Dickebusch (today, Dikkebus) church. Now.
And then.
French ambulances outside the church early in the war.
Today, outside the church, you will find the village war memorial.
But where are we, I hear you ask? This April 1917 map extract shows the southern ramparts of Ypres and the Lille Gate, right of centre at the top, with the Ypres-Comines Canal crossing the map from north to south roughly in the centre, Voormezeele in the centre at the bottom, and Dickebusch in the bottom left next to its very own lake. The closest German positions are marked in red, about three miles from Dickebusch as the crow flies, the whole area around Dickebusch easily within range of the German field guns and their heavier artillery,…
…as evidenced by the myriad of shell holes in this aerial photo of Dickebusch Lake.
Two views of Dickebusch, which I initially found rather confusing. If you look at the church in the background, its spire marked by the gold star on the map below,…
…it would position the photographer somewhere along one of the roads marked with a red line, sections of road pretty much devoid of buildings, which clearly can’t be right.
Flip both photos horizontally, however, and you have a photograph taken from the main street through Dickebusch, marked by the green line on the map, with the church on the right, as it is on the map. Which makes much more sense to me, and might do to you, too.
Aerial view of Dickebusch taken on 27th September 1916, the church spire marked with a gold star, the landscape relatively unmarked, although the village shows evidence of German bombing, and occasional shell holes cross the fields.
A not too dissimilar shot taken on 24th May 1917,…
…and a third, taken on 19th August 1917, nearly three weeks into the Passchendaele campaign, emphasising how much activity was going on by then, day & night, behind the front lines.
The letters on the cross at the top stand for ‘Alles Voor Vlaanderen – Vlaanderen Voor Kristus’, which translates as ‘All For Flanders – Flanders for Christ’. ‘Hulde’ means ‘tribute’.
The soldier on the front,…
…appears to have just been shot.
Literally, ‘To our lamented comrades in arms and civilian victims’.
There are Great War casualties named on this side of the memorial,…
…civilians at the top, with their ages,…
…and soldiers at the bottom, with their place & date of death.
The main panel on the other side features two more civilian casualties (possibly Second World War), and one soldier who died in the weeks following D-Day in 1944. Dollern is in Lower Saxony in Germany, so one assumes that he died as a prisoner of war.
More Great War military casualties on the lower panel.
Two well-known shots of men of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and their bus transport passing through Dickebusch on their way to Ypres in early November 1914.
Damaged houses on the outskirts of Dickebusch later in the war.
Ruins in Dickebusch after the war. The church, unsurprisingly, fared badly, its ruins just visible in the left background of the left-hand photo above,…
…and seen here in close-up,…
…but it’s looking good again today. And we’re back to old jazz hands again, because our next stop is just a few yards’ stroll down the road on the right, on the other side of the road, opposite the churchyard.