CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
This short film describes the work of Commonwealth military personnel in locating and burying the war dead on the Western Front battlefields after World War I. It follows the burial of Captain Clarence Jeffries of the 34th Australian Infantry Battalion in Tyne Cot Cemetery and his parent's efforts to visit his final resting place. Writer Rudyard Kipling suggested the biblical phrase 'Their name liveth for evermore' be inscribed on the Stone of Remembrance designed for Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries by architect Sir Fabian Ware.
Transcript
Walking through Tyne Cot Cemetery is a deceptively peaceful experience. The manicured landscape and ordered rows of well-cared for graves offers the visitor a sense of peace that belies the chaos which created this place. For Tyne Cot was once a battlefield. A place where gunfire and artillery roared and mud turned the ground into a morass that made movement near impossible. The 3rd Battle of Ypres, or Passchendaele as it is commonly known, was a campaign fought between July and November 1917 in Belgium. Australians took part in a series of actions between September and November. By 1917, the Western Front had been mired in stalemate for more than 2 years. Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare was wreaking havoc on Allied merchant shipping. Morale in the exhausted French Army was low, and soldiers had begun to mutiny in protest at the seemingly futile attacks, the heavy casualties, the lack of time away from the front line, and the sheer torment of industrial warfare. Things were not any better on the Eastern Front, and Russia was in turmoil. The Allies were in dire need of a substantial victory. General Douglas Haig pressed for a British-led offensive in Flanders. Haig claimed he could deliver a major breakthrough in the main theatre of war, and promised it might open the way to attacks on the key Belgian ports from which Germany was launching her U-boats. But Passchendaele did not deliver a breakthrough victory. Intelligence reports before the offensive was launched warned that the field of battle would become a swamp. Any artillery bombardment would churn the ground and destroy the drainage system. Seasonal autumn rains would compound the problem. The rain came, and the battlefield became a quagmire, as predicted. The mud of Flanders would be an enduring memory of the campaign. Australian war correspondent Gordon Gilmore described the conditions. ‘Torrential rains had turned the whole place into a forbidding bog. I shall not forget the sight of an Australian with a stern, determined, going-for-his-life look on his face. Seated on a mule and leading another back from one of the support areas through this hopeless quagmire. At every step, both animals sank to their bellies in the mud, and the Australian was urging them on – with his knees, with his heels, with his hands. One almost saw him willing them on with all the power of his brain. Presently, a big shell bursts with a crash 20 yards away from the rear animal and sent up a geyser of mud and water. The Australian – fatigued and fatalistic – did not even look ‘round.’ Captain Clarence Jeffries of the 34th Australian Infantry Battalion was among those who took part in the fighting around Passchendaele. Clarence embarked from Australia in May 1916. He was wounded in the Battle of Messines, but recovered to rejoin his unit in September, in time to take part in the 3rd Battle of Ypres. On the 12th of October, just near Augustus Wood, Jeffries and his company faced fierce German resistance from 2 pillboxes. These formidable concrete fortifications were a feature of the fighting in this period and on this part of the front. The pillboxes could withstand bombardments, which meant German troops were often inside and ready to fight in defence of their positions as Allied infantry approached. In the fighting on October 12, Captain Jeffries led a bombing party in a rush towards the pillbox. During the course of the action that followed, they captured 4 machine guns and 35 prisoners. He then led his company forward under an extremely heavy enemy artillery barrage and machine gunfire to the objective. Later, he organised a successful attack on a machine-gun emplacement. Two machine guns and 30 more prisoners were captured, but Jeffries was killed during the attack. Aged just 23, he was posthumously awarded a Victoria Cross for the action. Back in Australia, Clarence's parents were told of his death. When men were killed on the battlefield, burials were sometimes possible, but the small wooden crosses that marked their hastily dug graves could be lost in the maelstrom of battle. Sometimes men simply had to be left where they fell, or they vanished with a burst of shell. When the war was over, it took time for remains to be identified and organised into the ordered cemeteries we see today. In 1918, almost 20,000 of the some 46,000 Australians killed on the Western Front were still missing. The Australian Graves Detachment worked with British units to locate, exhume and consolidate the isolated remains of their comrades into larger cemeteries. It was traumatic and difficult work. Some were never found or identified, with many graves still identified as ‘An unknown soldier of the Great War’. The tyranny of distance and the cost meant many Australians could never hope to visit a loved one's grave. But some were able to make the journey relatively soon after the war. Roaming the old battlefields in search of individual graves. In 1924, more than 1,000 Australians visited Belgium, France and Britain. The number of such pilgrims had steadily risen in the previous years. Clarence Jeffries's parents were among these visitors. In July 1920, Clarence's parents visited Ypres in search of their only child's grave. Their search was in vain, but soon after they left, his remains were found. The Australian Graves Service reported that Clarence's body had been exhumed and reburied in Tyne Cot Cemetery. Tyne Cot Cemetery was created as a battlefield cemetery during the 3rd Battle of Ypres. The ground was taken by the 3rd Australian Division on the 4th of October 1917. A barn which stood in the area among German pillboxes had been dubbed 'Tyne Cot' by the Northumberland Fusiliers. One of the pillboxes was used as a dressing station, and the cemetery formed around it from October until March, when the ground fell back into German hands. It was re-taken by the Belgian Army in September 1918. As had become the practice, the Department of Defence sent photographs of the grave to his family. Their desire to visit Clarence's grave did not fade with time. In 1933, Mr and Mrs Jeffries made a pilgrimage to Tyne Cot. The Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners' Advocate reported Mrs Jeffries's impression that the cemeteries were in perfect condition and the graves beautifully kept. This small message of reassurance from CLarence's mother may well have given some comfort to those who could not travel across the world to see their own loved one's final resting place. The Battle of Passchendaele is now more than a century past, but at Tyne Cot and elsewhere along the Western Front, remnants and reminders of the battlefield can still be seen. At Tyne Cot, the graves revealed the sheer scale of loss. Row after row after row of soldiers who never returned home. And beneath the Cross of Sacrifice – an element common to many Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries – is an artifact of battle. The remains of a pillbox. Clarence's parents must have been deeply moved by such sites when they visited. Tyne Cot holds more burials than any other British Commonwealth war cemetery. At least 12,000 Commonwealth servicemen are buried or commemorated there, of which more than 8,000 are unidentified. It was an original battlefield cemetery and was expanded after the war to include burials from surrounding areas. The memorial commemorates nearly 35,000 servicemen from the United Kingdom and New Zealand lost in the Ypres Salient after 16 August 1917 and who have no known grave. The construction of the cemeteries across the world in the aftermath of the war was, in some ways, a gesture of both sorrow and hope. Relatives of the fallen were not the only battlefield pilgrims who visited cemeteries on the Western Front in the wake of the war. In a 1922 visit, King George V spoke about the significance of the Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries. ‘Never before in history of a people thus dedicated and maintained individual memorials to their fallen. And in the course of my pilgrimage, I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the years to come than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war.’ These silent witnesses remain, though the much hoped-for peace in the years to come was not to be.
