Neuve Eglise war memorial, with the village church beyond.
It all looks very smart and well cared for, don’t you think?
That small tablet down in the bottom right,…
…remembers Private (Soldaat in Flemish, Soldat in French – you’ll find both on the memorial) Elie Chirouter,…
…whose name can be found, sixth from the top, on the second column on the left-hand panel; the two large panels list the Great War dead, both military & civilian, while the smaller panels list the Second World War dead, military on the left, and civilian on the right.
I suppose it might help if I show you where we are. Neuve Eglise* is in the bottom left-hand corner of this map from June 1916, where it stands on a ridge from which you can look straight across at the German lines, marked in red and, at their closest, two and a half miles away, on the Messines Ridge to the right of the map. Between, the valley of the River Douve and its tributaries would ensure that conditions for the British soldiers beavering away, day and night, behind the British front line (marked as a dotted blue line), overlooked by the Germans up on the ridge, were rarely dry, and seldom safe.
*Neuve Eglise, about eight miles, as the crow flies, south west of Ypres, will be marked on any modern map as Nieuwkerke, much as you will find Ypres marked as Ieper, and indeed Messines marked as Mesen.
This is the view that the Germans would have had as they looked down into the valley of the Douve from their front-line positions at Spanbroekmolen on the Messines Ridge, just off the map to the north, although back then there would have been no trees to obscure the view of a German sniper, looking down from his sandbagged and camouflaged position up here at the British down in the valley below. Following the path…
…leads us to a little British cemetery that stands pretty much on the site of the British front line on the lee slope of the ridge, from where the church at Neuve Eglise can be seen through the mist across the valley on the horizon close to the centre of the picture. You can imagine working down there beneath the gaze of the Germans, should you so wish,…
…but you don’t have to, as the same little cemetery can be seen in front of the house on the right in this shot from down in the valley, and now you are a British soldier, trying his best to keep his head down, maybe a man of the Army Service Corps whose original vision of serving his country didn’t necessarily anticipate being this close to the enemy front line in the cross-hairs of our German sniper up on the ridge. Thus was life and death on the Western Front. Every day of the war.
Neuve Eglise’s position across the Douve valley meant that the village suffered the same fate dealt to so many villages across Flanders during the Great War, although the fiercest fighting took place during the Battle of the Lys in 1918, when the Germans captured the village on 14th April after a stubborn defence by its British defenders.
Aerial view of the battlefield around Neuve Eglise taken from a German balloon, I would presume, on 21st August 1918, because those are German troops you can see in the trench in the foreground. The trench crossing the centre of the picture might well be held by their British opponents, but I only say that because the small puff of smoke on the right is this side of the trench, and that’s a false clue, most likely, as British bullets contained cordite as an explosive, and cordite is smokeless. In the early days of September the British would recapture the village as the final weeks of the war approached.
The war memorial is surmounted by an angel and a dying Poilu. We’ll take a spin around,…
…and as we do we’ll also take a look at the state of the church,…
…and ponder on the nature of false clues and getting too big for your own boots. This picture shows the remains of the church’s internal columns, the fact that this is a post-war photograph evident by the lack of rubble, and in particular bricks, lying about, all having been scavenged for rebuilding purposes. Except that none of that is true. I later managed to find out who took this photograph, and a number of the others in this post, and he was an Australian sergeant who was in this area between 1916 & 1917, and no later, thus the rubble must have been cleared during, not after, the war (and therefore used for military, not civilian, purposes). From which you might either decide never to believe anything I say ever again, or you might consider applauding me for my honesty, and for checking, then double-checking (and often triple-checking, from a different angle, as in this case) my research.
Some of our Aussie sergeant’s mates pictured in the fields at Neuve Eglise. A moment in time.
View of the reverse of the memorial, with the little market square (in reality a market triangle cum car park) behind,…
…seen here…
…in various states of destruction during the war.
Time to move on,…
…although something doesn’t seem quite right here. And I don’t simply mean that the tree behind the memorial has changed the colour of its leaves from earlier, nor the fact that those on the right have now been pollarded.
Nope, I’m talking about the text on the memorial itself,…
…which, well, you tell me what’s happened here, but this does not look like the smart memorial we were looking at earlier.
Now, I can assure you that the picture on the left was taken on 10th November 2018, the day before the hundredth anniversary of the war’s end, some four and a half years before that on the right, which was taken in 2023, as were all the following pictures in which the tree is green.
I have no explanation as to what has happened, although the word ‘deliberate’ comes to mind,…
…but here are the two panels pictured in 2023, and does the stone surround on the right-hand panel appear somewhat rougher than a few years previously, or is my imagination playing me tricks?
Perhaps we have another Great War anniversary cleaning disaster (as in using the wrong chemicals, which only becomes apparent a few years down the road), such as those we may well have seen on other occasions in recent times, on our hands here,…
…because I’m not so sure that the angel is looking that great either,…
…although I suppose her little wingmate isn’t helping matters.
Right, this time we really are leaving, but only to check out the churchyard. I wonder whether that house on the very far right in the background…
…was once this one on the right here. Chimney’s in the wrong place. Nonetheless, it could be, you never know.
The churchyard is larger than you might imagine, and, as you can see, includes an enclosed British Great War plot, where we shall be paying our respects next post.