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[Page 31]
The Sun 30/10/19
WHERE THEY FOUGHT
Around Ypres and Passchendaele
Australian Landmarks
(No. 2)
("The Sun's" Special Representative)
LONDON, August 25.
The Australian soldier would think the battlefields to-day extraordinarily different from those scenes of mud and trouble in which he fought.
The old sounds have gone. An icecream seller shouts his wares in Ypres, at the Menin Gate. Belgian girls sell picture postcards to loud-voiced tourists in the old square. The"chink, chink" of the pickaxe is heard in the broken cellars of Messines, villagers are digging for their gold. The reaper is at work on some parts of the Amiens-St. Quentin battlefield, which was not much shelled. But on the great, wide stretches, an eerie silence is maintained.
Of course, the places are all recognisable. What Australian soldier could not find his way from Dickebush or Zonnebeke road to Westhoek? But the sights are all changed. There is neither mud nor good brown earth. There are wildernesses of weeds and stubby growths, trenches have fallen in, dugouts are dark with noisome caverns, hidden by vegetation; redoubts have been dynamited away.
The few inhabitants of the battlefields belong to four classes. Some civilians have come back. They have opened their mushroom estaminets and sell their bad beer and vin rouge; a small number is trying a little agriculture. The second class is the Tommy labor company. The company nowadays is a combination of veteran derelicts and lives in little white-washed tin huts on sites of old villages. All the vigorous and the young have gone home, and the old hands are taking a long, long time collecting scrap iron, blowing up pill-boxes for the steel girders in the concrete, and burning useless dumps. The third class is the Prisoners of War Company – the young German prisoner of pronounced physique and industry. The fourth is the Chow. He is as numerous as ever, is mixing violence with his laziness, and giving a lot of trouble to his British officers. The War Office will be glad to finish with the famous Chinese experiment.
Some Landmarks
All four classes are most plentiful in the Ypres salient. Yet if every human being there to-day were marched in column of fours along the Menin road, they would not number one twentieth of those who lie dead on that terrible ridge, nor one-fiftieth of those gallant men who tramp, tramp into battle echoed from the ruins of the old city.
The rubble of the old Ypres had a majesty, a beauty of its own in the days of battle. The Australian knew Ypres mostly as a stepping-stone on the long march into or from a fight. Engineers burrowed under the ramparts to make divisional headquarters. Battalions rested in the artillery barracks (save the name!) when they came out from Westhoek and Dairy Wood. I visited both these spots, so as to be able to tell you that the artillery barracks are a dirty, leaky, dishevelled ruins, and no shelter for man or beast, and the dugouts along the ramparts from Menin to Lille Gates are falling in and scattered with garbage and rats. Two pictures of dirt. But some readers will have known moments when these were convenient spots.
The ruins of the Cloth Hall and the Cathedral stand as they were. A few dried bones of glorious buildings. Grass is growing high amidst powdered bricks on acres where the fine old residences of wealthy Ypres used to stand. The Town Major has gone, and the Traffic Control is no more. The tourist is here in his stead. There are Cook's parties, and Bruges parties, and Brussels parties, in all manner of vehicles. And the enterprising Belgian has made Ypres hideous in his quest of the tourists' money. I counted ten estaminets, ugly iron and wooden barns, a great white double-story hotel, two gaudy restaurants, two tin shops … Will this be the new Ypres, in a place so hallowed?
The Ridge of Death
Vlammertinghe is battered as ever, but Popperinghe is repaired and gay. It is the farmers' centre, and more, the centre for the little army of occupation in these parts. The little restaurant in the square beloved of our officer, is a bright place now. A German Prisoners' orchestra comes along sometimes to play to the Tommies there, and the busy people have spent some of our money on a new painted verandah trimmed with shrubs in barrels. But I doubt if there ever is or will be such care-free gaiety as when the Australian subs and the English flying boys gathered round the old piano after dinner in the intervals of their offensives.
But away with such things. What mattered they? What mattered anything or any place except the bloody ridge, where the Germans were, and death beckoned, and veritable hell had to be gamely faced!
This ridge was the testing place, the arena of stark manhood – the grimmest battlefield, if the dead were laid out by the acre, of all the British front, perhaps of all the war. What variety of tense emotion, what depths of thought and feeling, were stirred here in victory and defeat, in struggle and labor, in stern and straining warfare wherein men were used to the last point of cracking and crumbling of tortured muscle and spirit. All that was local. It happened here. And was that all? No! The guns of Passchendaele sent their shot all round the world, the god of war played here on hearts all over the British Empire, all over Germany. It was as though, at each thrust and counter-thrust, a giant stone was tossed into a sea made up of the blood that had flown, and the ripples carried out to Australia, and washed there against the doorsteps of waiting mothers and fathers, of every home which had a boy in the Australian Corps.
But now the ridge is a mere wide slope of the drabbest monotony. Who could tell it had been compact of the emotions of scores of millions of human beings? Nothing is here, except a few thousand graves, a score of heaps of rubble that were villages and weeds.
You see a sea of green growth, from two to four feet high. But do not plunge into it. For it hides dishevelled fields, all furrows and holes, as uneven as an angry ocean. The duckboard tracks have gone, except in patches. Trenches have been washed and battered away. Redoubts are disappearing.
You can pass the big redoubt at the "Kink in the Road", where brigades had their headquarters in the last battle of Passchendaele. But do not peep inside. It is more unwholesome now than when shells were falling round and dead horses marked the road. The Anzac redoubt in front of Westhoek, carried with such dash and grave renown at dawn on September 26, has been dynamited. The redoubt near Abraham Heights, which was like a tiny island – with dead Germans lying round – on that day of disaster, October 12, lies broken in three pieces. Its girders have been salved. The Tenth Brigade staff, which worked inside, would not recognise it.
Passchendaele
The Ypres battlefield differed from others, in that the Australian soldier always knew what was ahead of him. He was climbing all the time, he was a stout and hard fighter, and after storming one ridge he was moved a bit to bring him face to face with another. He got a good general perspective of
[See image for photograph of Mr. J.F. Guthrie.)
Mr. J.F. Guthrie who has been selected by the National Campaign Council to contest one of the three Victorian Senate seats at the forthcoming elections. He is a farmer, stud stock breeder, and manager in Geelong for Messrs. Dalgety and Co., and is 47 years of age.
the ridges. Elsewhere he could only wonder what the world looked like on the other side of the German lines.
But the landmarks by which the Australian knew the ridges have gone. Passchendaele stood out, a pretty, straggling village. Now you can pass it without knowing that a village has stood there, for not one brick stands on another. The Zonnebeke ruins stand as they were; nothing could pound that pile of bricks much finer. I remember that glorious dawn when signal lights, worked from behind the church, announced its capture. Zonnebeke became an inferno of gas and flying metal, but it was difficult to avoid going through or near it during the remaining days of our Passchendaele battles, and many gallant Australians were killed round here.
Now it is the site of two estaminets. Beer waggons roll up once a week to replenish stocks. By the roadside near the church stands a drinking place, ambitiously bit for these parts – about the size of two railway carriages. You remember Zonnebeke chateau? Its owner lives in this mushroom house. He owned the village, and the sugar factory, and the farms round about. He is wealthy still, but Zonnebeke is Zonnebeke to him, so he has come back, though it is a desert. He refuses money from Australians for their beer. Did they not win back his village?
This curious craze for living on the site of former happiness I encountered on several battlefields. The owner of the lovely chateau of Hooge, with its pleasant grounds and woods and fountains, lives in a two-roomed iron house near his old garden. His home has been wiped off the earth. But he is happier here than elsewhere. At Riencourt I found an old couple who had levelled a little plot of ground, and planted vegetables. At Messines, people are building wooden homes.
One cannot forget for long that on Australian battlefields alone thousands of homes have disappeared. Constantly one comes across little knots of civilians. They may be just the old people, or a Belgian soldier and his wife and children, or some orphans or bereaved sisters. They are looking for what was their home. Sometimes they have left something to be dug for. But usually they look with hard, dry eyes on what was once their all in all; they wander listlessly amidst the rubble, as though stunned, they turn their backs, and with sad footsteps seek some brighter place.
(The next article of this series will appear to-morrow.)