100 years since the start of slaughter
In 1922, King George V visited the Tyne Cot cemetery during a pilgrimage to the Great War dead and looked out over the rows of thousands of wooden crosses planted in memory of the fallen.
“I have many times asked myself,” he said at the time, “whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon Earth through the years to come than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war.”
On Monday, his great grandson, t he Prince of Wales, repeated those words as he led the commemorations to the dead of Passchendaele.
In a reading before he laid a wreath at the cemetery’s stone of remembrance, Prince Charles summed up the horror of the 100- day battle, which started on July 31, 1917, and ended when Canadians seized the town in November. By then, there had been nearly half a million casualties on both sides — all for the gain of eight kilometres of Flanders soil.
“We remember it not only for the rain that fell, the mud that weighed down the living and swallowed the dead, but also for the courage and bravery of the men who fought here,” he said.
Now those crosses have been replaced by neat rows of white headstones marking the 11,961 Commonwealth soldiers commemorated here — such was the carnage that more bodies are buried at Tyne Cot than any other Commonwealth War Graves site.
As the Prince delivered his speech to a crowd of several thousand dignitaries and descendants of the fallen, bright sunshine illuminated the Tyne Cot memorial, a semi-circular Portland stone wall 4.5 metres high, which bears the names of another 35,000 Commonwealth soldiers who fell in battle and whose bodies were never found.
In his speech, the Prince quoted war reporter Philip Gibbs who had himself witnessed Passchendaele.
“Nothing that has been written is more than the pale image of the abomination of those battlefields, and that no pen or brush has yet achieved the picture of that Armageddon in which so many of our men perished.”
The Duke of Cambridge spoke last, calling out Kipling’s haunting transcription to the Unknown Soldier which adorns three quarters of the graves here. “A soldier of the Great War, Known unto God.”
The Duchess of Cambridge, standing alongside her husband with a poppy pinned to her chest, then laid a floral tribute at the grave of one unknown soldier and both stood with their heads bowed.
Flowers were also laid at the graves of four German soldiers buried here, treated by Allied forces after they had captured the enemy lines. A letter written by one unknown German officer to his mother on Sept. 20, 1917, was among those read out: “You do not know what Flanders means,” he wrote. “Flanders means endless endurance. Flanders means blood and scraps of human bodies. Flanders means heroic courage and faithfulness, even unto death.”