Reninghelst War Memorial

I doubt if too many of you have visited Reninghelst.  It’s hardly on the coach tour route, and I imagine most people who visit likely have personal reasons for doing so. 

Outside the church stands the war memorial,…

…but perhaps we should have a look at where we are before we continue.  The shaded circular areas show, clockwise from top left, Poperinghe (orange), Ypres (turquoise), Messines (pink, bottom right), Mont Kemmel (green & circularish) & Westoutre (red), with Reninghelst now added in blue.  The top half of this map, from May 1918, shows the British trenches in blue and the German trenches in red; the bottom half, from July 1918, has the colours reversed, and shows the territory gained by the Germans during the Battle of the Lys in April 1918, the furthest extent west that German forces would advance before the battle ended.  And while we’re looking at this map, the shaded squares, a couple of miles south east of Reninghelst, just to the west of Mont Kemmel,…

…are reproduced here in close-up, and to give you an idea of what the landscape looked like in this sector – the whole area behind the British lines apart from during the summer of 1918 – after four years of war,…

…these photographs, taken from within the pink circle marked on the map, show the view looking north (above) & south (below) once the Germans had departed in September 1918. Interestingly, the map shows that the area around one section of track, a short distance north of here – the slightly higher ground in the background of the above photo – remained in Allied hands despite the capture of the rest of the railway by the Germans.

Back in Reninghelst, the memorial features a Belgian soldier with rifle & flag defending the Flemish lion.

I shan’t translate, but you probably get the drift.

The names of the dead are inscribed on either side of the memorial,…

…these names all Great War military casualties.  ‘Hulde a an de gesneuvelde soldaten’ translates as ‘Tribute to the fallen soldiers’.  ‘Oorlogsslachtoffers’ means ‘war victims’.

The majority of the names on this side are civilian casualties of the Great War, and it’s worth pointing out that the inhabitants of Reningelst, along with some other nearby villages, were allowed, at their own risk, to remain in their homes for much of the war.  Only during the German offensive in the spring of 1918 were they instructed to leave, and by the look of the 1918 dates on the memorial, some failed to do so.  And paid the price.  But Reninghelst, like Westoutre, would remain in Allied hands throughout the war.

You might consider that there are rather a lot of names on the memorial for such a small village*, and I might well agree with you.  Presumably, names from some of the outlying hamlets, such as Ouderdom & Zevecoten, are included among them.  Reninghelst church is marked here in red.

*fifty one Great War casualties, along with five from the Second World War.

Just one of so many headstones to be found in Belgian churchyards that, by the dates of death, as likely as not tells a tale of two world wars,…

…although neither of the two Capoens listed on the war memorial, one on either side, is to be found on this headstone.

Reninghelst in wartime.  The two pedestrians on the left are walking past where the war memorial now stands.  And the graves you can see in front of the church in the centre probably give the game away as to where we will be next post.