2018 Battlefield Tour post 25
2018 France/ Belgium Trip Post No. 25
From the Christmas Truce site, we headed for our digs at Varlet Farm in Poelkapelle just north on Ypres.
The farm is worth a mention in its own right, it is shown on British trench maps in the middle of the Passchendaele battlefield and was a German fortified strong point in WW1.
During the Battle of Passchendaele (3rd Battle of Ypres) the Allies attacked the German line with 57 Divisions against the German 88 Divisions. The battle lasted 100 days and the British fired over 4 million shells in an advance of only 5 miles. To the cost of over a quarter of a million killed, wounded or missing.
During the battle, Varlet Farm came under attack by the Hood Bn of the Royal Naval Division. When this was repulsed the Anson Bn continued the assault at 5:40 am on 26 Oct 1917. It was finally taken at 7:20 am by Lt. Stevenson MC with only 7 men remaining from his Platoon. The RNVR lost 2000 men in the area around the farm.
The original moated farm was built in 1745 but destroyed in the fighting of 1917. It was eventually rebuilt in 1922 but 50 yards away from the original location. It is a typical working farm of 40 acres growing potatoes and sprouts run by Dirk Cardoen. His daughter Barbara helps him run the B&B side of the business.
What is not typical is that on a daily business Dirk comes face to face with the remains of the Great War. Every time he works the fields and especially during Spring and Autumn in what is known as the 'Iron Harvest' he unearths evidence of the events that occurred over 100 years ago. He uses one of his barns as a museum housing hundreds of artefacts he has found on his land.
There are remains of rifles and machine guns, bayonets, spent bullet cases, helmets, belt buckles, entrenching tools, duckboards, silent pickets and shrapnel by the bucket load. An interesting exhibit is a plaster cast of one of his tractor tracks. You can plainly see the nose cone of a shell stuck up. Lucky this time but farmers have been killed ploughing their fields and some have taken to armour plating their tractors.
Any unexploded ordnance he calmly places on a pallet to await disposal. When it's full he rings the local police who pass the message on to the Belgian Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company who are based near Ypres but a purpose-built facility that deals with gas shells only is located quite close to Dirk’s farm in Poelkapelle. It is estimated that more than a billion shells were fired in WW1 and approximately 30% failed to explode because of substandard fuses and shoddy production techniques. It will take hundreds of years to clear the fields of France and Flanders of this dangerous unwanted legacy of the Great War.
When we were there it was hot and he had the outside doors to the dining room open. There, not 30 feet away from where we were serenely eating our breakfast was a pallet load of unexploded bombs.
For anyone planning a battlefield trip, Varlet Farm is an excellent place to stay in Flanders, only 5 miles or so from Ypres.
