Never came to claim chair
1916 left him with no choice. Hedd Wyn volunteered to spare his younger brother Robert.
After months at war, Hedd Wyn was allowed to return home in March 1917 to help with the family farm and it is then when he started work on a new poem titled Yr Arwr (The Hero) which was his 1917 National Eisteddfod submission.
Due to work on the farm taking longer than expected, Hedd Wyn was ordered to return to the front by the military police, who turned up to collect him.
Amid the confusion and rush Hedd Wynn left the uncompleted poem behind – but wrote it again as he met up with the 15th Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers at Fléchin in France, from where he posted his poem The Hero.
Days later – 100 years ago today – he was killed at Pilckem Ridge near Ypres. He was one of 9,300 British soldiers killed in the first three days of the Battle of Passchendaele.
In just three days from July 31 to August 2 the British forces advanced by just 1.7 miles and suffered 32,000 casualties during those first three days of fighting.
As the hellish battle continued, the whole of Trawsfynydd village turned out in mourning as the black chair was delivered to the family farm.
The Battle of Passchendaele claimed thousands more lives and saw an estimated 325,000 Allied and between 260,000 and 400,000 German casualties either dead, wounded or missing in 103 days of heavy fighting and which moved the front line by just eight kilometres.
David Lloyd George, who was Prime Minister of the wartime coalition government during and immediately after World War One, described the Passchendaele campaign as “tragic carnage” in his war memoirs.
Thousands of soldiers were gunned down in the mud and there was torrential rain during the battle on the Western Front, from July to November 1917.