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In this recording, Joe Cody is interviewed by Neville Webber. He recalls Ypres and Passchendaele during World War I, and what it was like revisiting many years later.
Introduction: What was Ypres really like? Well, here's Joe Cody, a First Canterbury man to talk about it.
Neville Webber: Were you billeted or living there, or just passing through?
Joe Cody: We were billeted a mile or two outside. English Camp, I think was the name of it. A hutted camp, elafin[?] type huts - Nissen huts I think you'd call them. Well we had - I was a quartermaster sergeant at the time and of course our job was to take the rations up to the men on the line, which meant we had to go through Ypres every night, along the road to this famous Hellfire Corner and then take the road up to our battalion headquarters.
Webber: What was this mud we've heard so much about?
Joe Cody: Well it was.. You can put it this way: it's a huge plain to start with, with a very, very small fall to the sea. Every creek and every river had been blocked with debris and shells for years. It was one saturated mass of yellow clay. After.. when it was dry it shook as you walked, and when it was wet, well, it was just up to your waist. Men and mules and horses and wounded had fallen and drowned in it quite easily, quite often.
Well the Menin Gate was a hole in the wall, huge ramparts right around a walled city. Well, it was just a gate, a hole in the wall, that's where we went through, out onto the road, turn right up to Hellfire Corner and thence by various duckwalks across the mud up to the line.
Webber: Now you've been back to Ypres in recent years. How did you find it?
Joe Cody: Huh well, the world never stands still, although you think it does. I didn't find it at all.
Webber: Now Passchendaele is quite near Ypres. Did you see it?
Joe Cody: Oh yes. Passchendaele was the objective of the New Zealand division. It's just a little one-street village on the top of a low ridge. We went up there, we went half-way up and past the big graveyard at Tyne Cot on one side, we went over and had a look at that. Saw where all the New Zealand boys are laying, untold thousands of them there. And then we went up the road, the St Julien road I think it is. It looked awfully steep to us at the time, when we were heading that way, but now I don't think a car would bother to change gear. It's just another town, another village on the top now, properly rebuilt again.
Webber: No sign of trenches or these duckwalks?
Joe Cody: No. Well, I saw a different Passchendaele altogether. The Passchendaele that the diggers knew - the mud, the dead mules, the dead horses, the broken limbers, the dead men lying in long rows where the machine guns had got them on an enfilade fire. Shell holes, well, the moon would be a summer resort, compared to the desolate shell hole-stricken place that I knew. The pill boxes there still, and the barbed wire all around them. It just wasn't there. It was a bit of a blow really because you think, in spite of common sense, that it might be the same as you knew it.
Transcript by Sound Archives/Ngā Taonga Kōrero