In the beginning, they did not even know how many of the dead were missing. When architect Reginald Blomfield began work on the Menin Gate, a memorial to British soldiers who died at Ypres between 1914 and 1918 and whose bodies had never been found, he was told to make space for 40,000 names. The finished memorial, unveiled on 24 July 1927, recorded 54,896. It still wasn’t enough: a further 34,986 are remembered at nearby Tyne Cot.
No wonder, given such numbers – in all, some 200,000 Commonwealth men died defending the small Belgian town – that feelings ran high. Ypres itself was destroyed in the war. Winston Churchill, for one, wanted the whole town bought for Britain and preserved as a ruin. “A more sacred place for the British race does not exist in the world,” he said. He wasn’t alone in such sentiments. The road to the battlefields through the Menin Gate, originally been built by the French in the seventeeth century, was “the Via Dolorosa of our troops”, John Buchan wrote.
When the bereaved went to visit the battlefields, then, they called it pilgrimage. The boat-train from Victoria to Ypres took 12 hours. Wealthier pilgrims might seek out the five-day ‘Battlefield Tours de Luxe’ led by ex-officers in ‘high-class motor vehicles’. Others might prefer the Ypres YMCA, which opened in August 1919 and offered a three-day stay with guided tours and return fares for £5 10s. Or you could do it yourself: The Pilgrim’s Guide to the Ypres Salient (1920) included seven suggested tours of the battlefield. It listed 200 cemeteries and recommended the services of the Graves Registration Unit in the town square to locate your loved one’s last resting place, assuming he had one.
Mathew Lyons 