The First Battle of Ypres, 1914

After Germany had invaded neutral Belgium, the western front came to a standstill in late 1914. For the most part, the country was occupied by the Germans, but near the town of Ypres, French, British and Belgian soldiers kept the invaders in check. The first battle of Ypres lasted for a month, and was the beginning of grueling trench warfare between the Germans and the allies.

After a fierce German attack on October 31, a British vanguard withdrew to the road towards Ypres. Germany and the Allies troops fought for every yard of territory, but neither side managed a breakthrough.

The first major battle in Flanders gained fame because of claims that the German corps was mainly made up of young volunteers - students and apprentices. But the myth of the "self-sacrifice of the German youth" was contrived by the German leaders to cover up their own failure: abysmal training, inadequate equipment, and poor leadership.

The rush to assemble troops created a bottleneck: there were not enough rifles, saddles, or even shoes. As a result, 100,000 German soldiers had lost their lives by the end of November. The allies also recorded thousands of casualties.

The German military tried unsuccessfully to cut British troops off from their supply lines by staging a targeted attack on the Channel coast. What followed were horrific battles in Flanders until April 1915, when the Germans resorted to chlorine gas for the first time.

Large areas along the Belgian coast were razed in dogged trench warfare between October 20 and November 18, 1914. Belgian troops flooded the area - tactics that were successful for a time as they kept German divisions at bay.

On November 4, 1914, General Berthold Deimling ordered his troops to lay waste to the famous medieval Ypres Cloth Hall - with no military motive and against his supreme commander's explicit orders. By the second year of the war, large parts of the embattled Flemish city were already in ruins.

Numerous historic buildings in Ypres were destroyed during the first bomb attacks at the end of October 1914. People tried to salvage what they could from their ruined homes. Only about 8,000 of the city's 35,000 inhabitants stayed in Ypres during the war.

One of four German military cemeteries in Belgium is in Langemark. The remains of more than 44,000 soldiers are buried there. Even after World War I, politicians managed to instrumentalize the battle of Ypres by reinterpreting military defeat as a moral victory. Today, German politicians always join their counterparts from the former Allied nations to commemorate the war dead.