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In October, 1915 after several months of preparation in England, men of the 36th (Ulster) Division sailed across the Channel and began to disembark in France. The soldiers, drawn from all parts of the nine counties of Ulster, had previously trained at Finner Camp in Donegal, Ballykinlar in County Down, and the Clandeboye Estate near Bangor. All were volunteers with an overwhelming majority of them in their late teens and early twenties and, while many perhaps sought adventure and a chance to see some of the world beyond the confines of their own home towns and villages, they believed absolutely that their cause in going to war to free France and Belgium from German oppression and invasion was just and honourable.
During the next winter and spring they learnt their combat and trench skills in the quieter regions of the Western Front before moving, in June, 1916, to take over their allotted areas on either side of the River Ancre and west of the village of Thiepval in preparation for the forthcoming Battle of the Somme which started on 1st July, 1916. For the British, Commonwealth, and Empire soldiers the outcome on that day was little short of a massacre. The Ulster Division, which gained a few hundred yards of ground from Thiepval Wood up the hill towards the dauntingly fortified Schwaben Redoubt, suffered some five and a half thousand casualties - out of a total divisional complement of ten or eleven thousand men. (In writing of "casualties" it is a generally accepted assumption that one out of every three was killed or died of wounds later). Unable to advance or retreat, and impossible to reinforce because of unrelenting German shell, and machine-gun fire, those soldiers in the redoubt and elsewhere in no-man's-land held on until night gave them cover to slip back to the precarious safety of their own lines. The next day the division was withdrawn from the front and moved to the area around St. Omer where it regrouped, received large numbers of fresh soldiers to replace those killed or wounded, and made ready for its next engagement - the Battle of Messines.
The small town of Messines lies at the southern end of a low, rounded ridge which stretches eight kilometres northwards towards Ypres. The ridge overlooks the flat Flanders Plain and, in 1917 in the hands of the Germans, it dominated the southern sector of the Ypres Salient held by the British . Its capture was vital if the commander-in-chief's (Field Marshal Haig) strategic attack eastwards out of the Salient was to succeed.
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