. With a strong line of hills behind it, holding the town of Ypres was militarily unsound, but politically and morally it was impossible to give it up. We shall look at the desperate defensive WW1 battles of 1914, in which the ‘Old Army’, the regulars of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), was battered to pieces. Several actions were fought by exhausted battalions who intervened at decisive moments and stopped an astonished German enemy in his tracks. We shall remember the gallant stand of the Belgian Army on our left. At Ploegsteert ‘Plugstreet’ Wood a common humanity showed itself in the famous Christmas ‘truce’.
1915 saw the ‘new frightfulness’ of gas warfare and flamethrowers being added to the weaponry of this industrial scale war. The second battle of Ypres was as desperate an affair as the first and the Ypres Salient shrank dramatically. 1916 saw some fierce actions around St. Eloi and Mount Sorrel.
In 1917 Douglas Haig, freed from a strategy dictated by our French allies, launches his big effort to break out of the salient and free Belgium entirely. After a huge success at Messines in June the offensive that began on 31st July was a bitter disappointment, ruined by the worst weather in seventy-five years. We shall look at Plumer’s great successes in the middle period, and try to understand why we slogged up to Passchendaele in the mud.
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