Muddy Belgian Fields a Century Apart

We visited the Menin Gate in Ypres on Saturday. 54,896 Commonwealth soldiers are remembered on its panels. That to me was just registering as a large figure until I actually saw the inscriptions. It is then that the true size of that number hits the emotions. And of course, the Gate only names those who were never found, those who have a final resting place are not included in the number.




On Passing the new Menin Gate
by Siegfried Sassoon

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,—
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride
‘Their name liveth for ever,’ the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.






On Monday morning we visited Waterloo, where a century earlier the so-called glory of war had ended with the same net result. A victory, but at the cost of leaving so many behind in a muddy Belgian field. In the following 100 years that saw the Victorian era and the height of the Industrial Revolution and a period of significant social, economic and technological progress, we actually learnt nothing about the value of life.





nick