The Passchendaele Year

Achiel Van Walleghem was a village priest who kept a detailed record of events and attitudes. His unusual work offers a personal documentary and highly individual witness to the terrible events in Flanders in 1917. He lived in Reninghelst, just west of Ypres, and kept an extensive day-by-day account. He was very well informed by the officers lodging in his presbytery. Urged by his innate curiosity, he witnessed and noted the arrival of the first tanks and the increasing importance of the artillery. He also visited the camps of the Chinese Labour Corps and the British West Indies Regiment. On 7 June 1917 he awoke early to see the enormous mines of the Battle of Messines exploding. And he was present when a deserter was shot at dawn.  He records all this - and much more - with an unusual humanity.

This diary, on display at In Flanders Fields Museum, is not just a forgotten source of the western front, it is one that will forever change our views on the conflict, and on how men and women tried to cope.

With the support of the research project Memex WWI - Experiences and Memories of the Great War in Belgium (financed by BELSPO), Van Walleghems writings from 1917 have now been translated from the original Dutch by Professor Guido Latré Professor of English Literature and Culture, and Susan Reed, researcher in English Linguistics.

1917 – The Passchendaele Year
The British Army in Flanders: The Diary of Achiel Van Walleghem

Programme:

• A welcome from Jef Verschoore, chairman of the In Flanders Fields Museum and Deputy Mayor of Ypres
  Prof. Guido Latré: “Translating Achiel Van Walleghem’s Diary”
• Prof. Julian Putkowski: “Reversed Arms: Achiel Van Walleghem’s 1917 Diary and British Military Historiography of the First World War”
• Conclusion by Prof. John Spiers, after which he will present the chairman of the museum with the first copy
• a drink offered by In Flanders Fields Museum

Free entry
Thursday 18 May 2017 at 6.30 p.m.
Museum Café, In Flanders Fields Museum