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. He thought it sacred ground. He wasn’t alone. The road through the Menin Gate to the battlefields 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.
Pilgrims were sometimes shocked by Ypres itself, not so much the destruction as the behaviour of the locals who had returned to it. As early as 1919 a correspondent of The Times could rail against “mobs of picture-postcard hawkers, of of chars-à-bancs and pleasure omnibuses, of souvenir hunters and noise”. It was, he said, a place where “the wounds of war were… a spectacle to be casually appraised between an apéritif and lunch”.
A year later The Times was bitterly noting the absence of “any national monument to the millions who crossed the narrow seas from Great Britain” in Ypres. It was such feelings that the Menin Gate, and the wider Imperial War Graves Commission project, was intended to assuage. For Blomfield, the Gate would “symbolise the enduring power and indomitable tenacity of the British Empire”.
Some, among them war poet Siegfried Sassoon, who contrived to be passing Ypres the day after the unveiling, this triumphalism was too much. He decried the “intolerably nameless names” inscribed within the Gate in a particularly bitter poem. RH Mottram, novelist and Ypres veteran, wrote a piece in the Daily Mirror the day before. What should they inscribe on it, he asked himself. “Never again.”
But some 10,000 pilgrims attended the unveiling nonetheless, including 700 poor mothers whose costs were paid by the St Barnabas Society, a charity established after the war for just such a purpose. Two of them, Emily Shrubsole of Battersea and Caroline Merriman of Croydon, were chosen to lay a wreath in the official ceremony. The Gate bore the name of two of Caroline’s sons, John and Arthur; she had been waiting since October 1914 for John’s death to be marked and remembered.
After the speeches and the prayers trumpets sounded the Last Post from the ramparts, followed by ‘Flowers of the Forest’ from the pipers of the Scots Guards. Then a minute’s silence, broken by the sound of horse’s hooves on the cobbles. Then the Reveille. Then, The Times reported, there was “a quite ineffacable moment when once again the roll of British drums went out from the Menin Gate… They always make one shudder, those drums. But here, at such a place and in such surroundings, the splendour and the terror of them were beyond words.”
This is an extended version of a piece that first appeared in the July 2023 issue of History Today. The image is of the Cloth Hall in Ypres, after bombardment. It was taken by WOH Dodds and is part of the University of Victoria Library collection.
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Mathew Lyons 