'I died in hell': sacrifice of war dead remembered at Passchendaele
As the sun went down
on Ypres on Sunday, the shale grey stone floor of the old Belgian town’s Menin
Gate, the world’s first memorial to those who fell but who were never found
during the first world war, was slowly covered by more than 54,000 blood-red
poppies falling from its high arch. There was a paper flower for each name
engraved upon the vast gate.
A crowd numbering in
the thousands, including the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Theresa May and the
King and Queen of Belgium,
Philippe and Mathilde, watched as the poppies drifted down in the still evening
air. The young voices of the National Youth Choir of Scotland, standing below
the gate’s 14-metre-high ceiling, sang the Ypres hymn: “O valiant hearts who to
your glory came, / Through dust of conflict and through battle flame; /
Tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved; / Your memory hallowed in the
land you loved.”
Poppies are
released from the Menin Gate at the end of the wreath laying ceremony during More
than 800,000 soldiers on both sides of the war died in the blood and mud of the
Ypres salient between 1914 and 1918. Many marched on the so-called Menin road,
on which the gate built in 1927 now stands, from Ypres town to the front lines.
Still today, the remains of dozens of men are found every year in Flanders
fields, identified initially by the colouring and markings of the boots in
which they died. Of the three major
battles in Ypres, however, it is the third and final, whose centenary will pass
in the early hours of Monday, that bears the greatest infamy. “I died in hell –
they called it Passchendaele,” the soldier and poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote of
the carnage that raged from 31 July until 10 November 1917. Perhaps the first
world war battle that is today most sharp in the collective British
consciousness is the Somme,
but at the time it was this battle, and this place, that was synonymous with
the hopelessness and horror of what was playing out on foreign fields.
So it is, in this
centenary period, that among the many battles and places, Passchendaele, and
Ypres, have followed Gallipoli and the Somme, in being conferred by the British
government with what is likely to be a last great act of remembrance, certainly
in the presence of the sons and daughters, nieces and nephews of those who
fought… read more:
Also see
