St. Eloi (Ypres)

Sint-Elooi is a small village, about 5 km (3.1 mi) south of Ypres in the Flemish province of West-Vlaanderen in Belgium. The former municipality is now part of Ypres. Though Sint-Elooi is the Dutch and only official name, the village's French name, St. Eloi, is most commonly used in English due to its role in World War I. The village and the nearby locations of Voormezele and Hollebeke were merged into Zillebeke in 1970 and into Ypres in 1976.

The village takes its name from Saint Eligius (also Eloy or Loye, French: Éloi, c. 588–660 who worked for twenty years to convert the pagan population of Flanders to Christianity.

In World War I, like other parts of the Ypres Salient, the village was the site of the between German and Allied forces. From the spring of 1915, there was constant underground fighting in the Ypres Salient at Hooge, Hill 60, Railway Wood, Sanctuary Wood, The Bluff and St Eloi. The Germans built an extensive system of defensive tunnels and were actively mining against the British trenches at the intermediate levels. In March 1915, they fired mines under the elevated area known as The Mound just south-east of St Eloi and in the ensuing fighting (the Action of St Eloi, 14–15 March 1915), in which units of the British 27th Division participated, the British infantry suffered some 500 casualties. A month later, on 14 April 1915, the Germans fired another mine producing a crater over 20 m (66 ft) in diameter. Counter-mining by the tunnelling companies of the Royal Engineers began at St Eloi in spring 1915. Much of the mining in this sector was done by the 177th Tunnelling Company and the 172nd Tunnelling Company. The geology of the Ypres Salient featured a characteristic layer of sandy clay, which put very heavy pressures of water and wet sand on the underground works and made deep mining extremely difficult. In autumn of 1915, 172nd Tunnelling Company managed to sink shafts through the sandy clay at a depth of 7.0 metres (23 ft) down to dry blue clay at a depth of 13 metres (43 ft), which was ideal for tunneling, from where they continued to drive galleries towards the German lines at a depth of 18 metres (60 ft). This constituted a major achievement in mining technique and gave the Royal Engineers a significant advantage over their German counterparts. After German successes at The Bluff, the British decided to use the deep mines created by 172nd Tunnelling Company at St Eloi in a local operation (the Actions of St Eloi Craters, 27 March – 16 April 1916) and six charges were fired. However, the accompanying British infantry operation was a failure; the problem lay in the Allied inability to hold crater positions after they had been captured. The Canadian HMCS St. Eloi was later named after the battle.

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