One Day Guided Tours To Ypres

(Dunkirk also available)

General  |  History  |  Itinerary  |  Gallery

History - a brief summary!

From October 1914 until November 1918, the British and their Allies, determined to show their strength, held this sector, paying a terrible price in lives and injuries. The dead numbered half a million collectively. In the Ypres salient alone, there are over 120 military graveyards and many memorials naming those 'Known unto God', as Kipling put it. Defending a salient presents great dangers, as you can be attacked on both flanks as well as the front. Poison gas, from 1915, added to the peril. To make matters worse, the land surface of Flanders, which means flooded land, can only be kept dry by an extensive network of drainage channels. Once these were shot to pieces, the land became a soggy morass when it rained and stayed that way for months. Drowning in mud was an agonising death for men and beasts. The animals at least, could be put out of their misery, but shooting a pal was another matter.
The Ypres sector saw fighting in every year of the war, with three major battles, the First, Second and Third Battles of Ypres, as well as other fighting and mining. The men called it 'Wipers' and the town was almost wiped off the map. But such is the human spirit, that it was rebuilt, with German war reparation money, as a replica of the old town, at least externally.