Ruislip & Eastcote & Northwood Gazette
Where silence speaks loudest
PAUL FRY reflects on loss and hope on a battlefields tour of Belgium
NOTHING can quite prepare you for the sight. Twelve thousand white headstones standing in regimented lines, many dedicated only to “A soldier of the Great War... known unto God”.
This is Tyne Cot, the world’s largest Commonwealth war cemetery. It is immaculate, tended by staff and volunteers from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The powerful memorial – one of all too many – is surrounded by marble walls bearing the names of a further 33,783 UK soldiers and 1,176 New Zealanders whose bodies were never recovered from the cloying, suffocating mud where they fell in Flanders fields during the Great War.
A recent addition is an understated visitor centre that displays photos of loved ones, medals, letters and other mementoes that belonged to some of those who fell.
In May 1922, as the cemetery neared completion, George V visited and proclaimed: “I have many times asked myself 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.”
He was right. More moving, however, is a quote on a wall, from the unnamed fiancée of Scottish soldier John Low in January 1918.
“The thought that Jock died for his country is no comfort to me,” she wrote. “His memory is all I have left to love.”
You don’t need to look far for human touches that highlight the scale of inhumanity that blighted this land little over a century ago. There are headstones and register entries that show how many young soldiers, some not out of their teens, perished. Many signed up with Pals’ regiments, eager for adventure, but found instead barbed wire, bullets, gas, disease and death.
Tyne Cot grew from its original purpose – a repository for those killed in the First Battle of Ypres, many on operating tables, or deemed too far gone for medical intervention at the field dressing station that stood here.
We were on a day’s visit with Flanders Fields Battlefield Tours. None of us uttered a word while we were at Tyne Cot. Not until we were back on the road. It was part awe and respect, and part reflection on the senseless slaughter that ended so many barely lived lives.
We’d begun at Langemark, at the largest German First World War cemetery. Some 44,061 souls rest here, killed in a series of major battles around nearby Ypres.
Hardly anyone visits here – even very few Germans. It was here we learned how the German attack included young students who marched into battle in a state of near euphoria.
More than 2,000, some of them as young as 12, are buried at Langemark. The Belgians imposed tough restrictions on Germany’s dead: headstones had to be black
and were not allowed to stand upright.
Germany lost nearly two million men in the First World War, the largest number of casualties suffered by any nation. Yet for decades, this chapter of history was hardly taught at German schools. Today, the care of German memorials in western Flanders is carried out by volunteers and its grounds tended by students.
Dotted around the wider area are small cemeteries dedicated to many nationalities. There’s a Canadian one on the site where the first German chlorine gas attack was launched, and which has an impressive soldier figure standing solemnly atop a tall marble plinth.
We moved on to the excellent museum at Passchendaele, a name synonymous with a bloody, muddy stalemate. Here you can see uniforms, artillery and ordnance; you can walk in replica trenches and dugouts – and even get a replica sniff of chlorine gas, mustard gas and phosgene.
Lunch found us in the pretty town of Ypres, which is something of a phoenix-like wonder, as barely a stick was left standing after 1915. The central Wool Hall has been restored – the bullet-holes are real – and houses the innovative In Flanders Fields Museum and research centre.
Next was Hill 60 (named after its height above sea level) where giant craters were left by bombs packed under enemy lines by Allied miners.
Warfare was played out below ground, with both sides trying to, quite literally, undermine each other. At 3.10am on June 7, 1917, 450,000kg of high explosives went off under the German positions, killing 10,000 soldiers at a stroke.
Philip Gibbs, one of the five official British war reporters at the front, described the scene: “Suddenly at dawn, there rose out of the dark ridge and that ill-famed Hill 60, enormous volumes of scarlet flame throwing up high towers of earth and smoke all lighted by the flame, so that many of our soldiers waiting for the assault were thrown to the ground.”
If you have seen the Sam Mendes movie 1917, you will have seen a huge crater, filled with water and bodies in mud so clinging that, if you fell in, you would never come out. The film was shot in Scotland, Cornwall, Teesside and Shepperton Studios but you get the picture.
We have long been bombarded with figures and statistics but to see the now peaceful killing fields is cause for reflection on what really happened here.
Ordnance is still being dug up after every harvest.
In one farmer’s garage, my wife nervously held a grenade we were assured was safe.
When unexploded items are hit by farm machinery, it is a chilling reminder that World War One is still claiming victims more than a century later.
Decades on, bodies and weaponry still slowly rise to the surface.
We end fittingly at the poignant Last Post ceremony at Ypres’ Menin Gate, which has been repeated at 8pm every day since 1928.
After the bugles have sounded their final notes, a British schoolgirl stands in the centre of the giant stone arch, fronted by carved lions, and recites the lament: “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
“At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them.”