LEST WE FORGET.

[Stanley]

LEST WE FORGET.

This is the last of my foreign correspondence views for a while. I’m going to get down to some serious Barlick history writing now and will be here in the town until August next year but before I get back to the local stuff I thought the Editor might let me tell you about a trip I took last week to the Great War battlefields at Ypres or Iepre as the locals call it because they are Flemish, not French.
I’ve been wanting to see Iepre and the surrounding country for years because my maternal grandfather John Shaw Challenger was killed there in 1917 and my father was wounded and won the DCM there. In case you’re wondering why I haven’t given his name it’s because there’s a bit of a mystery about this. He was an Australian who joined up as a volunteer at the beginning of the war and after Gallipoli went to Loos, Vimy Ridge and finished up at Iepre fighting in the battle for Passchendaele in 1917 which was where we think he was gassed and wounded by a bayonet in the neck. Grandad Challenger, my mother's father, has been fairly easy to trace but father has been more difficult because like a lot of the Anzacs he appears to have signed up under a false name. We haven’t found any official record of him yet but one of these days I will crack the mystery! [I eventually got the complete picture and the family got some major surprises. If you want to know more ask the library staff for my book ‘An Australian Life’]
A friend of mine, Mrs Brigid Pailthorpe, was in the party and we soon realised there was a connection because her father in law was a surgeon at Bailleul where my grandad John Shaw died and could easily have been the surgeon who treated him. You can take it as read that we both did a lot of weeping that day.
We started the day by going to the exhibition in the Cloth Hall at Iepre. When you buy the ticket you are given the name of a soldier who died in the area, I got a German called Max Beckman, nothing wrong with that and I thought of him as well as my relations as I went round the exhibits. It’s a very good museum and gives a clear and sometimes shocking account of the horrors of industrial war.
It is very hard to realise that apart from the foundations of the Cloth Hall, (Iepre has always been a textile town), not a stone was left standing of the town. After the war Churchill suggested that it should be left as it was as a memorial but the Belgians said that they wanted it put back exactly as it was. Germany was made to pay for the public buildings and the Belgian government paid for all the private property. By 1930 they had a new town but it was an exact replica of what had been there before. The war cemeteries usually mark either the site of a major battle or a casualty clearing station where many of the men died. After the war, the Belgians gave the land on which the cemeteries lie to the British Government so that the soldiers who died could be regarded as buried in British soil. With the exception of a couple of cemeteries, the Germans were made to take their dead home, the Belgians refused to give land to the people whom they regarded as the aggressors. All the graves are tended by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission using Flemish workers and they are immaculate.
It was heartbreaking to walk through those long rows of white stones, many of them unidentified, ‘Known Only Unto God’ is the inscription on these. The others are marked with the name and regimental crest of the soldier's unit and what particularly affected me was the graves of the Jewish soldiers which were easily identified by the star of Israel and the rows of stones balanced on the top of the headstone. These are ‘Kaddish’ stones and are placed there by relatives to signify that they have said the ‘Kaddish’ or prayer of mourning over the grave. I was reduced to an emotional wreck at Tyne Cot Cemetery just below Passchendaele Ridge where all the graves face uphill towards the German positions. One of the pill boxes, the strong concrete buildings housing the machine guns, is still there covered by the memorial stone. This hill is only 150 feet high but looking down into the flat valley you clearly understood what an advantage this was. Nothing could move within about a mile without being totally exposed, no wonder so many men were killed. The casualty figures are telephone numbers and the mind soon becomes numbed by the sheer scale of the slaughter. Britain and the Commonwealth lost 500,000 men in five months on an area no bigger than the side of the Weets facing Barlick and this was only one small sector of the front line. The irony is that late in 1917 the whole salient was evacuated and it’s possible to speculate that these men died for nothing. The truth is probably that the Germans were so worn down by the assault here that it stopped them deploying troops elsewhere and so changed the face of the war. The one thing that is absolutely clear is that this was a war of attrition, deaths were swapped for deaths until both sides were so exhausted that they couldn’t carry on and a resolution had to wait until 1945.
A young American student who was in the party asked me why a man should volunteer in Australia to come and die on the salient half a world away from home. I told her that this was a good question and that when she found an answer she should let me know. We can’t imagine the circumstances that bred the enthusiasm for war that existed in 1914. Billy Brooks, an old Barlicker who was about a hundred years old when I talked to him told me how he and a mate of his had cycled to Skipton to enlist at the beginning of the war. When they got to the recruiting station the sergeant in charge told them that the queue was so long they couldn’t get processed that day and they should come back early the following morning. Billy said that the enthusiasm wore off during the night and they never went back. Eventually because he was designated a key worker, he was a taper in the mill, he was in a reserved occupation and never went to the war.
The Flanders Field exhibition in the Cloth Hall is very honest. It doesn’t shy away from the fact that the British Army shot almost 300 men for ‘cowardice in the field’. Contrast this with the attitude of the Australians who didn’t shoot any at all. Their attitude was that there wasn’t much point killing their own men when the Germans were making so good a job of it. We even shot one lad who was only 15 years old when he joined because he was frightened to ‘go over the top’. Our government, to this day, still refuses to give these men a pardon and admit that they should not have been killed, this is a national disgrace. [Later, in August 2006 Des Brown the Minister of Defence announced that legislation would be brought in to pardon these men.]
On the same trip I also managed to go to another place which gave me an unforgettable experience. We managed to gain entry to Room 600 at the Nuremberg Courts of Justice where the Nazi war criminals were tried. My first reaction was that there was something wrong as the room was too small. Our guide told me that this was because the Americans had knocked the end wall out to make room for the press and spectators but that it had been reinstated afterwards. The room is still used but only for murder trials. I was particularly interested in this place because when I was in Berlin in 1955/56 I occasionally stood guard at Spandau Gaol where Rudolf Hess, Walther Funk, Erich Raeder, Albert Speer, Baldur von Schirach, and Karl Dönitz, were held prisoner. Somehow, seeing the courtroom completed a circle for me.
I’m sorry that this week’s View has been so dire but if we are going to look at history we should look at the nasty bits as well as the pleasant. Both wars had a tremendous effect on Barlick. The Great War wiped out a generation of young men and condemned many women to being either spinsters or widows. The second World War brought Rolls Royce to the town and created a new industry. More about this in another View. I’d just like to leave you with another thought about World War Two, the same American lass who asked me about volunteers had another question about how valuable the Russian contribution was in WW2. I told her that one of the best kept secrets of the War was that the Russians lost over 30,000,000 lives keeping the Germans occupied on the Eastern front. She would have to work out the significance of that for herself.
I’m left with one small question of my own, how can it be that (unless I missed something) I saw no mention of deaths amongst the Ghurkha or Indian troops at Iepre?
(My late brother, who was a considerable historian of the Western Front later told me they hadn't been forgotten, it was just that there names were recorded in a different place.)

June 27, 2000