God Dethroned – "No Man's Land" (2009)

Men slipped and slithered

Through bloody soil on the battleground

“Memorial Tablet,” a poem by the English poet Siegfried Sassoon – who was decorated for what has been described as “suicidal feats of bravery” in World War I – includes these lines:

I died in hell— 

(They called it Passchendaele).  
My wound was slight, 

And I was hobbling back; and then a shell 

Burst slick upon the duck-boards: so I fell 

Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light. 

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All of the major World War I battles were horrific affairs.

But the Battle of Passchendaele – also known as the Third Battle of Ypres – may have been the most horrific of them all.

That battle began on July 31, 1917.  Twice the average amount of rain fell that August, and the area around Passchendaele – which was already treeless and heavily cratered as the result of previous fighting – became a sea of mud.   

Passchendaele

One Canadian soldier who fought at Passchendaele wrote in a letter home that the battle “was without doubt one of the Muddy-est, Bloody-est, of the whole war.”  

According to another Canadian, “The enemy and ourselves were in the selfsame muck, degradation and horror to such a point nobody cared any more about anything, only getting out of this, and the only way out was by death or wounding and we all of us welcomed either.”

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The British Commonwealth forces advanced only about five miles during the three-months-long battle, at a cost of 70,000 dead and 200,000 wounded.  (German losses were roughly the same.)  

A party of stretcher bearers struggles
through the mud of Passchendaele

Six months later, the British command decided that a strategic retreat was in order, and gave up all the ground that had been gained in the battle.

British Prime Minister Lloyd George later wrote that “Passchendaele was indeed one of the great disasters of the war.  No soldier of any intelligence now defends this senseless campaign.”

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Many of the British Commonwealth troops who died at Passchendaele are buried at the nearby Tyne Cot cemetery, which I visited last month.

Tyne Cot is the largest Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in the world:

Over two-thirds of the almost 12,000 soldiers buried there are identified only as “unknown”:

The names of 35,000 other soldiers whose remains were never recovered are inscribed on the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing.

The Cross of Sacrifice at Tyne Cot was placed on top of a German pillbox that survived the fighting:

This headstone, which is next to that pillbox, marks the final resting place of two unidentified German soldiers:

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 The term “no man’s land” was first used to describe the area between the trenches dug by the opposing armies in Ernest Swinton’s short story, “The Point of View,” which was published in 1909 – five years before the outbreak of World War I:

As soon as the light faded altogether from the sky . . . the great white eyes of the searchlights shone forth, their wandering beams lighting up now this, now that, horror.  Here and there in that wilderness of dead bodies – the dreadful “No-Man's-Land” between the opposing lines – deserted guns showed up singly or in groups, glistening in the full glare of the beam . . . .

“No Man’s Land” is the third track on Passiondale, a concept album inspired by the Battle of Passchendaele that was released in 2009 by the Dutch death metal band God Dethroned.

The next 2 or 3 lines will feature another World War I-inspired song titled “No Man’s Land.”

Click here to listen to “No Man’s Land” by God Dethroned.

Click the link below to buy the song from Amazon: