Silent witnesses to the futility of war
My desk calendar for Thursday 15th September, the day I sit writing this column, declares triumphantly that “100 years ago today! The first tank to be used in war was ‘Little Willies’ at Battle of Flors, France”.
A week earlier, standing on those battlefields of the Somme in Belgium and France, it really came home to me that there was nothing ‘great’ about the Great War that was raging a century ago. The real tragedy of it is the great numbers of fallen, commemorated in countless headstones and monuments across Flanders Fields and beyond.
No amount of reading war histories of looking at TV documentaries can prepare you for actually standing on the side of a crater overlooking the expansive countryside, or in a war memorial cemetery where rows and rows of white headstones mark the graves of the fallen soldiers, many ‘known unto God’ as their remains were never identified.
“Did they really believe when they answered the call, did they really believe this war would end wars?” sang the Furey Brothers and Davey Arthur. The song, ‘No Man’s Land’, better known as ‘Willie McBride’ was written by Australian Eric Bogle after he and his wife visited military cemeteries in Flanders and northern France, and saw all the young men buried there.
Look today at young lads getting their Leaving Certificate results, trying to decide what to do with their lives; look at the lads playing football and hurling on the Croke Park stage and elsewhere in recent weeks; look at any of our young people starting out in life and beginning to carve a career for themselves. Or slightly older lads getting married and starting a family. A century ago, those lads would have become “a whole generation that was butchered and damned.”
Regardless of their reasons for going to fight, and there were many, from beliefs and causes to simply earning a living, it is obvious that these young men didn’t know what they were facing into from 1914-1918. ‘The war to end wars’ would be “over by Christmas”. This wasn’t the case, and more men were needed to replace those filling the burial grounds that dot every village and area of the Flanders area. Reports coming back from the front were censored, and they didn’t know what misery they were going out to face in the trenches of mud and death.
There was a delightful, but sad, experience for one man who was on our battlefields trip. The 80 year-old from Kilkenny was travelling with his wife. It wasn’t and easy trip for them as she was using a wheelchair for part of it, and the memorials and cemeteries weren’t always the most accessible.
He was following in the footsteps of his grandfather, killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, in July 1916. The soldier was a Scotsman who was working in Kilkenny, and had married a local woman. When he died, he left three young daughters, including a baby. This man’s body was never found on the battlefields, but he is one of the 72,000 missing listed on the Thiepval Memorial, and his grandson was delighted to be able to see the man’s name inscribed on the wall after all those years.
In 1922, King George VI of Britain, speaking at the dedication of the Tyne Cot Cemetery, the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the world, with its 11,900 graves and 34,900 more missing listed, said: “We can truly say that the whole circuit of the earth is girdled with the graves of our dead. In the course of my pilgrimage, I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the years to come, than this mass multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war.”
Today’s world leaders could do worse than take a collective tour of the WWI battlefield cemeteries and memorials, as unfortunately, in the words of the singer at Willie McBride’s graveside, “it's all happened again, and again, and again, and again and again.”
(First published, Inspire Magazine, Meath Chronicle, October 2016)