Battle of the Menin Road Ridge. Regimental aid post and horse ambulance of the Royal Army Medical Corps in front of Zillebeke, 24 September 1917.
Mirror image: I think the one displayed by the IWM is flipped the wrong way around.
The canal bridge at Rijselseweg used as a shelter. The canal only held a significant amount of water between the closed lock gates of Lock 7b and a wall of sandbags at lock 7. This left the canal mainly dry in the further direction of Ypres. This photograph was taken by Lt. John Warwick Brooke, as he stood in the bottom of the canal facing the earth in-fill which raised the inhabitable area above the risk of flooding.
Today, the scene above is buried under a wide earth embankment. Although of substantial construction, this bridge came into the front line between April and September 1918. It could well have been irreparably damaged in pre-attack bombardments. At some time in the last 100 years, all the many bridges of the Ypres-Comines canal were replaced by earth shovelled into the canal to form maintenance free embankment crossings.
