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:

God Dethroned – "Fallen Empires" (2009)

The war is over

The cause is lost

Nine million dead

Shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Fabian Ware – a British businessman who was not allowed to serve in the British Army because of his age – went to France as a British Red Cross volunteer.

Sir Fabian Ware

At that time, there was no official agency responsible for recording the location of the graves of the British soldiers who had been killed in action.  Ware began to document British graves under the auspices of the Red Cross, and the organization he created to carry out that task eventually became the British government’s Commonwealth War Graves Commission.  

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During the war, British soldiers used broken rifles, sticks, or handmade markers – some were quite elaborate – to note where their dead comrades were buried.

The grave of an unknown British soldier
who died near Thiepval, France in 1916

Other graves were marked with simple wooden crosses provided by the army.

After the war was over, many of the regulation wooden crosses and other temporary markers were burned or simply left behind.  But some found their way back to British churches, museums, or other sites.

This cross ended up in the chapel of Epsom College, a secondary school located in Surry:

Here’s a closeup of the stamped metal tag on that cross, which identifies the dead soldier whose grave it marked as Lt. T. F. Jeffery of the Royal Field Artillery – who was 19 years old when he died on April 16, 1918:

Today, volunteers working for the “Returned from the Front” organization are attempting to track down all these grave markers and create an online database with photographs and location information.

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When I was in France and Belgium last month, I visited a number of World War I cemeteries and glimpsed dozens more through the windows of my tour bus.

Most of the markers in the cemeteries I saw were crosses.  That’s not surprising given that the overwhelming majority of the citizens of the World War I combatants were Christians.

Here’s an example of the white marble Latin crosses used in American World War I cemeteries in France and Belgium:  

Carved on each cross is the full name of the soldier buried there, his rank, his military unit, his home state, and the date of his death.  (It’s hard to tell, but the American soldier whose grave is marked with the cross in the above photo died on November 11, 1918 – the day the war ended.)

The inscription on the crosses of unidentified soldiers reads “HERE RESTS IN HONORED GLORY AN AMERICAN SOLDIER KNOWN BUT TO GOD.”

Here’s an example of the crosses found in French military cemeteries:

Here’s a photo of a German military cemetery in France:

(It may surprise you to know that there are German military cemeteries in France and Belgium.  The remains of many dead German soldiers were repatriated to Germany by their families, but about 900,000 are buried on enemy soil.)

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Of course, not all of the World War I soldiers who were killed on the Western Front were Christians.

Here’s an example of the markers used in American cemeteries for the graves of Jewish soldiers:

And here’s a photo of several of the headstones used to mark the graves of Muslims soldiers from France’s North African colonies:

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The British government’s Commonwealth War Graves Commission (“CWGC”) created almost a thousand World War I cemeteries in France and Belgium.  

All of them have common design elements that reflect a compromise between those who believed the cemeteries should have a strongly Christian character and those who favored a more secular design.

For example, the graves of of the British Commonwealth dead are not marked with crosses, but with rectangular headstones made from Portland stone (which is a type of limestone).  

The CWGC believed it was important that the headstones in its cemeteries be uniform in appearance, and turned down requests from family members to place more overtly religious headstones on the graves of their sons, fathers, brothers, or husbands.

The headstones of Christian soldiers are incised with crosses:

The headstones of non-Christians are incised with an appropriate symbol (e.g., a star of David):

Each CWGC cemetery features a large “Cross of Sacrifice” – an elongated stone cross with a bronze sword affixed to its front:

Each larger cemetery also features a “Stone of Remembrance” – a 12-foot-long stone that rests on three steps and is inscribed with the words “THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE.”  (That phrase was suggested by Rudyard Kipling, whose only son John died in the Battle of Loos in 1915.  John was only 18 years old.)

In contrast to the Cross of Sacrifice, the Stone of Remembrance was intended to commemorate those “of all faiths and [those of] none.”

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John Wolffe, a religious historian, characterized the CWGC’s cemetery template in the following words in a 2015 article:

[T]he outcome was uniformity and a kind of consensus, but also an enduring ambiguity.  The incised crosses on the regular rectangular headstones expressed a lowest common denominator Christianity, that could be owned by the great majority of relatives in 1920, but clearly fell short of what was wanted by the more fully committed.  The message of common sacrifice was expressed primarily in nationalistic and military terms rather than Christian ones, but still with sufficient Christian associations to retain resonances of martyrdom.

Click here to read Wolffe’s article in its entirety.

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Passiondale, which was released in 2009 by the Dutch death metal band God Dethroned, is a concept album that was inspired by the World War I Battle of Passchendaele (which is also known as the Third Battle of Ypres).

We’ll learn more about that battle and the cemetery where many of the British Commonwealth soldiers who died in it are buried in the next 2 or 3 lines.

Click here to listen to “Fallen Empires.”

Click the link below to buy the song from Amazon: