In Europe

war!’ Dick Barron (b.1896) talked about what happened soon afterwards: ‘My own mate fell, shotthrough the head, I tried to push his brains back into the hole, ridiculous of course …’ Tommy Gay (b.1898): ‘You heard the bullets flying past your ears, ping, ping, and all I could think was: what a miracle that they're not hitting me.’
    In November 1914 alone, 100,000 men fell in the vicinity of Ypres. In the immediate vicinity, another 400,000 would follow. Norman Collins (b.1898) had the job of burying the dead, who had sometimes been lying on the battlefield for weeks. ‘The first one I saw like that, I touched him, and a rat came running out of his skull. Then you thought: all those ambitions and aspirations, all the things they hoped to change in the world, but in reality they all died within a few minutes.’
    Jack Rogers agrees to sing a trench song for the camera, in a high, shaky voice:
    I want to go home,
    I want to go home,
    I don't want to go to the trenches no more
    The whiz-bangs and the shrapnel they whistle and roar
    I don't want to go over the top any more
    Take me over the sea
    Where the Allemands can't take me
    Oh my, I don't want to die
    I want to go home.
    Now for the other side. Imagine I'm a boy from Munich. We've all been whipped up by German propaganda, our brief training camp was an exciting interlude in our staid lives, and here we come, 3,000 students strong. This band of soldiers even includes engineers and doctors. No one wants to miss this. ‘Life was magnified a thousandfold in this grand struggle, everything that had once been fell into nothingness,’ one of them wrote later. Thanks to the Big Berthas, our men have destroyed the fortifications at Liège, taken Antwerp, and now we are marching at night against the British at Ypres. I cite this same soldier: ‘Then when the day begins to take shape out of the mist, an iron how-do-you-do suddenly comes whistling over our heads, and with a hard crack drives the little projectiles into our ranks, making the slimy earth spatter up all over; but before the cloud has had time to disperse, the first hurrah from 2,000throats has already sounded in reply. The author of the letter, Adolf Hitler, writes that as the artillery started to crackle and thunder, all the men began singing. This is probably nonsense, although the students of Munich were crazy enough for it to have been true. Afterwards people would speak of the Murder of the Innocents at Ypres, and Langemark has been called ‘the place the second World War was born’.
    The British facing them had been through the Boer War, they were professional. The 3,000 German boys – only a few of them survived into manhood – now lie in a separate section of the war cemetery, surrounded by plaques bearing the names of their student fraternities. One half of Hitler's 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment was killed, approximately 1,800 men. He himself came away unscathed. Later he was wounded, locals say in a wood not far from here, where the faint remains of trenches can still be seen.
    Peter Kollwitz, too, fell that week, on the same front, close to RoggeveldEsen. Käthe Kollwitz: ‘I dreamed we were with a lot of people in a big hall. Someone shouted ‘Where is Peter?’ It was he himself who shouted it, I saw his dark silhouette standing against something light. I went to him, embraced him, but didn't dare to look at him, afraid it would turn out not to be him. I looked at his feet and they were his, at his arms, his hands, they were all his, but I knew that if I tried to look at his face, I would know again that he was dead.’
    Approaching what was once the West Flanders front, you can tell by the buildings that you're getting close: suddenly, none of the houses and farms along the road date from before 1920.
    Ypres is the heart of this rebuilt past. During the First World War, the fortified medieval town was a striking, vulnerable promontory along the front. If the Germans broke through, they could be in Calais and Dunkirk the next day. The British supply lines would be gravely endangered, and the Germans would have a new front that was much easier to defend, and several important harbours in addition.
    The fighting at Ypres, in other words, served key military interests. Hundreds of thousands died on the enormous mud flats around the city and the neighbouring villages. At the local museum, In Flanders Fields, a scale model shows what Ypres looked like on 11 November,1918: