at Wightwick. The Social functions at Burton on Trent, Kidderminster and Walsall were supported by members of the Branch. All in all, it has been a very active year for the Branch. All ex-Mercians are very welcome.


Eagle Dining Club


A very proud granddad! WO2 Bill Steed Signals Platoon 1 Mercian V with his grandson after his passing out parade at Catterick


The Eagle Dining Club continues to meet each year. The 2009 Dinner was held at Lucas House, Birmingham University and the 2010 Dinner was held at the same venue on Friday 14th May. The Dining Club is open to all officers, both Regular and Volunteer, who served with The Mercian Volunteers. Our thanks go to Maj Lawrence Chell and his committee for organising the Dinner each year.


Contact Maj Chell on 01332 768221. Lt Cols Clarke, Lewis and Jeavons and Maj Chell The Website


The site has had over 69,000 hits since its inception providing a link for ex-Mercian members all over the world. Nick Pearson continues to provide the IT skills and the driving force as Webmaster for which we are extremely grateful. We are still looking for photographs, stories and


information about the Volunteers, so please let Nick have them; his e-mail address is: toonarmy60@ btinternet.com so keep in touch! The website address is:


www.mercians.org.


Lt Col Clarke presenting the Mayor of Zonnebeke with a Mercian Volunteer plaque (Gheluvelt is now part of Zonnebeke)]


Battlefield Tour Flanders 2009


Do you recognise the four Mercians who visited Flanders in September 2009 and toured some of the old Ypres Salient battlefields of the First World War? You do? Then you are older than you think!


Basing ourselves at Poelkapelle near Ypres, we were well placed to explore some of those sites with names such as Menin Gate, Langemark, Pilchem, Hill 60, Hooge Ridge, Gheluvelt, Passchendaele, Messines Ridge, the Spannenmole Crater and Ypres itself. Our accommodation for the week was just below the village of Passchendaele at Varlet Farm. At some time during the war, it had been the Headquarters of the Royal Naval Division. Although the farm was completely destroyed in 1916, it has been rebuilt and is situated right in the middle of the old battlefield on the gentle slope leading up to Passchendaele which was eventually taken by Canadian troops at huge cost in November 1917. Some half a million allied soldiers were killed or wounded in the numerous attempts to capture the ridge and the German army suffered an equal number of casualties. Today it is a pleasant undulating landscape under crops of corn and potato.


In fact, the courtyard of the farm, with its piles of the detritus of war such as spent ammunition and broken bits of equipment, still bears


152 October 2010


testimony all these years later to the horrendous struggle that took place in that small corner of Belgium. Charlotte Cardoen, the farmer’s wife, told us in impeccable English that the annual potato harvest was an interesting experience, bringing its own annual crop of unexploded grenades and shells. It appears that her job is to sit on the mechanical harvester and pick out the grenades from the potato crop as they are lifted from the ground, later to be destroyed by ammunition technical officers from the Belgian army!


We had allowed ourselves three days for the visit and we divided our time into a day in Ypres, its museum and the immediate area, a day in the northern and eastern part of the salient and then a day in the southern part around Messines Ridge. This short account precludes describing all the sites we saw but two events stand out in my memory. The first was the visit to the chateau at Gheluvelt, a major Battle Honour of The Worcestershire Regiment, where, in October 1914, the 2nd Battalion, as the Brigade reserve, plugged the gap that had been created by a massive German advance along the Menin road. Advancing from their reserve positions in Polygon Wood, the Battalion, tired and under-strength from casualties, moved 1000 yards under heavy artillery and small arms fire to bayonet charge a German Battalion which had broken through the line held by the South Wales Borderers. The


Worcesters cleared the grounds of the chateau of enemy and re-established the line with its right flank in the village of Gheluvelt itself.


The second event was our wish to meet the Mayor of Zonnebeke/Gheluvelt and present him with a Mercian Volunteers plaque and formal greetings from Worcestershire. What started off as a request to meet Dirk Cardoen soon developed into a drinks party and an exchange of international bonhomie. The picture says it all! Gheluvelt Park in Worcester has been refurbished and the Mayor of Zonnebeke attended the re-opening on 14th August. Yet another drinks party! To attend the nightly sounding of the Last Post at the Menin Gate is to experience some of the emotion still engendered by those awful events ninety years ago. Surrounded by the names of 85,000 men who were never found and denied a decent burial, the enormity of it all strikes home. When you go to Tyne Cot cemetery near Passchendaele and see inscribed on its rear wall the names of another 35,000 soldiers who were never found, then you begin to realise the scale of the sacrifices made by our grand and great grandparents. After that, our annual November Remembrance Day services in the 21st century take on a new meaning. The sentence “We will remember them” acquires an immediacy that is absolute.


The Mercian Eagle


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