My father was born in 1917, during the Great War. Welsh miners were a prized asset in World War One, with many used to dig trenches under enemy lines. But many remained underground in Wales digging coal as part of the national war effort. My family has its own history from that time and my grandfather on my mother's side fought in one of the great dreadnought battleships in at least one of the sprawling sea battles that took place in the North Sea. That is a story for another day.
Remembrance Day has just passed. This day has been observed since the end of the First World War to remember armed forces members who have died in the line of duty. In most countries, Remembrance Day is observed on 11 November. I visited and wrote about the war graves in northern France more than 30 years ago. This is a 'diary' of several days I spent there in 1988; it records the events and my feelings at the time. I have changed very little from the original text...
I had arranged to visit an old friend who works for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and who was then based in northern France, in the town of Arras. The Commission has an international role in assuring the upkeep and maintenance of all the Commonwealth graves and cemeteries. When I arrived he told me about the cemeteries and memorials he would take me to see, all of them on and around the battlegrounds of the Great War.
The next day we set out for Delville Wood, the first of several stops. Whilst I had read a good deal about the carnage of the First World War and seen a number of television documentaries, nothing had prepared me for what I was to find. Perhaps it was because my mother had died only two months before of cancer and I was closing in on having an understanding of mortality, but at all of the sites we visited I was simply overwhelmed. There is so much poignant, heart rending evidence of the tragedy of it all; so much death, the loss of so many young hopeful lives, all of them with so much ahead of them.
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| Delville Wood 1917 (https://www.riflemantours.co.uk/wwi-history-3rd-ypres-1917-3-3-2/) |
Delville Wood is an extraordinary place. It is the site of a short and extremely bloody confrontation between the German infantry who held the wood, which was an important vantage point, and a force of about 3,000 South Africans. Many of them still lie where they fell, Germans and South Africans together, victims of hand to hand fighting that went on day after bloody day in what must have seemed like hell on earth. What awesome bravery; not just to enter the fray in the first place or to commit countless act of heroism, but to go back each day knowing what they were likely to face. During the battle the wood had been levelled to the ground and only one tree had been left standing over an area of forty or fifty acres (15-20 ha). It is still there, a sturdy little hornbeam, the charred heart wood is visible and can be touched through a slowly healing split that runs the length of its trunk. It was an odd feeling to put a hand on it and imagine what it must it must have endured, a living connection with the past. Judging from the photographs which depict the aftermath, it hardly seems to have grown in more than seventy years; but around it a minor miracle has taken place. Without any interference from man, the land has naturally 'tumbled down' to woodland. Where there was once despoliation there is now a towering forest of sombre, grey stemmed ash and hornbeam stretching upwards twenty metres or more. Nature has seen to the site until now and nature is fully equipped to look after it in future.
The whole place is charged, full of the spirit and vitality of the men who fought and died there. They are in it, in the growing timber, it is a living monument. But there is nothing sinister about it, just an overwhelming sadness. All the same I was at once relieved and sorry to leave the dappled shade and dank stillness of its grassy rides and return to the sunny avenue and stark whiteness of the South African Memorial Museum which stands on the woodland edge.
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| Delville Wood now (http://www.webmatters.net/txtpat/index.php?id=148) |
We moved on towards Beaumont-Hamel. Past the Irish memorial, a quirky little windswept tower seated on a col amongst a cluster of pines and yew, past countless little cemeteries each with its own story to tell. Fifteen or twenty graves in the middle of nowhere; a company of Scotsmen making their way to the front line, struck by a single shell, buried together where they fell. Waste. We stopped at the Newfoundland Line, an area where the front line trenches and the fields that separated them have been preserved to commemorate fallen Canadians and Scots. On the far side of the battlefield I could see the memorial to 51st (Highland) Division, a statue of a kilted figure atop a pile of granite boulders from Aberdeen. Those eerie, silent movie clips of the highland regiments following their fearless piper as they go 'over the top', immediately recalled.
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| The memorial to 51st (Highland) Division (https://www.ww1cemeteries.com/fra-51st-highland-division-memorial.html) |
The "dreary waste of mud and water", described by the botanist and then serving soldier A W Hill, that separated the trenches has now gone, replaced by a verdant sheep-grazed lawn. The only incongruity in this pastoral scene the rusted, curly, iron which juts from the green carpet; once barbed wire hung from it - and men. Once again, however, the story of Delville has been repeated. Nature, in this case prevented from turning the site into woodland by the regular grazing of domestic stock, has clothed the scars of conflict with a turf containing a rich variety of grasses and wildflowers. While the end result and the atmosphere contrast with Delville, the process is the same; the slow return to order from chaos.
From here it wasn't far to the Vimy Ridge. Arriving by car from the south it is not immediately obvious that it is a 'ridge', and the area around it is now quite well wooded. It is only when walking North across the site, through the scattered Scots pine, cresting the rise and looking beyond the two glorious white megaliths of the Canadian Memorial onto the plain beyond, that the military advantage of possession becomes clear. Nearly four hundred and fifty thousand soldiers from both sides died in the desperate struggle for this piece of land. It was chilly when I got there and thin drizzle gave the site an ethereal quality. The moisture wet the soil and, remarkably, the acrid smell of mustard gas could still be perceived; providing a vivid jolt to the senses.
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| The Vimy Memorial, which overlooks the Douai Plain from the highest point of Vimy Ridge (https://www.cwgc.org/visit-us/find-cemeteries-memorials/cemetery-details/87900/VIMY%20MEMORIAL/) |
Stopping for a moment I reflected on all the consciousness, the humanity, the emotions which must have flowed like the blood: grief, triumph, fear, love, hate; the courage of the men, their pain, and for so many their death. All of it squeezed into such a short space of time and all of it drained away into the air and land around me. The life energy is still there, soaked up by the soil and the earth, in the growing trees and the grass. It is easy to think that you can hear the sound of distant, melancholy singing carried on the wind, the tramping of mud-covered army issue boots across duck boarding, the clink of billy cans, the low murmur of conversation occasionally punctuated by harsh laughter or cursing, and that odd sound that guns make when they are being hefted around - the dull clunking of wood and metal. So many souls; if the ground was cut with a spade it would probably cry out in pain and the wound would bleed.
Like the Newfoundland Line, the trenches and the land around them are preserved as an enduring monument to the conflict. Here, however, the small scale topography of the bomb craters and the winding networks of service trenches, where the troops queued to go 'over the top', are more clearly visible. For periods of time the front lines at Vimy remained relatively static and, in some places, were only tens of metres apart. The deadlock allowed the opposing forces to employ their sappers to dig labyrinthine tunnel systems, often reaching far under the trenches of their adversaries. Many are still intact and open to visitors. In one place, now lying between the fossilised front line trenches, there is a massive crater ten or fifteen metres deep, where a huge land mine was planted underground - its aim to breach the defences prior to a 'big push'. The sound of the detonations of these mines was said to have been heard in London and it is only possible to wonder at their effect on the men of both sides who suffered directly or indirectly from the impact of the blast. It was not uncommon for the sappers of each side to breach each other’s tunnels; either deliberately or accidentally. In both cases troops were often thrown into horrific underground confrontations, on hands and knees, stabbing and shooting at one another in the Stygian confinement.
Above ground the land is now clothed in grassland and open, pine, woodland. There is a carpet of soft grass under the trees whose broken canopy covers much of the battle ground. Here and there patches of nettles, often at the lips of craters or in the shallow trenches, possibly mark the remains of fallen soldiers whose bodies were never recovered. In the open, where the sheep are more willing to graze, acres of a richer turf full of herbs and fine leaved grasses has developed. There are acres of it, a wonderful mixture of species, including thousands of cowslips. The scattered literature indicates that plants such as the beautiful and spectacular pasque flower had been present until the War began but apparently they were literally 'blown away' during the ceaseless bombardment of the Ridge. It too is a splendid natural memorial to the fallen and, as I left, the mist and drizzle were starting to clear and the twin, white obelisks of the Canadian Memorial were beginning to glint and shine in the morning sun, revealing the man-made edifice in its full grace and beauty.
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| Pasque Flowers Pulsatilla vulgaris (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pasque_Flowers_(Pulsatilla_vulgaris)_(17209106741).jpg) |
Our penultimate destination was the Villers Bretonneux Cemetery which is a good way south, towards Rouen. On the way we stopped at a number of small sites, sometimes with less than a dozen graves. Villers Bretonneux itself is another site on a col; it overlooks a poplar-lined valley through which winds a deep fast-flowing tributary of the River Somme. The cemetery itself is a long thin strip of land with rows of graves leading up to an area of open grass surrounded by pine and mixed shrubs. These provide shelter from the wind and create a pleasant sun trap.
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| Adelaide Cemetery, Villiers-Bretonneux (hhttps://www.cwgc.org/visit-us/find-cemeteries-memorials/cemetery-details/2701/adelaide-cemetery,-villers-bretonneux/) |
Until one or two years before my visit, and probably since its establishment, the entire area had been kept tightly mown. Due partly to a wish to leave longer, less frequently mown grass, through which paths are cut providing a more pleasant atmosphere for visitors, the management regime had been relaxed. The sward, released to flower for the first time for many years, had revealed an incredible diversity of species. With over sixty recorded, including bee orchid, cowslip and the lovely purple milk vetch. It was marvellous to behold. As I wandered over the cut areas many of the species could still be seen, but just as rosettes of leaves, patiently waiting for their chance to blossom. It will still have to be cut of course, otherwise it will succumb to the natural succession that culminates in woodland, and the fragile species will be overshadowed and lost. However, the new regime will mimic traditional hay meadow management with infrequent summer and occasional autumn cuts. The hay being removed to prevent an increase in soil fertility and the subsequent dominance of coarse grasses.
The plants making up this and the other grasslands I had seen are very different from the sea of weeds described by Hill in the Summer of 1917 as he wrote about the land over which the Battle of the Somme had been fought in the late summer and autumn of the previous year: "Looking over the devastated country from the Bapaume road, one saw only a vast expanse of weeds of cultivation which so completely covered the ground and dominated the landscape that all appeared to be a level surface". He recorded a long list of plants, some of which he annotated; Papaver rhoeas (common poppy) was, of course, "dominant"; Sinapis arvensis (charlock) "marked recently dug graves" with a yellow bouquet; and Juncus bufonius (toad rush) was found in "shell holes, in a band just above the water table".
Sinapis arvensis (charlock); Papaver rhoeas (common poppy); and Juncus bufonius (toad rush)
The irony is that, apart from plastic and paper ones, there are almost no poppies to be seen any more in Flanders or anywhere else along the front line. The agricultural practices of the region are just too intensive for any ‘weeds’ – for that is how poppies are classified in farming systems. They used to prosper among the crops and a small number had popped-up in the meadow' at Villers Bretonneux. But this and the other species of cultivation are rarely seen in abundance in established grasslands.
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| Common Poppy. (Thirty years later someone else has noticed that there are no poppies in Flanders any more: http://www.flanderstoday.eu/living/talking-dutch-where-poppies-dont-grow) |
Finally we moved on to the great Thiepval memorial to the fallen British soldiers with no known grave; seventy three thousand names, mainly of men who died on the Somme battlefield. The memorial is a huge, ungraceful thing, all brick and arches, offering the eye no comfort - nor the heart. So many names; "They shall not grow old, age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn". Binyon was offering consolation to all those left behind to mourn; Thiepval, is a silent testament to unfulfilled hopes and dreams; a summary of lost experience and lost opportunity. Never again to laugh, to cry, to love, to touch. And "…we shall remember them".
The controversy and criticism that surrounded the construction of the Thiepval memorial is supposed to have almost broken its creator Lutyens who afterwards, it is said, never really regained former inspiration. Many criticised it as “ugly, arid, ill-befitting its purpose”. However, what he left is huge, sombre, awesome and timeless; something that gives the impression that it will stand forever. It is a summary, a physical metaphor for as long as it survives the ravages of the local climate, a silent beacon visible for miles across the gently undulating waste. They will not be forgotten.
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| Thiepval Memorial (https://www.cwgc.org/visit-us/find-cemeteries-memorials/cemetery-details/80800/THIEPVAL%20MEMORIAL/) |
The battlegrounds provide an extraordinary, living, link with the past and, more than almost anywhere I have been, they convey a sense of place. The sheer enormity of the conflict, evidenced by the serried ranks of the graves themselves and the thousands of names etched on the monuments at Thiepval, Ypres and Vimy. The hugely powerful atmosphere generated by the remaining battlefields; the sense of loss, the ghosts. How marvellous that these awesome wounds, through which humanity suffered so much self-inflicted pain, have healed themselves and that out of the waste and despoliation something so valuable and beautiful has risen. At each site, Delville Wood, the Newfoundland Line and the Vimy Ridge, the process has been the same: the recurrent theme of nature healing and restoring, the slow return to order from chaos - and truly this must be nature's greatest purpose.
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| Canadians celebrate as they return from the capture of Vimy Ridge, April, 1917 (https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7164578.J_Neven_Pugh/blog & Wikicommons) |
