Salient - Landscapes of the Great War

Loch Nagar is also the name of a mountain in Scotland.
The painting shows the start of the infamous Battle of the Somme on 1st July 1916. The battle began with the detonation of a series of 17 mines. Some of the immense craters, such as the Lochnagar Crater, are still visible today.
At the end of this socalled First Day of the Somme 58,000 British troops were lost (one third of them killed), which to this day remains a one-day record. The battle ran on until 18 November, at which point it was called off.

Shell holes and craters and ditches and trenches filled with treacherous mud and water.
Messines, south of Ypres (Belgium) saw endless and hopeless fighting. Finally, in June 1917, the allies succesfully captured the area from the Germans. Nineteen mines were detonated in tunnels digged deep under the German strongholds. Some 10,000 men were killed during the explosion alone.

The attack on Mametz Wood on 7 July 1916 was suicide.
Seven days into the battle of the Somme, the men of the 38th (Welsh) Division were directed to capture the formidable Mametz Wood, advancing suicidally uphill over open ground against sweeping machine gun and intense artillery fire. The attacks, ending on 12 July in the clearance of the wood, saw vicious hand-to-hand fighting and innumerable acts of courage - and over 4,000 Welsh deaths and casualties.

The most controversial battle of the Great War was the third major battle of Ypres, better known as the Battle of Passchendaele. It took place between July and November, 1917.
The British and Empire forces advanced just five miles, at a cost of at least a quarter of a million casualties. Their one consolation was that the Germans had also suffered grievously.
Perhaps the battle's enduring epitaph is the phrase from one of Siegfried Sassoon's poems: I died in hell - They called it Passchendaele.

The pattern of death, drawn by white chalk that came out of the trenches and the shell holes.
Nowadays Thiepval is the place of a huge memorial, with white stone panels on which are inscribed over 73,000 names of both British and French soldiers who were killed in the Somme Battlefield between 1916-1917, and who have no known graves.

Zonnebeke, in Flanders, was the place where the first trenches in the Ypres Salient were dug, between 16th and 20th October 1914.
From that moment on it was living hell. The village was completely removed from the earth - and so were many men and boys.

The Battle of Mouquet Farm was one of the most tragic Australian experiences of 1914-18 on the Western Front.
The battle was part of the Somme Campaign and lasted from the beginning of August 1916 until September. It fell only after the British had seized Thiepval and swept past Mouquet Farm.
It was also the place where one of the youngest Australians died. Private Stanley Adams from Randwick, Sydney, was a plumber before the war. He was 16 years old when he was killed in action at Moquet Farm, in August 1916. He has no known grave.

Langemark became the grave of numerous German boy soldiers. About 15% of Germany's volunteers were students and high school graduates. Entire lecture-rooms and classes - together with professors and teachers - would take themselves down to the recruiting offices.
In 1914 during the 1st Battle of Ypres, the German Army hurled these units of enthusiastic but untrained students into the fray. They were shot down in thousands by the only professional Army in Europe - the British.

This large German cemetery is only seven miles from Ypres. Many of the boy soldiers mentioned above lie here and for this reason the cemetery is often known as the Studentenfriedhof - the Students Cemetery.
There are 44,292 German soldiers buried here. The cemetery also holds a mass grave, where roughly 25,000 soldiers lie.

The memorial at Notre Dame de Lorette commemorates the bloody fighting in January - March 1915, in which the French infantry eventually held the line and more or less saved their country. A determined German attack initially penetrated the line, but in the end the Germans were driven back.
The cemetery has 20,000 white crosses, in remembrance of over 120,000 men from both sides who died in this sector.

One of the largest and most impressive war cemeteries in Flanders is Tyne Cot, situated to the south of the village of Passendale.
The name 'Tyne Cot' was given because on the site of the present cemetery, a cottage used to stand. The British soldiers abbreviated the word cottage to 'Cot' and coupled it with the name of the river Tyne in Northern-England.
On this cemetery are 11.856 graves.