The 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month, 1918-2018

And so the centenary of the Great War, the War to End All Wars comes to its conclusion. This is a companion to my earlier posts, Ypres, Tyne Cot and the Menin Gate marking the start of hostilities in August 2014 and The Somme, One Hundred Years Ago Today on the 1st of July 2016.

This blog is primarily about our travels. Lynne and I have seen great religious monuments, like Angkor Wat and the Shwedagon Pagoda, monuments to power, like the palaces of Rajasthan, and monuments to love like the Taj Mahal. But we have also seen grimmer monuments and visited places that make you stop and think; the bombed-out streets of Mostar, the Killing Fields of Cambodia and the industrialised horror of Auschwitz all ask terrible questions about the nature of humanity. So does the cemetery strewn countryside of northern France.

And the Great War, the one that did not quite end all wars, has its monuments, too.

Canadian Memorial, Vimy Ridge

But the great monuments are not as moving as the graveyards which often lie beside them.

Canadian graveyard, Vimy Ridge

Throughout Britain and France and across the world there are memorials to those who died. The memorial in Harrogate is typical for a town of its modest size. It bears 721 names from the Great War….

War memorial, Harrogate

…and there is even one in São Brás de Alportel in the Algarve...

Memorial plaque on the council office, Sao Bras

...bearing the names of six Portuguese soldiers, five of whom died on the Western Front. Portugal sent 50,000 troops to France after declaring war on Germany in 1916.

Memorial plaque, Sao Bras

But perhaps this is a day for a traveller to be at home. Swynnerton in Staffordshire is today a one pub, two churches, one post office village (and we are lucky to still have our pub and post office) [2023 Update: No longer. The Post Office went a couple of years ago. I am happy yo say the pub still thrives] It has some 750 residents, most of whom (myself included) live on the 1970s housing estate, or the recent additions adjacent to it. In 1918 Swynnerton was far smaller, barely more than a hamlet, but it was an important hamlet as it contained Swynnerton Hall, home to Francis Fitzherbert, the 12th Baron Stafford (and now home to Francis Fitzherbert, the 15th Baron Stafford - economising on names helps when you have a big house to run). It had the same pub and churches but rather more businesses than the present village.

It also has a war memorial, on a patch of grass outside the parish church of St Mary.

Swynnerton war memorial

Thirteen names are inscribed on the pedestal. A couple of years ago Lynne did some research on these names for a presentation on ‘Swynnerton through the Wars.’ Thanks to that research we can zoom in on two of the names.

Charles Wood

Captain Charles Wood on the Swynnerton War Memorial

Charles Wood was the younger son of Mr. and Mrs. E. J. W. Wood of Meece House, a mile outside Swynnerton. His father Edward John Wood was a successful pottery manufacturer and a distant relative of Josiah Wedgwood.

Charles had been a territorial officer since 1909 and was sent to France in 1914 with the First Battalion, Royal Welch (sic) Fusiliers. He was soon mentioned in dispatches and his battalion spent January and February 1915 dug in on the Ypres sector. They then moved just across the French border to participate in General Haig’s spring offensive. The offensive started on the 10th of March with an attack on the French village of Neuve Chappelle.

Although intelligence reports suggested Neuve Chapelle was thinly defended, taking the village required three days and cost 17,000 lives. Captain Wood died on the second day.

The attack gained less than a square mile of territory, but was hailed by banner headlines at home proclaimed it a great step on the road to victory.

Wood and his older brother had been brought up in Meece House. His father had all the trappings of commercial success; a household of loyal servants, tenant farmers on his land and a chauffeur-driven Sunbeam. The car was a familiar sight at St Mary’s where he was churchwarden. He presumably expected Charles to inherit both his pottery and his position in local and county society but any plans they had ended at Neuve Chapelle. Charles’ older brother John, who had always been in poor health, died 8 months later in November 1915.

Their grief-stricken father Edward did not survive much longer, but before he died, he and their mother placed a memorial on the road outside Meece Hall.

Wood memorial outside Swynnerton Training Camp

Charles’ name is not mentioned; it is a memorial to all who gave their lives…

Inscription on the memorial outside Swynnerton Training Camp

…but they also placed a memorial window to both brothers in St Mary’s church.

Wood Memorial, St Mary's Swynnerton

In the Second World War, Swynnerton became host to a huge munitions factory. The ‘Swynnerton Roses’, the 30,000 women who worked there, are commemorated in the small rose garden in front of the memorial. For a time Meece Hall, the home of a young man who died in the War to End All Wars was occupied by executives of the armaments factory as they sought ever more efficient and deadly ways to win another war just a generation later. In peacetime, the abandoned house became dilapidated and was demolished in the 1990s.

Swynnerton Roses garden and Wood memorial

George Bennett

George Bennett on the Swynnerton war memorial

George Bennett was born in Swynnerton in the spring of 1889, two doors away from the Fitzherbert Arms.

George Bennett's birthplace, Swynnerton

His family had worked on the land for generations but his father had become the local wheelwright. When George was born his mother already had by two young children, Elizabeth and John. Like many old Swynnerton families (including the aristocratic Fitzherberts) the Bennetts were Catholics and worshipped at Our Lady of the Assumption

Catholic Church, Swynnerton which also faces the war memorial
Swynnerton Hall is in the background

George trained as a wheelwright with his father…

Swynnerton's old smithy and wheelwright's shop just across the road from the Bennett's cottage.
Idle for many years they are waiting for someone to find a use for them.

… and became engaged to Beatrice Gosling, eldest daughter of the landlord of the Fitzherbert Arms.

The Fitzherbert Arms, Swynnerton
The extention may have come after Gerorge's time, the large windows are a very recent addition 

When war came, he joined up and served first with the Royal Horse Artillery and then with the Ammunition Column of the Royal Field Artillery. They were engaged in battles across France, but in 1917 were stationed at Poperinge in Belgium, seven miles from Ypres.

George’s job was to take ammunition to the front line, a difficult enough task without the rains that forced heavily-laden horse-drawn carts to sink to their axles.

On the 8th July 1917 George wrote to his fiancée Beatrice,

My dear lover,

I know you will be looking forward to hearing from me, hoping you are all well enjoying the best of health. Well Darling, the weather is broken here now having a fair amount of rain, & a fine very heavy thunder storme.

Well Darling, I’m wondering how you are getting on with the harvest, I do hope you will have good weather, & be able to get a little assistance. The crops behind the firing line lines are looking well, the heavy storme have battered the corn down badly. The crops are much the same as in Blighty not so much grazing land, a good few hops being grown here, also a little chicory which the French People use for the coffee, they don’t drink much tea, you don’t see the fireplaces like ours they have stoves, which stand out nearly in the centre of the room.

We are well behind the firing line here, but Mr Fritz sends us a few souvenirs over pretty often with his long rangers, however I am have thankful to say, he has not got the right range, I expect I shall be going up with Ammn to night, it is indeed the worst Battle Front that I have had since I been out here, however I live in hope that the one above will guide us safely through.

Well Dear, I wonder what you are doing at this present moment, you are absent in body angel, but never absent in mind, how I am longing to be with you, & to comfort to love and to cherish you, no matter how long we have to be apart, you will always have a good true lover, & God does not grant us, to be united in this world, may we be united in the next.

I could tell you a great deal, but us you know I have not the privilege, however amidst all things, I am, thankful to say I am in good health & spirits, & living in hope of returning to you. Well Darling, I am looking forward to hear from you, & to know that you are all well, also please forward me your dear Brother’s address I have not heard from him again. I don’t think he is very far away from here.

Cigs are cheaper here than in Blighty. I should have written you a few days ago only I have been waiting to get one of these envelops, we are only allowed one once a fortnight, you see dear our business is not so exposed in one of these. I am just going to write my dear Father and Mother a few lines, hoping they are well, & not worrying about me.

Well angel cheer up, I am alright, and having a good life & considering the facilities, when I hope we may all meet together again & live in happy days. In conclusion I desire you to give my kind regards to all at home, & hope to hear from you soon.

Au-soir & God bless you darling

Pray for me

Your Ever loving boy

George x x x x

With Heaps of hugs and kisses
Somewhere in France but near the border of ( )
There are fore of us in the house
One Catholic besides my self
The other are harness cleaning. It does not seem like a Sabbath day.

George was killed the following day. He was 28 years old

During her research Lynne made contact with Gabrielle, who now lives in Buckinghamshire but is the grand-daughter of Beatrice Gosling and her husband John Bennett, George’s elder brother whom she married in 1922. Gabrielle showed Lynne a copy of the letter and kindly allowed it to be used in 'Swynnerton through the Wars' and has agreed to its use here. The typescript reproduces the spelling, punctuation and little slips of George’s handwritten original.

On the 9th of July 1924, Beatrice Bennett, née Gosling. gave birth to a son – Gabrielle’s father - whom they named George. Sadly, John Bennett died of head injuries in 1926 after a bicycle accident. Beatrice never remarried but she brought up her son, enjoyed her grandchildren and attended mass regularly. She died in 1990 aged 99.

War is not about politicians, generals and armies, it is about people. Without fear or favour it kills the rich and well-connected as easily as the humble wheelwright - and it destroys families.

The Great War killed 10 million soldiers on all sides and 8 million civilians. Each one deserves to be remembered like Charles Wood and George Bennett.

Would it have been worth it had it been the War to End All War? Perhaps, but it wasn’t.

Never Again

One final thought: it is easy to blame politicians for wars, but when war was declared in 1914 people across Europe were out on the streets cheering. The nationalism that caused the wars of 1914 and 1939 is on the rise again, in Russia and the USA, in Hungary, Italy, Germany and other European countries, including here, at home. Never again is up to us, all of us.

WW1 Centenary Posts

Ypres, Tyne Cot and the Menin Gate(1914/2014)
The Somme, One Hundred Years Ago Today (1916/2016)
The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month(1918/2018)

Ypres, Tyne Cot and the Menin Gate

How World War 1 Started

The First World War started a hundred years ago today, or three days ago, or four, or last week, depending on your point of view. On the 28th of June 1914, Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip gave up on his attempt to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and went into a bakery (now a museum) beside Sarajevo’s Latin Bridge. When he came out he found himself standing beside Franz Ferdinand’s stalled car. It was an opportunity too good to miss.

The Latin Bridge and assassination site, Sarajevo, May 2012

A month later, to the day, Austria declared war on Serbia, the next day Russia mobilised, followed by Germany on the 30th of July and France on the 1st of August. On the 4th of August Great Britain declared war on Germany, so we are commemorating today as the anniversary of the start of the Great War, partly out of British bias, and partly because on that date all the major players in the disasters of the next four years had placed their pieces on the board.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire was important at the time, and the murder of the heir to the throne was a major event, but the death of 9 million combatants and about the same number of civilians seems a serious over-reaction. The truth was that Europe was spoiling for a fight and everybody was up for it. Across the continent declarations of war were greeted with celebrations in the streets.

From ‘England to her Sons’

Sons of mine, I hear you thrilling
To the trumpet call of war;
Gird ye then, I give you freely
As I gave your sires before,
All the noblest of the children I in love and anguish bore.

‘England to her Sons’ was written by W. N. Hodgson in August 1914. He was killed in July 1916 on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

Tyne Cot Cemetery, Passchendaele

War is a failure of diplomacy. It is also a business, and one that specialises in the bulk production of corpses. Tyne Cot Cemetery stands as an antidote to Hodgson's jingoism. It lies on a hillside a few miles outside the Belgian town we usually call by its French name of Ypres, though the Flemish speaking locals call it Ieper. The British troops called it Wipers.

Tyne Cot Cemetery, Passchendaele

It is the largest Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery of this, or any other, war. 11,954 soldiers are buried here and on 8,367 of the headstones the only words are

A Soldier of the Great War,
Known unto God.

On the memorial wall are the names of 34,959 more who have no known grave. Some may be in the anonymous graves but many more simply disappeared into the muddy morass that this gently sloping hillside became.

Tyne Cot Cemetery with the memorial wall at rear

The grave of Second Lieutenant Arthur Conway Young bears the words

Sacrificed to the fallacy

That war can end war.

Rudyard Kipling wrote:

If any question why we died,

Tell them, because our fathers lied.

Like much of Kipling's work it is deceptively simple. He was a fervent supporter of the war though a trenchant critic of the way it was fought. His only son, John, was killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915. John Kipling had been rejected first by the Royal Navy and then by the Army because of his extreme short-sightedness, but his father pulled strings to gain him a commission in the Irish Guards. ‘Our fathers lied’ can be interpreted in a broad sense, but for Kipling it had a personal meaning, too, a meaning he had to live with until his own death in 1936.

Just above Tyne Cot, on the top of the ridge, is the village of Passchendaele. It is not a huge ridge; you can drive from bottom to top without changing gear, though no doubt it looked a lot bigger to those slogging up it in knee deep mud through barbed wire entanglements into a hail of machine gun bullets.

There is little remarkable about the village of Passchendaele except that it still exists. It is perhaps a measure of the futility of WW1 that there were not one but two battles of Passchendaele, both actions within the five month long Third Battle of Ypres - and there were five of them.

The low ridge stretches south for several miles before curving west round to Messines, part encircling Ypres and giving fine views over the town - which is why it was so important.

Ypres

It was at Ypres that the British stopped the German advance in October 1914 and they held the town for the rest of the war, despite the Germans occupying the high ground on three sides, putting Ypres near the tip of a dangerous salient. The subsequent Battles of Ypres (1915, 1917 and two in 1918) involved the Germans trying to take the town, or the British attempting to break out.

Grote Markt, Ypres

Today it is a pleasant little town with some 30,000 inhabitants, much the same as in 1914. The central Grote Markt is dominated by the magnificent bulk of the thirteenth century Cloth Hall just as it was in 1914, though it is not quite the same Cloth Hall - how could it be?

The Cloth Hall, Ypres, Feb 2008

The painstaking business of putting the bits back together started in 1933, was interrupted by the second bout of unpleasantness and completed in 1967. It now houses an exhibition/museum called 'In Flanders Field'. It is long on the horrors of war and short on the glory of victory (how different to North Korea’s Fatherland Liberation War Museum!) and should be a compulsory part of any visit to Ypres

Australian artillerymen outside the Cloth Hall, Ypres, Sept 1919
Borrowed, with thanks, from Australians on the Western Front 1914-18

The Menin Gate, Ypres

A short walk from the Grote Markt is the Menin Gate. The memorial, designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield, was unveiled in 1927, the marble walls bearing the names of 54,896 British and Commonwealth servicemen who perished in the Ypres salient and have no known graves.

At 8pm every day since 1927 buglers of the Ypres Fire Brigade have played the Last Post at the Menin Gate. (or, after the German invasion in 1940 at the Brookwood Military Cemetery in Surrey, returning to the Menin Gate on the day Ypres was liberated in 1944). I have attended on three occasions, on a warm summer evening and on crisp February nights. Anyone who leaves without a lump in their throat does not understand what they have witnessed.

The Last Post at the Menin Gate, Ypres, Feb 2008

There are however, problems with the Menin Gate. Firstly it was too small for its purpose. 90,000 soldiers have no known graves, but the gate has space for less than 60,000, which is why those who died after the 15th of August 1917 are commemorated on the wall of Tyne Cot Cemetery.

Names on the Menin Gate, Ypres

Secondly, although the gate faces towards the front line, they did not use it - it was too exposed to artillery fire, and thirdly although the design had some critical success, it was not universally loved. Siegfried Sassoon, a poet and professional soldier who was decorated for bravery in the war that so disillusioned him wrote:

On Passing the New Menin Gate.

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.

Vauban and the Ramparts Cemetery

Sir Reginald Blomfield’s gate replaced Ypres’ original Menin Gate, part of the fortifications designed by Vauban in the late 17th century. Vauban was an innovative military architect but his ramparts and moat, though state of the art for their time, were irrelevant when the First World War arrived.

Vauban's rampart and moat, Ypres

Much of Ypres still lies within these defences and although they are no longer complete you can walk half way round the town on the ramparts. It is a pleasant stroll, but like everywhere else on the front line that stretched from the channel to the borders of Switzerland, you cannot go far without meeting a military cemetery. The Ramparts (Lille Gate) Cemetery is small, containing the graves of 128 men, 127 of them British and the other unidentified and unidentifiable.

Ramparts Cemetery, Ypres

Kipling, Sassoon, Owen and 'The Old Lie'

Rudyard Kipling became the literary advisor to the War Graves Commission. He suggested the biblical ‘Their name liveth for evermore’ which adorns the Stone of Remembrance that stands in every military cemetery and so upset Siegfried Sassoon. He also coined the phrases ‘Known unto God’ for the graves of unidentified soldiers (the French use the uncompromising ‘Inconnu’) and ‘The Glorious Dead’ which appears on either end of the cenotaph in London. Kipling was not there, though, and Sassoon was. I would like to think the human race has matured and no longer finds glory in war, but that is probably wishful thinking. There was precious little glory in the events around the Ypres salient.

The 90,000 men commemorated at the Menin Gate and at Tyne Cot represent a quarter of 400,000 Commonwealth servicemen who died holding the Ypres salient. They may have been heroes, but they were also victims. Nor should we forget the similar number of Germans who died here, nor the several thousand French and Belgian soldiers.

The Kipling couplet quoted earlier may have had personal connotations, but hints at wider lies told by one generation to the next. Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est about a gas attack does not go in for subtle hints. It may be one of the best known poems in the English language, but I make no apology for including the last verse here.

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The Old Lie: Dulce et Decorum Est
Pro patria Mori.

Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori (it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country) is the title of one of the Odes of Horace first published in 23BC. It was a lie then, it is a lie now.

American readers might already know that the same lie adorns the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

WW1 Centenary Posts

Ypres, Tyne Cot and the Menin Gate (1914/2014)
The Somme, One Hundred Years Ago Today (1916/2016)
The Eleventh hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month (1918/2018)