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.

*     *     *     *     *

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.

*     *     *     *     *

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.

*     *     *     *     *

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.

 *     *     *     *     *

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.)

*     *     *     *     *

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:

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. 

*     *     *     *     *

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.”

*     *     *     *     *

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.”

*     *     *     *     *

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:

*     *     *     *     *

 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: