Great War | Invisible Works

Vanishing Point – Langemark

Langemark is I feel one of the most desolate corners of the Western front. As I mentioned in another piece on Vladslo there is something so desperately bleak and sad about German cemeteries. They don’t lack in any of the respectfulness of the loss or the death...

Vanishing Point: Flatiron Copse

Vanishing Points

There are parts of the Somme where you can and do suddenly feel remarkably isolated in the sun, bits around Serre in the tractor tyre marks and up on the swallowing heights of Redan Ridge with the wind and the larks. For me Mametz is one of the most curious of these,...

Vanishing Points: Tyne Cot

Vanishing Points

If and when you visit the Western Front, which a huge and growing number of people do partly because of the centenary and partly because you know, corner of a foreign field and all that family stuff, you are entering a piece of ground that is pretty much at the...

Vanishing point: Before endeavours fade

Vanishing Points

I’d been meaning to go to Holborn and take a photo of this chap for years. This is my grandfathers regimental memorial, he was in the 1st RF (of which I have already posted plenty), I collect these things for some reason I can’t fathom. The memorial is a...

Vanishing Point: Essex Farm, The Eve brothers

Vanishing Points

I’m fortunate, I get to go to Ypres and the Somme and indeed various other bits of the Western Front fairly often, I do it mostly for my own vicarious pleasure/misery or whatever you find you want to call it. If I face facts it is I suppose a strange thing to...

Vanishing Point: The Ridge

Vanishing Points

It’s quite an apposite moment, the ridge being what it is, a symbol of so much thrashing about in the earth trying to gain a foothold, somewhere that looms large in Canada’s psyche and it’s nearly Canada Day, a day that symbolises so much about the...

Shot at Dawn: John Abigail

Vanishing Points

John Abigail; A local lad, local to anyone in Norwich It’s a longer story than I can write, and a sad tale too. Born in Thorpe Hamlet, they moved to Oak Street shortly before the outbreak of The Great War. John was one of eight children, the family were poor one...

Vanishing Point: Vladslo – Mother and son

Vanishing Points

Deutscher Soldatenfreidhof Vladslo. The Cemetery is about a mile and half north east of Vladslo which sounds like it should be on the steppe somewhere but isn’t, it’s in Western Flanders towards Diksmuide, Belgium, itself about 20 miles North of Ypres. It...

Vanishing Point: Sint Juliaan – Under a green sea

Vanishing Points

The Brooding soldier sits on a corner at Sint Juliaan, or St Julian, or Vancouver Corner, take your pick from Flemish, English or Canadian. It is just to the North East of Ypres or Ieper on the way to Langemark/Poellcappelle not far from Passchendaele, but most sites...