The haunting symmetry of tombstones at the Tyne Cot cemetery. Photo / Supplied
The haunting symmetry of tombstones at the Tyne Cot cemetery. Photo / Supplied
An unexpected find in a World War I cemetery raises a more nuanced reflection on Anzac Day for Lawrence Schäffler
Like many casual readers of history, I knew the Great War was a self-defeating exercise in attrition that — after four years of fighting — left the Western Front’s lines pretty much as they were at the beginning of the carnage.
Still, I’d always been curious and wanted to visit the Flanders battlefields to gain a better understanding of the conflict. Why was it such a protracted stalemate? Why was the human toll so horrific?
A recent visit to Brugge presented the opportunity to join a day tour to the battlefields and cemeteries surrounding one of the war’s epicentres — the nearby town of Ypres.
My wife and I were the only New Zealanders in a group of about 20 comprising mainly Australians and Canadians. During the one-hour drive to Ypres our guide, Philippe, delivered a comprehensive overview — outlining the causes of conflict, the major battles, the weapons, life in the trenches — and the grim legacy that endures to this day.
He filled in my knowledge gaps about New Zealand’s contribution to the war, reciting some scarcely believable statistics. I didn’t know, for example, that New Zealand’s losses were (proportionally) more than that of any other Allied country. Nearly 17,000 dead and more than 41,000 wounded — a 58 per cent casualty rate.
The Kiwis featured in many battles, but the one that still resonates grimly was Passchendaele (July 31 to November 10, 1917) — widely considered one of the “blackest in New Zealand’s military history”. It accounted for nearly 850 of our men — the overall tally was nearly half a million.
A small, flat, neutral country with nothing much going for it other than a fancy textiles industry, Belgium was an insignificant player on Europe’s early 20th-century landscape. How did it become a focal point in such a deadly conflict?
It was largely the result, explained Philippe, of the complex web of alliances that shaped Europe at the time. Following the June 1914 assassination of Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by a Serbian gunman, a sabre-rattling Germany (Austria-Hungary’s ally) declared war on Serbia. Serbia had two powerful allies — Russia and France. A fight with Serbia meant war with both.
The German generals reasoned that, rather than fighting on two fronts simultaneously (east and west), if they could dispense with France quickly they could then turn their military machine east to Russia, perceived as a more formidable foe.
The easiest route to France was through Belgium. Neutral Belgium refused to give Germany access to France. Germany advanced anyway. Belgium’s neutrality was guaranteed by Britain — Germany’s invasion brought the British Empire into the war.
Flanders is where they all met.
An awkward reality — was he a distant relative? The variation of the surname is unusual. Photo / Supplied
The Iron Harvest
WWI is often described as the war of the Big Guns — when field artillery “came of age”. It’s impossible to know exactly how many shells the opposing sides exchanged over the four years, but estimates range between 900 million and 1.5 billion — in a very concentrated area. Some 60 per cent of battlefield casualties were caused by artillery.
The ceaseless barrage turned the land into a lifeless, cratered nightmare — and in the rainy season it became a sea of cloying mud. Today, though the region is again green and pleasant, traces of craters and the infamous zigzag trenches are still visible.
Bizarrely, it’s estimated only 66 per cent of the millions of shells detonated. Mainly because the soft mud simply absorbed the projectiles, but also because many were duds. In the race to scale up mass production, imperfect engineering standards (on all sides) proved unreliable.
More than a century after they were fired, these unexploded projectiles are being unearthed and are still extremely dangerous. Hapless farmers ploughing their fields collect about 160,000 shells each year — the so-called Iron Harvest.
The farmers leave them at designated spots for collection by the disposal crews, who take them to special sites for destruction. The Belgian Explosive Ordnance Disposal team (the army’s demining unit) destroyed more than 200 tons of projectiles in 2019 alone. The arithmetic suggests the chaps will be busy for centuries.
It’s dangerous work — scores of Belgian and French disposal experts, as well as farmers, have died handling the shells. Belgium established a dedicated disposal facility at Poelkapelle in 1980, after dumping the shells at sea was banned.
Destroying the projectiles is particularly tricky when they contain toxic gas. Along with the Big Guns, WWI also marked the introduction of large-scale gas warfare, using shells filled with bromine, chlorine, phosgene and later, the particularly nasty mustard gas.
Farmlands hide a dangerous legacy — some shells contain toxic gas. Photo / Supplied
Both sides embraced gas warfare. I was surprised to learn the French, not the Germans, were the first to use it, employing tear gas against the Germans in August 1914. Using poison gas in war was outlawed by the 1925 Geneva Protocol.
Inevitably, as well as the Iron Harvest, human remains are regularly unearthed. And that’s understandable, given that thousands of soldiers were buried where they fell, under tonnes of displaced earth.
The remains are impossible (at best difficult) to identify because few soldiers wore dog tags, and the dog tags that were worn weren’t of particularly good quality — they’ve simply disintegrated over the decades. While modern science makes it possible to conduct DNA analysis, the task would be daunting — most are reburied in mausoleums.
An average of 160,000 unexploded shells are unearthed every year — the Iron Harvest. Photo / Supplied
Cemeteries
Nothing brings the senseless waste of young lives into perspective quite like the endless rows of gravestones in the Commonwealth cemeteries — in particular, the symmetrical, semi-circular layout at Tyne Cot. It comprises nearly 12,000 graves, more than two-thirds containing unidentified men.
New Zealanders’ graves — 520, of which 322 are unidentified — are scattered among those of Australians, Brits, Canadians, South Africans, Rhodesians and Indian Gurkhas. . Many gravestones only carry the soldier’s nationality and regiment, his anonymity underscored by the Known unto God epitaph. Other listings are even more cryptic: A Soldier of the Great War.
We also stopped at Gravenstafel, site of the New Zealand Memorial with its poetic epitaph — From the Uttermost Ends of the Earth. Indeed.
On October 4, 1917, during the Passchendaele offensive, the Kiwis took the Gravenstafel ridge (they called it “Grab and Stumble”). Only 10 per cent of them survived. Nearby, at Vancouver Corner, is the Brooding Soldier Memorial. It commemorates the 2000 Canadians who died in the first gas attacks of 1915.
And then we arrived at Langemark, one of four German cemeteries in the region.
Tyne Cot cemetery. Photo / Supplied
Langemark
In contrast to the sweeping curves and symmetry at Tyne Cot, Langemark is square and stark. Some 44,000 men are buried here and, as with the Commonwealth cemeteries, the vast majority are unidentified. Most are buried in common graves. A bit more circumspect, the German gravestones simply read: Vier Unbekannte Deutsche Soldaten (Four Unknown German Soldiers). Sometimes five, six, seven or eight.
Though many are buried in the shared graves, more than half — 25,000 — lie in a single, mass grave. Surrounding it are 68 blocks with bronze panels bearing the names of soldiers who (based on archival records) are thought to be in the grave.
With my German/Irish heritage I knew it was probable that distant ancestors had fought on both sides (and in both World Wars). But as a Commonwealth product I was raised, guided and shaped by the British narrative. The wars were pretty much black and white – good versus bad, victim versus perpetrator — and being on the winning side, I’d never given the blended heritage much thought.
So I certainly didn’t expect to be confronted with an awkward discovery in the Langemark cemetery. But there, on one of the mass grave’s bronze panels, was listed a Joseph Schäffler — Infanterist (Infantryman). It stopped me in my tracks and sent my thoughts spinning.
Who was this man? Where was he from? Do we carry the same DNA? How old was he when he died? He was killed in November 1914, mere months after it all started. Perhaps fortunately, his war was brief.
Of course, it’s impossible to be certain we are related, but the same, unusual variation of the surname (the l and the umlaut over the ä) — is compelling evidence. Furthermore, Joseph is a popular name in Catholic families, often given to the first-born son. My grand-nephew is a sixth-generation Joseph — a naming convention that extends to his great-grandfather.
The Flanders visit reinforced the obvious: it’s impossible to escape the staggering waste of human life, a hollow feeling amplified by the bewilderment/disbelief/anger at the seeming impunity with which the generals committed so many young men to their deaths.
But I left the battlefields and cemeteries appreciating, for the first time, that the horror was not the exclusive preserve of the Anzacs.
Just as the young Kiwis might have marched to the front alongside their British counterparts singing It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, Infantryman Joseph Schäffler and his mates might have marched from the opposite direction singing the Argonnerwaldlied (Forest of Argonne Song).
Many young Kiwis, it’s widely acknowledged, volunteered for duty because it offered an opportunity to see the world. Everyone was keen to get “over there” as fast as possible because “everyone knew” it would all be over in weeks.
None, of course, had the faintest idea of what lay ahead — nor that many would never return. Joseph didn’t have the luxury of choice — he’d have been conscripted. But I’d venture to guess he was just as naive, innocent and excited.
Unbelievably, 21 years after the guns fell silent, it started all over again.
The epitaph says it all — they came from the other side of the planet.
Photo / Supplied
That so many WWI soldiers lie buried in unknown graves seems deeply insulting to the thousands of young men who ventured willingly to the other side of the world and fight in a war they had little chance of understanding. Gone without so much as a gravestone to register their brief lives. Many are simply “missing in action”.
Sometimes, though, miracles happen and help to bring closure to descendants.
Consider the fortuitous discovery of an Australian rifleman’s grave. It resulted in the establishment of a new memorial near Ypres — the Brothers in Arms Memorial Park.
Inaugurated in September 2022, the memorial’s centrepiece is a life-size bronze statue of two Australian brothers — the younger Jim Hunter cradling the dying, older John. The statue underscores an often-overlooked footnote to WWI′s grim statistics: many families lost more than one son.
It was erected following the discovery in 2006 of a shallow grave by workers installing a gas pipeline near the Flanders hamlet of Westhoek. It contained the remains of five Australian soldiers. The recovery team noted one had been buried “differently” — a little apart from the others and wrapped in a ground sheet.
DNA analysis identified him as Private John Hunter, and the researchers eventually tracked down his Australian relatives who provided the missing details and confirmed Jim had buried John.
Young Jim, 25, was one of seven brothers. He volunteered in 1916 and it seems this forced John to follow suit, ostensibly because he considered it his duty to protect his younger brother. They were drafted to the 49th Battalion, a unit of mostly Queenslanders.
John was fatally wounded during the Battle of Polygon Wood and died in his brother’s arms. Jim buried him in a temporary grave, promising to return after the war and take his brother home.
He did return, but the artillery barrages had so changed the terrain he couldn’t find the grave. Jim died many years later without fulfilling his promise. And John never did return to Australia. He was reburied, along with the other four, at Buttes New British Cemetery in Polygon Wood.
But the story resonated with the Australian public, and it led to the creation of the memorial and the statue. The memorial’s title was perhaps inspired by the 1985 Mark Knopfler/Dire Straits anti-war anthem:
Canadian surgeon John McCrae was forced to make instantaneous triage decisions in this field hospital. He later penned his famous poem, In Flanders Fields. Photo / Supplied
Checklist
Belgium
GETTING THERE
Fly from Auckland to Brussels Airport with one stopover with Qatar Airways and Emirates.
