TOM MORGAN'S YPRES DIARY
TOM MORGAN'S YPRES DIARY
The long, slogging fight of the Third Battle of Ypres began on July 31st, 1917 and ended with the capture of the village of Passchendaele on November 6th. The "beginning of the end" came on October 30th, when the Germans were cleared from the Passchendaele Ridge.
By the beginning of October, the advancing 3rd Australian Division had captured the area near to an old farm building which was marked on British maps as "Tyne Cottage" or "Tyne Cot". The area near the barn had been very heavily defended and there were many concrete machine-gun positions. As the general advance in the area progressed, the British began to use the largest of these as a dressing-station in support of the continuing advance, and they began a small cemetery outside. The dressing station and its cemetery continued in use until the German advance of March, 1918, when the area fell into German hands again. In due course, the British made their Final Advance and the area was held by the British by the end of the war. At that time, there were about 300 burials in the cemetery behind the blockhouse, plus other isolated burials in the immediate area. Apart from this small cemetery, the Tyne Cot position resembled any other derelict battlefield after the war, marked by broken ground, trenches, shell-holes and debris and battlefield graves.
After the war, the decision was taken to use the site as a concentration cemetery for the area and as a result, the bodies of some 11,500 men were brought here for burial, the cemetery being slowly extended towards the road, to a design by Sir Herbert Baker. When the cemetery was declared finished it contained the graves of 11,908 men, although with later additions and removals, the figure quoted today is 11,957 - the greatest number of Great War burials in any British War cemetery anywhere in the world. Almost two-thirds of the soldiers buried here are unknown.
There are four German soldiers buried in the cemetery, three unknown and one, Otto Bieber, commemorated by name. These soldiers were originally found buried just outside the cemetery boundaries.
In addition there are Special Memorials - gravestones which have no bodies buried beneath them. These are to be found against the wall, by the road. To the right of the entrance arch are memorials to 81 men who are known to be buried in the cemetery, but whose exact graves can't be located. These 81 men are buried somewhere, among the "unknown" graves. Against the wall to the left of the entrance are 20 more gravestones without burials and in front of them is a "Kipling Memorial" stone which records the fact that these 20 men did once have known graves in wartime burial grounds nearby, but their graves were lost in later fighting. Nevertheless, as the Kipling Memorial proclaims, "Their Glory Shall Not Be Blotted Out" and for statistical purposes they are considered to be buried within the cemetery and these gravestones are their personal memorials. They are not mentioned by name on any Memorial to the Missing. ("Special Memorials" and "Kipling memorials" are not unique to Tyne Cot; they can be found in many British cemeteries.)
Tyne Cot cemetery seems to go on and on, away into the distance. It has always seemed to me that no photograph (except perhaps, an aerial photograph) can really give an idea of how big the cemetery is. Nothing can replace the immediate visual impression of actually being there. The irregularly-spaced graves of the original dressing station - over 300 of them - are easily found, just behind the cross of sacrifice, but the overall memory is one of row after row after row of graves, in their ordered plots. From the entrance-gate, the cemetery slopes gently upwards, and this increases the impression of vastness.
As if this wasn't enough, the curved rear wall to the cemetery forms the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing and another 34,870 names are carved into its panels - the names of the Missing in the Salient from August 15th, 1915 to the end of the war - including, of course, the Missing of the terrible 1917 battles for Passchendaele. As one stands at the cemetery, looking towards the towers of Ypres in the distance, one sees a peaceful, undisturbed landscape sloping gently away towards the town. The 34,870 who are numbered among the Missing are still there, somewhere.
(The names of those missing from the earlier battles around Ypres are commemorated on the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing, in Ypres itself, which contains 54,328 names. The important date which determines which Memorial to the Missing a soldier will be commemorated on was 15th August, 1917. The Missing who died on or before that date are named on the Menin Gate, while those after the date are named at Tyne Cot. But there are exceptions. ALL the Australian Missing from the whole of Belgium, regardless of date, are named on the Menin Gate, and the same is true of the Missing of Canada, South Africa and India. In the case of New Zealand, the exception to the rule works the other way. The New Zealand government wanted all Missing New Zealanders to be commemorated on Memorials to the Missing located in cemeteries near to the places where they fell. Thus, all the New Zealand Missing from the Passchendaele area are commemorated at Tyne Cot, and the circular apse in the centre of the Memorial records 1,176 names on eight panels. The main part of the Memorial to the Missing, therefore, contains the names of soldiers from the British Army alone with one further exception - one soldier from Newfoundland - although the Commonwealth War Graves Commission considers the New Zealand Memorial to be part of the Tyne Cot Memorial for statistical purposes and the total figure for Tyne Cot commemorations includes the 1,176 New Zealanders.)
The present site of the cemetery was very much part of the battlefield in the final days of the muddy, blood-soaked advance towards Passchendaele. Just below the crest of the ridge the Germans had constructed a line of strong machine-gun posts, or "pill-boxes", protected by an impenetrable, deep thicket of barbed wire. This formidable protective band included the land now taken up by the cemetery. Most of the pill-boxes along the ridge were blown up after the war and the rubble used to help reinstate the local roads, but the ones in the Tyne Cot section of the battlefield were left in place to avoid disturbing the graves which had been made around them. Five of these large concrete structures still stand within the cemetery although only two of them are obviously visible, standing to the left and right of the main cemetery area, with tall poplars growing near their corners. They would have been covered in earth during the war, to make them less easy to spot from the air. The third of the five pill-boxes is still hidden, in a way.
When King George V made his pilgrimage to the battlefields in 1922 he visited this cemetery when the permanent construction works were still in progress. He suggested that the Cross of Sacrifice, that unmistakable element of every Commonwealth War Cemetery, should, in this case, be built over the largest of the Tyne Cot blockhouses. And so the Cross of Sacrifice at Tyne Cot stands much higher than usual, above a stepped pyramid of white stone which now covers the blockhouse. In the side of the pyramid facing the entrance gates, a small section of the original concrete is still visible through a gap left in the stone, and an inscription below the gap recalls the fact that it was the 3rd Australian Division which captured and silenced the strongpoint in 1917. (Look carefully at this inscription and you can see that there has been an alteration. For many years the inscription wrongly credited the 2nd Australian Division with the capture.)
Th remaining two pill-boxes are hidden from view. There is one under each of the two domed pavilions at either end of the curving Memorial to the Missing at the far end of the cemetery. The gardeners use these last two pill-boxes as toolsheds.
I saw another reminder of the bloody history of this place on 30th October 1997 - the 80th anniversary of the capture of the position, and also my 50th birthday. I was there with my son and one of my friends and on the day of this visit, there was some gardening work in progress and there was a temporary sign apologising to visitors for the inconvenience. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission gardeners had been improving the drainage of the soil and all along the long rows of graves, narrow trenches had been dug, about a spade's width across. Drainage pipes or gravel had been laid in these small trenches and then they had been filled in with the earth which had been taken out.
This gave a rare opportunity to glimpse a tiny part of the battlefield itself, under the turf of the cemetery, and so we began to walk along the filled-in drainage trenches, no more than nine inches across, but hundreds of yards long, looking at the replaced soil. It wasn't long before the past began to reassert itself. Within half a minute I found a Shrapnel ball, and then another. Within ten minutes we had picked up rifle bullets, a revolver bullet, the bottom of a British water-bottle, a section of a British army boot, a button from a soldier's small pack and a belt-buckle.
My son and I noticed that our friend, walking some distance away, had some disciples. A couple of busloads of visitors were also at the cemetery and someone had asked my friend what he was doing. He explained about the minor excavations and when we left the cemetery about ten minutes later, we left many people walking slowly from one side of the cemetery to the other, hands clasped behind their backs, their bodies bent forward from the waist, looking for all the world like some silent, contemplative order of monks.
(Thanks to Terry Denham for his advice on the statistical accuracy of this article.)
Copyright © Tom Morgan,
January, 2003.
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