Written for the 106th Anniversary of the Battle of Passchendaele,
November 2017

By Will Stone.

Its name, Tyne Cot, originates from the low farm buildings which once stood on the summit, buildings whose shape on the skyline reminded British soldiers crouching in the mud below of the Northumberland Fusiliers in their homeland.

A few miles outside Ypres in West Flanders on a gently rising slope stands the largest military cemetery in the Commonwealth. Its name, Tyne Cot, originates from the low farm buildings which once stood on the summit, buildings whose shape on the skyline reminded British soldiers crouching in the mud below of the Northumberland Fusiliers in their homeland. Before the First World War this area was, like all the rural folds and hamlets around Ypres, an unremarkable parcel of agricultural land, from whose habitually gusty heights one could do little more than observe the handsome twin towers of the ancient Cathedral and Cloth Hall of Ypres. Rising from the enclosed pool of human habitation at the centre of the plain the grandiose pair sat comfortably like proud swan parents upon a thickly woven nest of amber medieval roofs. The distant town was a reassuringly familiar shape interrupting the otherwise featureless horizon, a focus for the eye, a welcome stimulus for the mind after the monotony of the surrounding terrain. That is still the case today, for the replica town built over the ruins left by the war has confidently taken the place of the old. But by 1915, if you had stood on this ridge as a soldier, in what would have been a strongly fortified German position, you would have watched the clear profile of the town slowly corrupted until nothing remained but a blurred shadow, a patch of darker texture in the distance. For from these dominating heights and others in the vicinity, the Germans over months systematically pounded the town into rubble. These first German forces had taken over a village, or rather a string of farmsteads atop the ridge, collectively known as Passchendaele, which happened to form the eastern edge of what became known as the Ypres Salient. If the Allied forces with their backs to Ypres could break through here at this crucial point, then they could drive east across the low ground behind the ridge, push on towards Brussels and thereby break the deadlock. Hence the ensuing bloody battles for the prize of Passchendaele ridge.

The difference here though is the sheer vastness of the space, somehow accentuated by the gently sloping terrain, a size which responds to the scale of the loss.

Now of course the name of this once innocuous village has become a byword for the insanity and bestiality of industrialised slaughter, synonymous with the pitiless squandering of soldiery, the most wretched conditions a man can endure, and as a necessary counterweight, a number of individual heroic acts against all the odds. Along with the Somme the year before, Passchendaele is surely the supreme symbol of the futility of war and a showcase for the intensity of suffering endured by the common solider and his higher-class junior officer, which we find impossible to comprehend today. But this gently rising slope, which seems so intractably calm today, no different to land mirrored all over the region of the Westhoek, tenanted by grazing livestock or a field of root vegetables, is now a vast cemetery, a city of the systematically butchered, inhabited by those who fell directly above where they now lie for eternity. In these pastures and orchards around Ypres today, many young men were simply torn apart by bullets, shrapnel and the force of explosions, fragmented to nothing or even vaporised, then interred ‘automatically’ through further shelling. They were destroyed then buried by the new machines of war and had no need of grave diggers. Tyne Cot War Cemetery is unique in its scale and harbours an emotional aura even more powerful than smaller cemeteries. Built in 1927 by Sir Herbert Baker it is an immense walled enclosure of ranked graves, each topped by an identical War Graves commission headstone, all alike in their sober restraint and famously meticulous alignment, just like every other military graveyard scattered between the lanes and sparse copses across Flanders Fields or the Somme. The difference here though is the sheer vastness of the space, somehow accentuated by the gently sloping terrain, a size which responds to the scale of the loss. Tyne Cot Cemetery is also located directly on the actual battlefield, still scarred by fortifications.

Thickets of barbed wire appeared everywhere like great swarms of tumbleweed that had swept in and been caught on hooked poles.

To reach Tyne Cot from Ypres, the motorist or coach party must first pass through the village of Zonnebeke, roughly at the south-eastern edge of the Passchendaele battlefield. As you pass into the system of modern mini roundabouts at the village centre, you realise everything here that stands above the surface of the earth is of recent construction. There is no building in sight dating from before 1914. The village has a dull, almost oppressive atmosphere, especially under grey northern skies, due to uninspiring functional architecture, an aspect which is hardly helped by the unrelieved starkness of its location. But we can forgive poor Zonnebeke its present aura from unflattering post-war reconstruction, for like other satellite hamlets of Ypres, its fate was to be simply shelled off the map, nothing remaining but tracings of habitation, vague outlines in the earth more like those of iron age settlements where buildings had once stood. The whole area between here and Ypres was to become an expanse of putrefying slurry and thick mud, criss-crossed by duckboard paths and low dykes, by flooded shell holes, constantly turned soil, blasted carbonised tree stumps, slippery holes and pits covered with corrugated iron. Here man had resorted to a cave dweller’s existence. Thickets of barbed wire appeared everywhere like great swarms of tumbleweed that had swept in and been caught on hooked poles. The last remains of what had been trees rose here and there like blackened arms or broken masts rising from the muddy deep. And within all of this constantly reiterated chaos and squalor, men who were still soldiers had somehow to navigate the terrain, to form lines of defence, crouching in freezing burrows, almost buried already while still alive, their machine gun barrels propped on sandbags, sacking and straw to stop them sinking into the mire. Here too the dead were left to decay, irretrievable, the moaning luckless wounded marooned in the sea of mud eventually grew silent and stiffened, the corpses of horses rotted and split. And that heavy Flanders mud, constantly aroused by new shelling, devoured everything.

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You almost imagine you see locals, carts and animals, daily life continuing in the farmsteads and along the white ribbons of road, a provincial way of life undisturbed for centuries.

There are two telling photographs taken by Allied aerial reconnaissance in 1917, one taken on June 16, before the battle for the Passchendaele ridge and one after on December 5 following six months of sustained shelling. In the first image the field edges, rural roads and general contours of the managed landscape are still clearly discernible despite three years of conflict; in fact they seem almost miraculously intact but for a scattering of shell holes. It is still clear that one is regarding a landscape fashioned by man, harnessed for habitation and agriculture, for the continued progress of civilisation. There is nothing alarming or out of the ordinary about this photograph, it resembles the view taken with a primitive camera from a bi-plane or balloon over any hamlet or intersection of rural roads during the war. You almost imagine you see locals, carts and animals, daily life continuing in the farmsteads and along the white ribbons of road, a provincial way of life undisturbed for centuries. But then place the second photograph beside the first. It is as if the landscape had been literally stripped off the face of the earth. This is something more akin to those shadowy images of a planet brought back by a machine voyaging through space.

Passchendaele, June 16, 1917  |  Passchendaele, December 5, 1917

The surface, the texture of the land is completely unrecognisable from six months earlier, though they are taken from exactly the same position and height. Nothing whatsoever is left that links this brutalised crust of earth to the former except four vague weblike strands that roughly meet at centre and echo the position of the major roads in the former image; the lesser roads have vanished. There is no shape or mark evident which can be recognised as having any connection with human life. This is a landscape of desolation, if a landscape at all. Once carefully apportioned fields with strict boundaries have been replaced with a boundless wasteland, once well-tilled fields and hedgerows have been replaced with a grey brown gruel of endlessly pulverized soil. The area has been, as if negated, denied any future existence, no trace of its former upwardly radiating face could survive. Here is an image which strikes terror and bewilderment without the viewer even being aware of exactly what they are looking at. There is something fundamentally inhuman, diabolical, about this blackened calcified surface with its dusty coatings of white powder and sooty bruises. It is the calling card of a nameless catastrophe that begs unremittingly for attention far beyond its time.

For down there on that moonscape surface where no animal could survive, human beings were still present and in some cases even remained alive.

Rationally speaking, it is of course a terrifying indictment of mankind’s growing capacity through technology even at this early stage in the twentieth century, to mortally disfigure his environment. Never before had man been able to reconfigure his environment so utterly, never before had he been so powerless in the face of his own devilish mechanistic ingenuity. But then the most overwhelming thought of all occurs, that this is not an alien planet surface where nothing but an unbreathable darkness collects in the intricate lacework of ditches and pits, this is a place where men still existed. For down there on that moonscape surface where no animal could survive, human beings were still present and in some cases even remained alive. And so with the accompanying progress in photography and flight, the image and the plane from which it was taken, man is for the first time in history able to look upon what he has achieved with his new weaponry and possess a permanent record of the effects of that destruction, which he can study and ponder and be existentially tormented by, presumably for eternity.

Leaving Zonnebeke by car you ascend the same slope which men inched up over months under raking machine gun fire coming from the numerous German bunkers dug in nearer the summit. But you ascend shamefully quickly through a slight pressure on the accelerator and a casual changing of gears. Thus in a matter of minutes you are at the top, covering a distance which took the Allied regiments three punishing years of grinding effort to cross. Then quite suddenly you are atop the ridge itself and heading towards what was once the nucleus of the German position. You turn down an unremarkable lane bordered by a few comfortable bungalows, gamely sprouting window boxes of geraniums, to arrive at the enclosing flint walls to the rear of the cemetery. The area opens out suddenly, giving the visitor a clear view of the land between Tyne Cot and Ypres, now so empty, so silent, so peacefully inhabited by those ubiquitous Flemish brown and white cattle. Here and there a tractor draws the eye, crawling across a field, or a carefully maintained drainage ditch glints furtively in the sun. The cemetery aside, there is no visible evidence of a war now well over a century old, no inkling of what happened here, as if this calm agricultural landscape had never been anything other than it is.

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I was struck that even here, in this hallowed place some eager curator had deemed it necessary to embellish and interfere with an atmosphere which should have been left neutral …

The first time I visited Tyne Cot around ten years ago, one’s initial view of the cemetery was from the bottom where the original entrance is, and here cars pulled up alongside the boundary wall. It seemed right and sensible to arrive here, and on leaving your vehicle take in the immensity of the enclosure rising up from your vantage point to the higher rear walls with their ranks of names that enfolded the whole like a pair of reassuring arms. In this way the new arrival had nothing to sully the ground between them and what they had come to experience. Unfortunately, given the increased visitor numbers to war memorial sites following the 1914–18 war centenary, the Flemish tourist authority has ordered the building of a large car park to the rear and thus denied visitors this original approach. Now on arrival the visitor sees nothing at all of the cemetery apart from the back of its rear wall and is led, before they have even seen a single tombstone, to a new purpose-built visitors centre which sprouts from one corner of the enclosure like an ungainly prosthetic limb. This modern building is linked to the car park by a new so-called ‘memorial path’. As I approached this neat gravel path I heard a mysterious voice, gaining in amplitude as I drew nearer, a young woman’s voice tinged with portentous solemnity and monotonously reading one after another a list of soldiers’ names. The whole length of the path the voice continued its roll call. The voice, I soon discovered, issued from speakers secreted in the newly planted undergrowth beside a grassy hillock. I was struck that even here, in this hallowed place some eager curator had deemed it necessary to embellish and interfere with an atmosphere which should have been left neutral, so the visitor might freely experience the ambiance of the cemetery and the cemetery only. To my mind such auditory gimmicks however well-meaning, constituted an assault on the individual’s gently ripening emotive reaction to the memorial. The men who lie at Tyne Cot and the unfound rest whose names grace the rear walls in their interminable ranks, all who made the momentous communal sacrifice, surely deserve the unsullied purity of a silence they have earned to continue in perpetuity.

Most visitors, awed, will stand a moment just inside the entrance of Tyne Cot, to take in the full measure of the funerary vista before them. Except that they can’t take it in, for the mind filters the scene and reduces the impact of the truth behind this mass grave to a level which is bearable. For yes, this is a mass grave however well apportioned and private in their slender space are the tombs and coffins. But what we see on all the military cemeteries in France and Belgium is that noble endeavour in terms of remembrance to include extricate every individual out of that mass. Every headstone is scrupulously replicated and each plot absolutely equal to another, complete equanimity in rest as never in the manner of death.

Eventually the constant movement of the mowers between the tombs became fatiguing to watch, as if in their indefatigable mowing and back and forth they were the only thing keeping those wandering the repeating rows from slipping into the entirety of truth around this human catastrophe.

The visitor will then move off up the central path of baize-like lawn, their head turning to right and left, unceasingly drawn by the swathes of headstones that obediently peel away. In between them the grass is regularly mown to the required height and at the foot of every headstone rooted in perfectly groomed light brown soil a little bush of thyme or some daisies bounds fervently in the breeze. But eventually one’s gaze is drawn to two dark heavy shapes interrupting the lightness of the surrounding florally embroidered headstones. In symmetrical alliance a pair of original German bunkers remain sunk in the turf, brute and immoveable sentries, drawing us back irrevocably to the meaning of this place. Only then does it become clear we are on the battlefield itself, where machine gun bullets spat on the surface of the earth ‘like oil in a frying pan’ and chains of shrapnel swung back and forth cutting down anything upright and alive. Another bunker higher up the slope in a central position, provides the foundation for the central cross of remembrance that presides over the tombs unfurling beneath it. To stand here on the successively diminishing plinths of stone, with one’s back to the mighty mast of the cross pillar, is a profound and unforgettable moment, as the scale of the cemetery becomes even more significant.

Of course, visitors immediately and instinctively raise their phones and cameras at Tyne Cot, for the symmetry of the tombstones is irresistibly photogenic. It is hard not to be impressed by this commendable though in some sense absurd decorum in stone and echoing military marching and drill set against the contrasting squalor and humiliation of the incumbent’s demise. The scent of new mown grass drifting across the cemetery is no antidote, but it adds to the veritable sense of peace here. I watched the two mowers keen to finish off, push on down the narrow avenues of tombs, only stopping to empty their fragrant grass boxes and gaze upward to the sky, concerned about the likelihood of impending showers. Eventually the constant movement of the mowers between the tombs became fatiguing to watch, as if in their indefatigable mowing and back and forth they were the only thing keeping those wandering the repeating rows from slipping into the entirety of truth around this human catastrophe. On the rear walls of the cemetery that curve around in two giant crescent shapes, are inscribed still more names of the missing. Even the lofty arches of the Menin Gate were not sufficient to carry all the names, so the remainder are engraved here; listed in the same methodical painstaking calligraphy. Interminable are those lists that filigree the stone, obeying the steady turning of their alphabetical cog. Our eyes scan the names until they weary from the repetition, from the horrifying consistency of violent death, the familiarity of names presented in a situation which is so distinctly unfamiliar.

To leaf through these red books as the sun weakens in the late afternoon over the slope of Tyne Cot is to be fully exposed to that all pervasive sorrow which is the fallout from such an unimaginable human tragedy.

At either side of the rear wall stands a corner tower and in each tower a curious small bronze door. Behind the door is an airy cavity in which lies a large red leather-bound book. Inside are listed the names of the dead with their place of birth, together with those who survived them, their closest next of kin. Often this was a wife, but if not then a mother or father. To leaf through these red books as the sun weakens in the late afternoon over the slope of Tyne Cot is to be fully exposed to that all pervasive sorrow which is the fallout from such an unimaginable human tragedy. The reader of the red book cannot help but follow the domestic streams and personal tributaries running so hopefully into these soon to be extinguished lives, set out here formally in ink, the close family groups abruptly severed by the arrival of an official letter with a few sterile lines expressing ‘deep regrets’ or ‘sincere condolences’ for their grievous loss. All those letters in small brown envelopes dropping on the doormat, the pale outstretched hand moving towards them, trembling with the first suspicion, the slow fingering of the envelope or the manic slitting open, the opening of the three folds… and then no reprieve. With dusk approaching the red book must now be placed back in the cavity and the bronze door closed. Returning to Ypres, downhill, you see the last white glow of the cemetery from a distance as you pass along the Zonnebeke road, the headstones all melting into one another across the slope, and the cemetery appears as if a chance hallucination, a deceiving work of art.

I arrived at the Menin Gate in time for the last post ceremony. There beneath the massive vaults in the cold night air I stood by the huddles of people in their bright anoraks as the sombre uniformed men young and old emerged to perform their daily ritual like the roundelay of figures appearing from a Swiss clock tower. The trumpets sounded, the flags were slowly lowered and the dark river muscled its way on past the Menin Gate and around the walls of Ypres, just as it had done then, when the next batch of fresh Tommies tramped across the bridge, ‘loaded down like brick carrying roman slaves’ as the author Stefan Zweig put it. They went out from here, thousands every day slogging up to the forward trenches, most only to make their return as a name engraved in stone.

Christ of Passchendaele, 1918

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Top image: Tyne Cot Cemetery in 2012 (photo by the author).