YPRES TO VERDUN
COUNTRY
LIFE
First published in 1921.
Ypres to Verdun
A Collection of Photographs of
THE WAR AREAS IN
FRANCE & FLANDERS
Specially taken by
SIR ALEXANDER B. W. KENNEDY
LL.D., F.R.S.
Past President of the Institution of Civil Engineers
Associate Member of the Ordnance Committee, etc.
LONDON:
Published at the Offices of "Country Life," Ltd., Tavistock Street,
Covent Garden, W.C. 2, and by George Newnes, Ltd., Southampton
Street, Strand, W.C. 2. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons
"Quand pensez-vous que la guerre sera finie?" dit le Docteur.
"Quand nous serons vainqueurs," coupa le Général.
"Les Silences du Col. Bramble."—Maurois.
PREFACE
An official visit to the Front during the great days ofOctober, 1918, when our chief difficulty and our greatobject was to keep up with the retreating Germans,gave me some first-hand knowledge of the devastationof the country which had been the result of four yearsof war. Familiar—too familiar—as this was to oursoldiers, we at home—if I may take myself as a fair example of theaverage man—could really form no idea, even from the most vividof the correspondents' descriptions, of what the ruined country wasactually like. Roads, fields, orchards, were a featureless waste ofshell-holes, often already covered with rank herbage altogetherdisguising their original nature. Villages were only recognisableby painted notices, "This is Givenchy," or sometimes "This wasGivenchy"; not a house, not a wall, not a gate-post to show wherethey had been. Large towns like Ypres or Lens or Albert werelittle more than piles of brick, stone, and timber rubbish, throughwhich roads were being cleared between immense piles of débris.In Rheims nearly as many houses were destroyed as the 13,000 saidto have been burnt in the Great Fire of London, and smaller placeslike Soissons or Cambrai or Arras had suffered terribly. It wasforbidden in our Army Areas at that time, no doubt for excellentreasons, to use a camera, but I made up my mind that when permissioncould be obtained I would do my best to secure somepermanent record of what had happened.
It was only in September of 1919 that I was able, with my friend,Lieutenant-Colonel Douglas Gill, D.S.O., R.A., to make a first[vi]photographic visit to the War Areas, and to get over a hundred viewsfrom Ypres to Verdun. At this time Major-General P. G. Grant wasin charge of affairs at Headquarters at Wimereux. It was not withoutpardonable professional pride that I remembered that it was GeneralGrant, a Royal Engineer Officer, who had on the 25th-26th of March,1918, been chosen to organise the wonderfully constituted Companywhich General Haig's despatch euphemistically called, in enumeratingthe elements of which it consisted, a "mixed force." The days we