From: Rusty�Bullethole, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>It seems strange to me that all the intoning of
>fragments of poetry goes on annually at this time
>where effort would be a lot more usefully spent
>exhuming the intact and identifiable remains of the
>hundreds of thousands of men who drowned in the mud at
>Passchendaele and giving them a long-overdue and
>thought-provoking burial. The creation of a shiny new
>graveyard with ten thousand bodies in it every year
>for a few decades might achieve rather a lot more than
>the present arrangements.
>Any comments from anyone?
Norman, it seems your thoughts are being answered.
Rusty
Times 28.10.00
Ypres fields still yield a sad harvest
FROM MARTIN FLETCHER IN YPRES, BELGIUM
ON A blustery afternoon beneath a pale autumn sun, two
buglers sounded Last Post in a corner of a First World
War cemetery amid the flat green farmland of Flanders.
As the mournful notes floated over the endless rows of
identical white headstones, the remains of 12 more
British soldiers were lowered into the ground. "They
shall not grow old as we that are left grow old," the
chaplain intoned. "At the going down of the sun and in
the morning, we will remember them."
Eighty-two years after the guns of the Western Front
finally fell silent, such poignant services are becoming
almost commonplace around Ypres. Normally two or three
sets of human remains are found by local farmers each
year, but since 1998 no fewer than 103 have been
recovered from a patch of land the size of half a dozen
football pitches on the town's northernmost fringe -
the most recent of them last Saturday.
Jerry Gee, director of the Commonwealth War Graves
Commission in Northern Europe, believes that it is the
single biggest recovery of bodies since the immediate
aftermath of the war and that the discoveries so far
are "only the tip of the iceberg".
This land was once the heart of one the unspeakable
battlefields around "Wipers", where 500,000 soldiers
died, more than a third of whose bodies were never
found. It was a scene of carnage where the two sides
confronted each other across 40 yards of cratered mud
and the Germans first unleashed poison gas in 1915.
Today it is a bumpy green field bordered by an expanding
industrial estate. What makes it unique is that is has
lain undisturbed since 1918 because its owner, a doctor
from the nearby village of Boezinge, wanted it preserved.
When the doctor died, his heirs sold this Flanders field,
and a frozen vegetable company is going to build on it.
Often in such cases, the bulldozers move in and ignore
any bones they unearth because that would mean stopping
work while inspectors are summoned. In this instance the
town's authorities have let a team of nine Flemish
volunteers, led by Patrick Van Wanzeele, a metalworker,
go in first to recover what they can. The diggers'
success has exceeded their wildest expectations. "This
land is untouched. It's virginal," Aurel Sercu, a retired
teacher, said.
The team uses metal detectors to locate disturbances in
the earth where the trenches ran. Then they dig. Sometimes
they find a single set of remains, sometimes clusters of
half a dozen. Sometimes they find complete skeletons,
sometimes just a few bones because the soldier was blown
to pieces. Those buried by explosions are the best
preserved. Their leather boots, scraps of uniform and
regimental badges might still be intact. That way 39
have been identified as British, 15 as French and 30 as
German. On one skeleton left near the surface the diggers
found fossilised maggots.
Human remains are only the beginning. They have retrieved
helmets and bayonets, bugles, rifles, pistols and
case-loads of ammunition preserved in the dense clay.
They have found watches, whistles, cutlery, crucifixes,
rings, iodine capsules, candles, tins of bully beef, a
rum bottle, a jar of Bovril, a French dictionary,
playing cards and a tiny ivory monkey for pushing
tobacco into a pipe.
They found a razor that belonged to Private George
Parker, a 23-year-old Yorkshireman who was killed in
1915 and buried near by. His only living relation, a
great-granddaughter, has let them include it in an
exhibition of the artefacts opening in Boezinge on
Remembrance Day.
They have found ten dugouts of the sort that riddle
this part of Flanders, so that a tractor or cow
occasionally vanishes into a hole in the ground.
Predictably, they have also found hundreds of shells
and grenades, many unexploded and some containing
lethal gas. The two sides fired an estimated 1.5
billion shells on the Western Front, millions of
which landed in soft mud and failed to detonate.
The Belgian Army still collects more than 200 tons
of decaying munitions that farmers leave beside the
roads each year. Occasionally a farmer is blown up
while ploughing his land, and so the war's casualty
list keeps growing.
The diggers' one disappointment is that just a single
set of remains - those of a Frenchman - have been
identified. In some cases they have been able to
establish the soldier's regiment, but their identity
tags have either perished or were removed by comrades
in the heat of battle so that relations could be
informed. Only in 1916 did the British introduce a
system of double tags so one could be left on the
body. Other clues were removed by wartime souvenir
hunters. The Germans destroyed 60 per cent of the
War Department's First World War service records
during the Blitz. By one set of remains, the
diggers found a silver cigarette case initialled
"B.C.", but no sign of his regiment. By another
they found a badge reading "North Warwickshire
Miners".
The diggers are driven by a sense of duty. "Soldiers
should be buried in a cemetery, not here," Andre
Hooreweghe, a retired steelworker, said. And they
duly attended Thursday's funeral at the Cement
House Cemetery - one of nearly 200 First World
War cemeteries around Ypres - with three
representatives of the British Armed Forces and a
coachload of British tourists on a battlefield tour.
It was a moving occasion. The remains were
contained in 12 small square wooden boxes -
conventional coffins are used only if relations
attend. The Rev Ray Jones, of St George's Memorial
Church in Ypres, led the prayers. The military
representatives laid poppy wreaths and saluted.
Then the Tommies' remains were lowered back into
the earth from which they had so recently been
taken - but this time with dignity and honour.
Soon they will receive headstones bearing Rudyard
Kipling's famous words - "Known Unto God" - like
2,365 other graves in the same cemetery.
"It's hard to find the right words," Liz Sear
from Northampton, one of the tourists, said after
the 12-minute service. "It made the hair stand up
on the back of your neck, particularly during the
Last Post. It was a privilege to be here."
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