Royal salute for heroes
He echoes his great grandfather George V with tribute to heroes of Passchendaele
THE scene of conflict was a quagmire which ran with the blood of the fallen during one of the most infamous chapters of the First World War.
More than half a million British, Allied and German soldiers had been killed, wounded or gone missing by the end of the three-month long Battle of Passchendaele.
Many died going over the top into a hail of bullets. Others simply disappeared in the hellish swamp created by unrelenting rain and shellfire in the fields near the Belgian town of Ypres. One wrong step could send you to your death in a crater of slime.
Yesterday, 100 years since the battle began on July 31, 1917, Prince Charles led tributes to those who fought at Passchendaele during a poignant ceremony in the largest Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in the world where 4,000 descendants of soldiers gathered to pay their respects.
Serene and immaculately kept with row upon row of neat white headstones, Tyne Cot cemetery sits north of Ypres on ground that was once a battlefield.
Tyne Cot was the name given by the Northumberland Fusiliers to a barn which had become the centre of a German stronghold of pillboxes. It was finally captured on October 4, 1917.
Time may have changed the landscape, but the struggle to comprehend what happened at Passchendaele, a village near Ypres, remains undimmed.
Indeed, it was to the words of his great-grandfather George V, who visited Tyne Cot in 1922, that Charles turned yesterday.
Charles said: ‘After the war almost 12,000 graves of British and Commonwealth soldiers were brought here from surrounding battlefields. Today a further 34,000 men who could not be identified or whose bodies were never found have their names inscribed on the memorial.
‘Thinking of these men, my great-grandfather remarked: “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”.’
By the end of the battle – officially the Third Battle of Ypres – in November 1917, the Allies had advanced just five miles.
Outlining the tortuous course of the battle, Charles said: ‘One hundred years ago today the Third Battle of Ypres began. At ten to four in the morning, less than five miles from here, thousands of men drawn from across Britain, France and the Commonwealth attacked German lines. The battle we know today as Passchendaele would last for over 100 days.
‘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.
‘The advance was slow and every inch was hard fought. The land we stand upon was taken two months into the battle by the 3rd Australian Division. It would change hands twice again before the end of the war.’
Some 11,961 men lie in the cemetery, of whom more than 8,300 remain unidentified. There are also four German burials. The Germans were remembered with flowers laid down by the Duchess of Cambridge and Queen Mathilde of Belgium.
By the end of the offensive, the Allied forces had sustained over 320,000 casualties, including high numbers of Australian, New Zealand and Canadian troops. German losses are estimated at between 260,000 and 400,000.
Charles also quoted the acclaimed war correspondent Philip Gibbs, who had worked for the Daily Mail earlier in his career and witnessed Passchendaele, recalling how he wrote: ‘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.’
At the ceremony the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were joined by the King and Queen of Belgium as they walked through the rows of headstones.
Before yesterday’s ceremony, Prince William admitted it had been a ‘proper teary moment’ hearing the Last Post played at Menin Gate, Ypres, at a service on Sunday evening.
Lewis Moody, a member of England’s 2003 Rugby World Cup winning team, told how he wept when he discovered, while making a film about rugby players killed in battle, that his mother’s great uncle Ernest Lovejoy was among those lost at Passchendaele.
‘There was a wave of emotions that almost caused me to break down,’ he said.
‘Every inch was hard fought’