THE mud was everywhere. It was deep and sticky and it came over the top of men’s boots. Just moving about was difficult. Outside the trench the mud was strewn with bodies, arms and legs lay half buried in the blood soaked mud. That was all there was to see, trees and buildings had long since been burned and shelled so the landscape was just mud broken only by bomb craters filled with water. And the rain was incessant. There was never a chance for weary soldiers to dry out their clothes so they fought and slept in wet uniforms. Overcoats were so heavy with water that they were useless against the cold. To expect men to fight and die in such hellish conditions was asking too much but men did fight. They fought the terror and fear and when the whistle blew to go ‘over the top’ they fought the enemy.

This was the Battle of Passchendaele, the Third Battle of Ypres. The first two had failed. British and Empire soldiers were fighting to break through at a bulge in the front line, The Ypres Salient, where the allies thought the German defences were at their weakest. From August to November 1917 the battle raged in the mud and rain with unbelievable loss of life, allied troops lost 325,000 and the Germans lost 260,000. By the end of this war of attrition Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig claimed victory having extended the bulge by a mere five miles. The rationale for claiming victory was that we could stand the losses more than the Germans.

Passchendaele was just one battle in the first world war that claimed 37 million killed and injured. More than half of the soldiers who went to war either did not come home or did so with terrible injuries. For the British and Empire troops over 1 million were killed or never found and a further two million were injured and 11,956 of the dead are buried at Tyne Cot, the biggest British war graves cemetery in the world. Of the dead 8,369 are unidentified, their graves marked only by the inscription ‘A soldier of the great war known only unto God’. There names of 34,887 of men with no grave are carved on the walls of the Tyne Cot Memorial and another 54,395 names are on the walls of the magnificent Menin Gate at Ypres.

It is often said that we owe our freedom to these brave men but actually we owe much more. Our society is based on their values. Our culture is formed by their beliefs. Our very nation is filled with their innocence and their humility. As a country we owe these heroes a debt that will never be repaid and we should remember them forever. Our children and grandchildren need to know about the Great War.

Harry Patch died in 2009 and was the last survivor of the first World War. He summed up the terrible war with this memory taken from his book ‘The Last Fighting Tommy.’

"We came across a lad from A company. He was ripped open from his shoulder to his waist by shrapnel and lying in a pool of blood. When we got to him, he said: 'Shoot me'. He was beyond human help and, before we could draw a revolver, he was dead. And the final word he uttered was 'Mother.' I remember that lad in particular. It's an image that has haunted me all my life, seared into my mind."

Cllr Bob Allen

Bolton