Passchendaele
and Yprès 1914-1918 - A historical background to the music of Peace Concerts
Passendale
Soldiers
sang irreverently as they marched to the Front in the First World War, pianos
and gramophones were given a place in the deepest German trenches, enemies
joined in carol singing during the Truce of Christmas 1914. It was called
“The Ragtime War”. The music defied one of the greatest human
tragedies of the twentieth century - and it came to Yprès and Passchendaele by
chance. Right at the beginning of the Great War in mid-October 1914, an
indecisively led British Army aiming to outflank the Germans, accidentally ran
into a larger German Army, intent on outflanking the British. This
unplanned collision in “the Westhoek”, a rural part of Western Flanders
centring around the medieval river port of Yprès, became known as the First
Battle of Yprès - a bloody stalemate in which there was “much slaughter and
no result”. In fact the battle’s real outcome was the destruction of
the existing British regular army and thus to Kitchener’s call for an army of
volunteers.
At
Yprès on the 22nd April 1915, the Germans made their first use of poison gas.
They drove a rapid advance through a nightmare front of men blinded and drowning
in the fluid from their own lungs. Sacking a general who protested at the
mounting carnage, Sir John French, the British commander, ordered the
counter-attack. This began the Second Battle of Yprès, which dragged its
victoryless, deathly way through May - ending only when supplies of men and
materials were exhausted.
Finally,
in the summer of 1917, General Sir Douglas Haig was given the independent role
he had long coveted - he was made Commander in Chief of the British Army in
France. Ignoring warnings that low, river silt farmlands which had long
since had their agricultural drains destroyed by shelling, were unsuitable for
an infantry advance, he resolved on a grandiose breakthrough of the German lines
at the Yprès salient.
As
part of his plan for this Third Battle of Yprès, Haig identified Passchendaele,
a tiny market town on a low hill within sight of Yprès, as the subject of an
intense, high profile campaign. Amid weeks of torrential rain and a
morrass of bottomless mud, “the blindest slaughter of a blind war” that was
the battle of Passchendaele brought the final human cost of the conflict in
Flanders to six hundred thousand killed and one and a half million wounded.
But ultimately, when the heap of rubble that had once been the town of
Passchendaele was eventually captured by the allies on the 7th November 1917, it
was occupied for a few hours, then the troops were withdrawn. General Haig
reported that “the campaign had served its purpose.”
NOTE ON NAMES - Yprès is now known as Ieper - the Flemish spelling of its name and Passchendaele is now shown on signs and maps in its modern spelling - Passendale.