They shall not grow old

Friday 9 November 2018

I walked along the row of graves at Tyne Cot Cemetery with some trepidation.  Armed with a piece of paper with a list of names of relatives who had fought and died on these battlefields I desperately hoped to find their last resting place.

Before setting off on the Year 9 history trip to the Battlefields in France and Belgium I spoke to my great aunt who provided the names of relatives from the West Yorkshire Regiment and Durham Light Infantry who had not returned from WW1.

Tyne Cot in Belgium is the largest British military cemetery in the world, many of those here died in the Battle of Passchendaele. Now called ‘the city of the dead’, in 1917 it was on the front line of one of the bloodiest battles seen in any war. Sadly, my relative wasn’t buried here, he was one of the 35,000 reported missing, just a small etched name on a white memorial marked his short life.  We will never know how he fell or where he died.

As I searched along the rows of names, I realised why it is so important to remember ‘the war to end all wars’. These were people just like us – 12 buried at Tyne Cot had attended our school – they had finished their exams and had their whole lives ahead of them.  They sacrificed their futures to fight, and ultimately die, for their country.

Many were too young to understand what they were fighting for. As they signed up next to an illuminated ‘recruiting’ tram in City Square, the Leeds Pals, as they became known, must have felt a tremendous sense of patriotism and camaraderie, not aware yet of the horrors that would await them or the futility of war.

During the four day trip we visited museums, battlefields and cemeteries in France and Belgium.  Row upon row of graves marked the casualties of a brutal war where millions were killed.  It’s not until you see the size of the battlefields and number of graves that you comprehend the sheer scale of the devastation. Now neatly lawned and tranquil, the muddy trenches and barbed wire wasteland of a century ago were hard to imagine.

It was a miserable existence for the men in the trenches, in freezing rain, during the 1916 Somme battle. At the Passchendaele Museum we walked along the duckboards and through the trenches, trying to envisage living in these squalid conditions for months on end with the numbing sound of shells overhead and muddy swamps and rats underfoot. It’s easy to understand how the fear of being gassed and constant sound of shells caused so many soldiers to become zombie-like with shell shock.

Our impressions of the visual reality of the ‘Tommies’ who fought in the war has to date been formed by grainy black and white images which seem a world away from our lives today. Now, film director Peter Jackson has released a ground-breaking documentary They Shall Not Grow Old which brings this old footage to life by adding colour and sound.  The films are no longer distant and antiquated, they portray real people; sons, husbands, uncles and friends. For me, this more than anything, brings to life the Battlefields and its cemeteries, echoing the reality of these bloody battles.

Peter Jackson said: “I wanted to reach through the fog of time and pull these men into the modern world, so they can regain their humanity once more – rather than be seen only as Charlie Chaplin-type figures in the vintage archive film.”

Created to mark the centenary of the Armistice, it will be shown on BBC2 on Sunday 11 November at 9.30pm (also on BBC iPlayer). I’d highly recommend watching it.