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Updated: June 27, 2025
This engagement at Wytschaete gave a good illustration of the difficulty of fighting in heavy, winter ground, devoid of cover, and so water-logged that any speed in advance was next to impossible. Just prior to the battle the ground had thawed, and the soldiers sank deep into the mud at every step they took.
The battle of Wytschaete and Messines was a model in organization and method, and worked in its frightful destructiveness like the clockwork of a death machine.
I lunched on a hill surrounded by batteries, with the now celebrated towns of Messines and Wytschaete just across a valley, so that one could watch shells bursting over them. And still nothing threatened my peace of mind or my physical well-being. And yet it was one of the most interesting days of a not uneventful period.
A long winding C.T. brought you from Battalion H.Q., which were at Rossignol Farm about a mile from the front line trenches. The main features of the landscape were the Wytschaete Ridge and Petit Bois a thick wood on our left front. The German trenches were not at first at all close to ours; and both their wire and ours was thick and solid.
Then came the frontier at Steenwoorde; and they were actually in Belgium, passing Poperinghe to Ypres, the most famous British battleground of the war. When Brian was fighting, and when you were on earth, Padre, everyone talked about the "Ypres Salient." Now, though for soldiers Ypres will always be the "salient" since the battle of Wytschaete Ridge, the material salient has vanished.
Away on the ridge miserable Wytschaete stood hard against the sky, a mass of trembling ruins. Then two soldiers came, and finding a boat rowed noisily round the tiny lake, and the shells murmured harshly as they flew across to Ypres. Some ruins are dead stones, but the broken houses of Flanders are pitifully alive like the wounded men who lie between the trenches and cannot be saved....
In June, 1917, the British began an attack on Messines and Wytschaete, in an effort to straighten out the Ypres salient. By this time their flyers dominated the air, and they had gained the immense advantage of artillery superiority.
Even the forest patches in this region were dead and slivered by rifle and shell. To the left of Wytschaete one could see great bursts of brown, black, greenish and white smoke over a width of country perhaps ¼ of a mile and a length of 2 miles. It was here that the 3rd and 1st Canadian Divisions were fighting with the Huns for mastery.
The British now took the offensive and advanced their line on a 600-yard front south of Ypres, near Hollebeke, and continued to exert pressure on the German lines. On the 7th a further push forward was made east of Wytschaete in Belgium.
His fatalistic contempt of danger took him into the trenches wherever shelling was hottest; and it is difficult to imagine how he escaped being sniped at Hill 60 or on the Wytschaete Ridge. He was loved by the men of the 7th N.F. as one who was willing to share their dangers, and always ready with a word of cheer in the hottest corner.
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