Eric Bogle – "No Man's Land" (1980)

The trenches have vanished long under the plow

No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now

In the previous 2 or 3 lines, I talked about one of the World War I cemeteries in Belgium that I visited last month.

The Thiepval Memorial to 
the Missing of the Somme

My tour group and I also visited the the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme – a war memorial in northern France that commemorates the more than  72,000 British soldiers who died in the Somme River sector and who have no known grave.  

It is the largest British Commonwealth memorial to the missing in the world.

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One British historian has estimated that only about half of the bodies of the British Commonwealth soldiers who were killed in the Battle of the Somme and in other Western Front battles were identified before they were buried.

The headstones for about a quarter of those soldiers identify them only as “unknown.”  

The bodies of the remaining men were never found.

A few of the 72,000-plus names carved
on the walls of the Thiepval Memorial

I don’t have similar statistics for the French and German soldiers who died in combat on the Western Front during World War I, but it’s probably safe to assume that the ratios of the identified dead, the unidentified dead, and the missing were roughly the same.  

If so, that means that for every four soldiers who were killed on the Western Front, there are two buried with their names on their headstones, one buried with an “unknown” headstone, and one whose body is still missing.

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It’s not pleasant to think about how mutilated the bodies of the hundreds of thousands of unidentified World War I dead must have been.

It’s even more horrifying to contemplate what happened to all those soldiers who are classified as “missing.”  

British 8-inch howitzers

An estimated 70% of Western Front combat deaths were the result of artillery fire.  (Most of the remainder were caused by machine-gun and rifle fire, while a relatively small percentage were the result of poison gas or bayonets.)

Most of the “missing” who were killed by artillery fire simply ceased to exist as physical entities.  Or at least they ceased to exist in a form that could be interred in a cemetery.

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The number of artillery shells that were fired in World War I is mind-boggling.

NPR has estimated that as many as 1.5 billion artillery shells may have been fired on the Western Front during the course of World War I.  Since about 30 million combatants saw action in that theater, that means that about 50 shells were fired per soldier – which is 50 too many, if you ask me.

Casings from artillery shells fired by British
artillery at the Battle of the Somme

Luckily for those soldiers, many of those shells were duds.  In fact, French and Belgian farmers are still uncovering thousands of tons of unexploded ordnance in their fields every year.

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In the next 2 or 3 lines, we’ll visit the Douaumont ossuary, a memorial to the quarter of a million French and German soldiers who died in the Battle of Verdun in 1916 – most as the result of artillery fire.  (During the 300 days of that battle, the French and German armies fired an estimated 65 million artillery shells at one another.)

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Singer-songwriter Eric Bogle wrote “No Man’s Land” (also known as “The Green Fields of France”) after what he called a “very sobering tour” of one of the British World War I military cemeteries in northern France.

The song is about a fallen soldier named William McBride – a young private who “joined the glorious fallen” in 1916.  According to Commonwealth War Graves Commission records, there were at least two British soldiers named William McBride who died in 1916.  One of them is one of the thousands of unidentified or missing men commemorated at Thiepval.

Click here to listen to Bogle’s 1980 recording of “No Man’s Land,” which has been covered by dozens of others.

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: