On a visit to Ypres this week to view the newly-renovated In Flanders Field Museum, I took the opportunity to visit two of the graves of men from Southborough. I spent years researching the material for my book Southborough War Memorial, and last September led a guided walk round part of High Brooms, where many of the men lived, but it is still incredibly moving and poignant to stand at their graves, in the places where they died. I got up at 6am, and, as I also needed to fit a run in, I ran through the Menin Gate (quiet at this time of the day, of course) and along the Menin Road toward Potijze. There are several small cemeteries here, and in the Potijze Chateau Wood Cemetery lies W Chuter. There are chickens and cows grazing beside the little cemetery, wheat growing, a row of potatoes, and I heard early morning birdsong. Private Chuter, 2nd Battalion Hampshire Regiment, was born in the parish of St Barnabas, Tunbridge Wells, where my own son now lives. He died on 9 August 1916, aged 19. Among those buried in the cemetery are forty-six officers and men of the 2nd Hampshires and nineteen of the 1st Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers lie here, who died in a gas attack on that day.
Wilfred Owen's poem Dulce et Decorum Est which describes a gas attack is one of the most powerful World War One poems:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen's poem Dulce et Decorum Est which describes a gas attack is one of the most powerful World War One poems:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
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