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may 31, 2017 \ newsweekly - € 0,75 \ rEad morE at www.flandErstoday.Eu currEnt affairs \ P2
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Sheep in the city
Molenbeek’s pop-up Parckfarm will become a permanent fixture now that the city council has approved a permit \2
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Full Speed ahead
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inviSible priSonS
The Brussels-based Greenlight4Girls is helping female pupils both at home and abroad to break into male-dominated ICT studies and jobs
A new exhibition at Ghent’s Museum Dr Guislain looks at mentally ill prisoners who have been in the wrong institutions for far too long
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sam sweeney will perform with the violin that British music hall performer Richard Howard was making when he was conscripted. Howard died in the Battle of messines
Making history
© elly lucas
the Battle of messines remembered, 100 years on denzil walton more articles by Denzil \ flanderstoday.eu
A century ago, the largest man-made explosion until the arrival of the nuclear bomb signalled the start of the Battle of Messines, an operation in which more than 40,000 soldiers were killed. A series of events are planned to mark the centenary.
I
n the early hours of 7 June 1917, the German 4th Army holding the Messines Ridge, a natural stronghold south-east of Ypres, was coming under fierce artillery bombardment. It had been going on for days. In the previous week, more than 2,200 artillery guns had pounded their lines, firing as many as 3,000,000 shells.
Suddenly, at 2.50, the barrage stopped. General Friedrich Sixt von Armin, aware that the silence was likely to presage an infantry attack, moved his men into position. They stared through the dark and the smoke, armed and alert to repel the enemy, not realising that the danger lay beneath their feet. On the Allied side, a countdown had begun. Preparations had started the previous year for an ambitious operation directed, like the Battle of Messines that followed, by Field Marshall Herbert Plumer, commander of the British Second Army. He was aware that taking the Messines Ridge – one of the strongest points in the German line – was
vital to the Allies’ chance of success. By 7 June, preparations were complete: 21 tunnels over a distance of 8,000 metres had been built underneath the Messines Ridge and filled with 455 tons of explosive. General Sir Charles Harington, chief of staff of the 2nd Army, told British officers: “Gentlemen, we may not make history tomorrow, but we shall certainly change the geography.” The statement made it into the press and became history. At 3.10, the mines underneath the German lines were detonated. Over the next 20 seconds, 19 huge explosions (two mines failed to explode) rocked Flanders in what would remain the largest man-made explosion until the arrival of continued on page 7