Ypres

views updated Jun 27 2018

Ypres a town in SW Belgium, near the border with France, in the province of West Flanders, the scene of some of the bitterest fighting of the First World War, and now site of the Menin Gate.
Battle of Ypres the name given to each of three battles on the Western Front near Ypres during the First World War in 1914, 1915, and 1917. In the first battle (October–November 1914) Allied forces prevented the Germans breaking through to the Channel ports; the second battle (April–May 1915) was an inconclusive trench conflict in which poison gas was used for the first time, while the third battle (1917) was the slaughter of Passchendaele.