The Western Front: Landscape, Tourism and Heritage

To

Frances Ann-Marie Miles

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

Pen & Sword Archaeology

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street

Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright © Stephen Miles 2016

ISBN: 978 1 47383 376 0

PDF ISBN: 978 1 47388 471 7

EPUB ISBN: 978 1 47388 470 0

PRC ISBN: 978 1 47388 469 4

The right of Stephen Miles to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

Typeset in Ehrhardt by

Mac Style Ltd, Bridlington, East Yorkshire

Printed and bound by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd.

Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the imprints of Pen & Sword Archaeology, Atlas, Aviation, Battleground, Discovery, Family History, History, Maritime, Military, Naval, Politics, Railways, Select, Transport, True Crime, and Fiction, Frontline Books, Leo Cooper, Praetorian Press, Seaforth Publishing and Wharncliffe.

For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact

PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED

47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England

E-mail: enquiries@pen-and-sword.co.uk

Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk

Contents

Acknowledgements

Firstly I would like to thank my editor Professor Nick Saunders at the University of Bristol for his continuing commitment and patience in steering this project to its conclusion. His advice was absolutely indispensable and is greatly appreciated. It was most reassuring to have such an experienced writer and academic as editor for this my first book. At Pen and Sword Books I would like to thank Eloise Hansen and Heather Williams, very able Commissioning Editors, who were consistently helpful and attentive.

Many people have helped me with the research for this book but in particular I would like to thank the following: in Belgium and France Dominiek Dendooven and Piet Chielens, In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres; Michel Rouger and Lyse Hautecoeur, Musée de la Grande Guerre du Pays de Meaux; Steven Vandenbussche, Timby Vansuyt and Lee Ingelbrecht at the Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917, Zonnebeke; Alexandre Lefevre, Somme Tourism, Amiens; Avril Williams, owner of the Ocean Villas Bed and Breakfast at Auchonvillers; and David and Julie Thomson, owners of the Number 56 Bed and Breakfast in La Boisselle, who were often my hosts. For the use of images in Belgium I would like to thank François Maekelberg, President of the 1914 St Yves Christmas Truce Committee, and Klaus Verscheure of the Danse La Pluie production company, Sint-Denijs. In the UK I was assisted by Anna Jarvis at the Heritage Lottery Fund and Peter Francis, Media and Marketing Manager, and Ian Small at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I would also like to thank Dr Wanda George, Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada and Emeritus Professor Myriam Jansen-Verbeke, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium for allowing me to use the results of the WHTRN survey.

Abbreviations

APWGBHG – All-Party Parliamentary War Heritage Group (UK)

CWGC – Commonwealth War Graves Commission

HGG – Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne

IFFM – In Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres, Belgium

IWGC – Imperial War Graves Commission

MGGM – Musée de la Grande Guerre du Pays de Meaux

UNESCO – United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation

WHS – World Heritage Site

WHTRN – World Heritage Tourism Research Network

WW1 – World War One

A note on terminology

In this book ‘the Somme’ refers to the area where the British army fought in France from August 1915; the Battle of the Somme (July – November 1916) was fought along a front roughly 18 miles (29 kilometres) long stretching from Gommecourt in the north to Curlu in the south. The terms ‘along the Somme’ and ‘on the Somme’ refer to this geographical parcel of land and not the modern French département or the river of that name.

Modern Conflict Archaeology

The Series

Modern Conflict Archaeology is a new and interdisciplinary approach to the study of twentieth and twenty-first century conflicts. It focuses on the innumerable ways in which humans interact with, and are changed by the intense material realities of war. These can be traditional wars between nation states, civil wars, religious and ethnic conflicts, terrorism, and even proxy wars where hostilities have not been declared yet nevertheless exist. The material realities can be as small as a machine-gun, as intermediate as a war memorial or an aeroplane, or as large as a whole battle-zone landscape. As well as technologies, they can be more intimately personal – conflict-related photographs and diaries, films, uniforms, the war-maimed and ‘the missing’. All are the consequences of conflict, as none would exist without it.

Modern Conflict Archaeology (MCA) is a handy title, but is really shorthand for a more powerful and hybrid agenda. It draws not only on modern scientific archaeology, but on the anthropology of material culture, landscape, and identity, as well as aspects of military and cultural history, geography, and museum, heritage, and tourism studies. All or some of these can inform different aspects of research, but none are overly privileged. The challenge posed by modern conflict demands a coherent, integrated, sensitized yet muscular response in order to capture as many different kinds of information and insight as possible by exploring the ‘social lives’ of war objects through the changing values and attitudes attached to them over time.

This series originates in this new engagement with modern conflict, and seeks to bring the extraordinary range of latest research to a passionate and informed general readership. The aim is to investigate and understand arguably the most powerful force to have shaped our world during the last century – modern industrialized conflict in its myriad shapes and guises, and in its enduring and volatile legacies.

This Book

What to do with the war dead? How best to honour and remember them? And, how should we deal with the tensions between forgetting and remembering? One answer, as Stephen Miles shows in this path-breaking book on the First World War’s Western Front, is to visit them, or at least to journey to the places where monuments and memorials have been erected to their memory, even when they are not present by virtue of still being missing on the battlefields.

In the wake of the Armistice on 11 November 1918, battlefield pilgrimages and tours tapped into the need of the bereaved to visit the graves of, and the places associated with, their loved ones. Beginning in the 1920s, and down to the eve of the Second World War, legions of the desolate tramped across the old Western Front, chafed by grief, battlefield guides in hand, seeking a rendezvous of the spirit with the sons, fathers, brothers, husbands and lovers who had not returned. Never before or since have the dead been visited by so many of the living. But why do visitors still come a century on? What do they see today and where do they see it? How have places and attitudes changed under the pressures of Remembrance, commercialization, and the wars in-between?

In, recent decades, visitor numbers to the Western Front of France and Belgium have increased dramatically at the same time as the First World War has become more than history. Since the late 1990s, archaeologists, anthropologists, cultural historians, and heritage and tourism professionals have increasingly made a claim on what was once the preserve of military historians on the one hand, and battlefield scavengers on the other. Over the past two decades, the ‘view from below’ – the experiences of ordinary soldiers – has been given a more jagged edge, as the remains of men and matériel have emerged from the earth, often captured by television cameras. Sometimes, and in ways inconceivable to past generations, the painstaking study of military records and recovered personal belongings, together with DNA analysis, have identified individuals, reclaiming them from the stone-engraved lists of ‘the missing’. Families who had never known, or who had forgotten their First World War connections can now visit the graves of their ancestors for the first time in a hundred years.

At the same time, museums along the old battlefields have increasingly engaged their publics with creative exhibitions charting the contributions of those who were brought from across the world to join the ‘Great War for Civilization’. Partnering these exhibitions are others which have explored hitherto under-acknowledged aspects of the war, from Trench Art to postcards, from aerial photography to Remembrance flowers, war art, and the contested reconstruction of devastated towns and cities. This new generation of major museums has responded to the needs and expectations of a changing public just as innumerable privately-run café-museums catered to the charabancs of bereaved relatives which began arriving in the early 1920s.

Yesterday and today the places where battlefield visitors go are framed (some would say corrupted) by commerce just as the conflict itself produced vast profits for war-related industries. Different perspectives create widely varied responses to the modern commercialization of the war, from the multitude of tour companies offering specialist itineraries to war-themed food and drink, and from t-shirts and crockery to the undisputed king of Remembrance icons, the ubiquitous poppy as lapel badge, car sticker, umbrella, and edible chocolate flower. Whether buying such items is simply modern-day tourist behaviour, or perhaps a deeper investment in memory and place is debateable – though both must play their part. What is new, or at least more recent, are several different but connected developments which have accompanied the surge in battlefield tourism. In France and Belgium, there are, to different degrees, legal recognition of and protection for First World War remains as cultural patrimony, codes of ethical practice for tourism, and a revitalised interest in re-enactment of battles by enthusiasts.

Stephen Miles documents, explores, and offers his own thoughts and analysis of this spiders’ web of issues that is part history, part anthropology, and part heritage and tourism. Drawing on his own original research and fieldwork, he unravels the strands of emotion and memory, of commercialization and commemoration; he tells how those he spoke to are moved to visit the places of their ancestors, and their feelings at having done so. He asks the difficult questions about the rights and wrongs of such activities, about how such landscapes of death and destruction became heritage, and what exactly does that mean for the old killing fields of the Western Front where so many who fought still lie just centimetres beneath the busy roads and fertile fields, rather than in the regimented rows of official war cemeteries.

This is a timely book, published in the middle of the Centenary of the First World War, and on the cusp of changing attitudes and perceptions to a conflict that has passed beyond living memory. It is perfectly pitched to make us rethink what the war meant during the inter-war years, and what it means today in a world full of violence and danger not just to soldiers, but to ordinary people on city streets. Modern conflicts have moved beyond the battlefield to embrace us all. In this singular way, today’s visitors to Western Front cemeteries and memorials carry a sense of anxiety about their own personal safety at home unknown to the original battlefield pilgrims and visitors of the years 1919–1939, when grief at the loss of others was paramount.

By interviewing those whom he encountered during his own sojourns along this war landscape, Miles captures a unique snapshot of today as well as of the past. While family histories propel our desire to visit the battlefields, we are not just visitors to the Great War past, but time travellers to our own past, standing in the places not only where young men in uniform suffered and died, but where countless others have stood in later years trying to comprehend their own loss.

The truth of the matter, as this book reveals, is that the Western Front is not solely a century-old physical destination, but also an imaginary place, where multitudes can stand together in one location yet experience widely different emotions and senses of personal identification and validation. The power of landscape to hold and shape us is arguably nowhere as evident as when we are in ancestral places, tied by history, memory, imagination and blood to our own forebears who died before their time. Landscape is indeed the last witness to the First World War, but there are as many Western Fronts as there are visitors to it.

Nicholas J Saunders, University of Bristol, June 2016

About this Book

This book is written from a British and Commonwealth perspective. I make no apologies for this as broadening the book’s focus to include the entire Front with its international roll-call of different nationalities would have been an unwieldy undertaking; it would also have necessitated delving into foreign-language sources for which I am ill-equipped. For this reason I have maintained a specific remit although some readers may find their own nation’s involvement in the Western Front underplayed (particularly with regard to contemporary tourism). This is regrettable but is in no small measure due to the gap that currently exists in research into tourists from Commonwealth countries outside of Australia, New Zealand and Canada to the Western Front. I hope this imbalance will be rectified in the future. The only concession to the manner in which the Great War is interpreted and experienced by another nation is my inclusion of the Musée de la Grande Guerre du Pays de Meaux in Chapter 6. At the time of writing this was the newest large museum along the Western Front and it would have been remiss of me to have excluded it just because its primary visitor constituency was French. It is here included as an excellent example of innovative war museology.

I deliberately decided to adopt a broad definition of the word ‘tourist’ in this book which follows that provided by the United Nations as:

a traveller taking a trip to a main destination outside his/her usual environment, for less than a year, for any main purpose (business, leisure or other personal purpose) other than to be employed by a resident entity in the country or place visited.¹

Tourism refers to the activities of these people. I make no distinction between a tourist and a visitor, the latter often excluded from tourism statistics if they are day-trippers. I have avoided this difficulty although inaccuracies are likely to exist as, for example, with the status of visiting locals, government officials and soldiers/cadets both contemporary and historic. Overall I have treated tourists as a homogeneous body regardless of such characteristics as age, gender, educational background or ethnicity. This is because I did not want the discussion to be weighed down by a large number of graphs and tables which might have been needed at every turn to explain differences in tourist engagement with the region.

Prologue: The Menin Gate, Ypres – 17 March 2015

As the evening shadows lengthened the crowds began to move as if drawn by some hidden magnetic force. In large groups and small they walked purposefully along the souvenir-lined Meensestraat towards their destination, the Menin Gate, a classical monolith and global iconic symbol of commemoration. Just like these crowds others had walked this road before, laden with heavy guns, ammunition, personal kit and all manner of military impedimenta, singing cheerfully or walking mute and anxious, in wind, rain and sunshine; on they move in our imaginations, the soldiers of the Great War, along this very road towards the pounding guns and muddy trenches. Many were not to return. I join the moving crowd as we follow them to a monument they would not have known but one which belongs only to them, these ghostly figures from fading pages and sepia photographs. It is a special moment.

The soft light falls on the gate warming its surfaces which soon become golden like the mellow walls of a Cotswold village. The police have already closed the road and the crowds thicken; I stand in line amid a rising murmur of conversation. There are accents from every corner of Britain and beyond and groups of school-children vie for position, lively and boisterous. Young children sit cross-legged on the floor eager not to miss the ceremony; others sit aloft on their parents’ shoulders with a grandstand view. Selfies are being taken. In essence this could be any crowd. Grey-blue uniformed RAF personnel take position as an Honour Guard, sharing jokes and snatching photos of each other. In the distance there is the sound of boots marching on the cobbles and a large contingent of Dutch army cadets takes up position at the gate, echoing the sounds of military forebears a century ago. Hands on shoulders they shuffle into position with martial precision then stand rigidly to attention. All four corners of the hall are now blocked off and the crowd is ten deep.

The cavernous structure envelopes these crowds waiting patiently and expectantly. Above us is a massive arched barrel vault with three huge roundels now letting in the crepuscular light. On each façade are entrances leading on to steps above which lie rows of bright red wreaths. Above the cornice is a panel reading, ‘To the armies of the British Empire, who stood here from 1914 to 1918 and to those of their dead who have no known grave’. And it is to these individuals that my eye is drawn as I become aware of thousands of inscribed names on every surface of the hall, the stairwells and the galleries of the memorial. Carved beautifully and precisely into 60 Portland limestone panels are 54,394 officers and men from United Kingdom and Commonwealth Forces (except New Zealand and Newfoundland) who fell around Ypres before 16 August 1917. The numbers are staggering – name upon name, row upon row – sons, husbands, fathers, uncles are all recorded here, each and every one a human being without the dignity of a burial or final resting place. Here they are listed by regiment, seniority of rank and alphabetically by surname; on one of the upper panels is Brigadier General Charles Fitzclarence the ‘GOC (General Officer Commanding) Menin Gate’. There are familiar sounding names and unusual ones too – Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Indian, South African – Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. I check later and discover that my own surname appears 40 times. This is an entire army on a vast vertical parade ground standing to attention with lapidary regimentalism and united in death in a martial sense of comradeship. It is hard to take in.

The Menin Gate is arguably the most concentrated symbolic commemorative space in British culture. A whole nation and its Empire made a stand here on the Western Front and vast numbers made the supreme sacrifice. The classical architecture has been interpreted by some as a monument to victory and when opened in 1927 was derided as a grotesque valedictory symbol of military prowess in a war that had caused immense death and suffering; indeed the poet Siegfried Sassoon referred to the Menin Gate as a ‘sepulchre of crime’. But the Imperial War Graves Commission, the memorial’s builders, intended the gate to be first and foremost a place for commemoration where those who had lost loved ones could grieve and find solace. At the opening ceremony on 27 July 1927 Lord Plumer said quite poignantly of each one of those named: ‘He is not missing; he is here’.

Suddenly the sound of boots marching in step resonates around the hall and four navy blue uniformed buglers line up on the cobbles. It is 8.00 pm. The cacophony of conversation reduces to a low susurrus then is all but extinguished as attention becomes directed towards them. Shrill notes ring out followed by an abrupt pause. At this a Master of Ceremonies from the Last Post Association addresses the crowd over a microphone and after welcoming us requests that no-one applauds at the end or at any time during the ceremony. He then moves on to relate the biography of Lance Corporal Marcus Levinge, a New Zealand soldier killed on 17 March 1917 near Messines, not far from Ypres. The crowd are attentive and focussed on this tragic story given greater meaning as the words resonate around the tens of thousands of inscribed names. At this the buglers sound the Last Post which echoes around the vault and provides a visceral focus for remembering the sheer scale of the sacrifice. Marking the end of the soldier’s daily labours and the beginning of the night’s rest the Last