Recalling bloodiest day of war
‘‘I died in hell (They called it Passchendaele),’’ is how the poet Seigfried Sassoon described the three month battle that left 500,000 casualties and became synonymous with the slaughter of the First World War.
It’s exactly 100 years since the name of the tiny Belgian village on the Western Front name became linked to New Zealand’s ‘‘darkest hour’’ of the 1914-18 conflict.
On October 12, 1917 an Allied attack on heavily-defended German lines snuffed out the lives of 845 Kiwi soldiers in a quagmire of liquid mud, barbed wire and machine guns. The total rose to 950 after soldiers succumbed to their wounds. Some 1860 were injured.
Passchendaele’s dead included
23 men from Taranaki, according to Ancestry.com.
Among them was 2nd Lieutenant Cyril Cutten Carncross, of Eltham, the son of the Hon. Walter Charles Frederick Carncross, the Acting Speaker of the Legislative Council.
‘‘When his father retired from the House of Representatives in
1902, and went to Taranaki to take over the Eltham Argus, Cyril accompanied him and did good work for that paper until he enlisted with the Rifle Brigade,’’ read an obituary published on October 25 and recovered by historian Helen Vale.
‘‘He left for France on September 6, 1917 and joined his battalion in the field on September
21,’’ she writes.
Less than a year after enlisting, and three weeks after arriving in Belgium, Cyril Cutten Carncross was killed in action. He was
28-years-old.
Carncross was one of 100,000 New Zealanders who went away to ‘‘do their bit’’ in the war - a huge number considering the country’s population in 1914 was 1.1 million. About 18,000 died.
Others to fall on that grim October day included Private Leo Dawson Boswell, of New Plymouth, Rifleman Leonard Broadmore, of Inglewood, Private Montague D’Arcy Julian, of Opunake, and Private Henry Charles Wells, of Warea, Taranaki.
‘‘In terms of lives lost in a single day, this was the most catastrophic in the country’s history,’’ Chris Turver, RSA district president of the Wellington-West Coast-Taranaki region, said.
Some 322 of the dead have never been identified and lie in the nearby Tyne Cot cemetery, he added. ‘‘It was the darkest day in the whole of New Zealand’s military history.’’
Today, services are taking place in New Zealand and Belgium to remember the fallen.
The Pukeahu National War Memorial Park in Wellington will see a national commemorative programme at 3pm to mark the centenary of the Battle of Passchendaele, followed by a reflective event at 6pm at the Te Papa museum.
The ceremony will be live streamed on the WW100 website and Facebook page.
And in Belgium the New Zealand National Commemoration will take place at 11am local time at Tyne Cot Cemetery, the largest Commonwealth War Grave Cemetery in the world.
The New Plymouth & District RSA has been unable to put on a service to mark the centenary, its president Graeme Lowe said.
‘‘Executive members have had a lot of illness this winter and the Events 100 committee has been heavily involved with planning for Armistice 2018.’’
The organisation remains committed to planning commemorations for ANZAC Day, Battle of Crete, and Armistice Day, he added. This year’s Armistice Day will be held at the Transitional Taranaki Cathedral on 12th November at 10am. All welcome.