Lord Thomas of Gresford
Main Page: Lord Thomas of Gresford (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD)
My Lords, following the deadly struggle of the 38th (Welsh) Division to take Mametz Wood, a key point in the Somme offensive in July 1916, some people in Wales called for the cancellation of the National Eisteddfod which was due to take place some four weeks later in Aberystwyth. To sing, they thought, was unseemly in such circumstances. David Lloyd George, then Secretary of State for War and shortly to succeed Mr Asquith as Prime Minister, encouraged the gathering to continue and spoke from the Eisteddfod platform:
“Why should we not sing during the war? It is true that there are thousands of gallant men falling in the fight—let us sing of their heroism. .... Let us sing of our land that gave birth to so many heroes”.
Lloyd George added:
“Our soldiers sing the songs of Wales in the trenches, and they hold their own Eisteddfod behind them”.
It was true.
At three o’clock on the dawn of 9 July 1916, as told by a survivor, the 16th Royal Welsh Fusiliers were in position in the sunken road before Mametz Wood. They were exchanging banter between themselves and singing snatches of Welsh songs. Their colonel, Colonel Ronald Carden, a cavalry officer and a famous polo player, joined them to lead the attack. He was immaculately dressed, carrying nothing more than his officer’s cane. Someone in the ranks struck up “Aberystwyth”", the Welsh setting of Charles Wesley’s, “Jesu, Lover of my Soul”. Your Lordships will know how the music moves from the poignant minor key of the first two lines into a triumphant major conclusion of hope and of redemption. When it was finished, the colonel said: “Boys, make your peace with God! We are going to take that position and some of us won’t come back, but we are going to take it. This”, he said, tying his handkerchief to his cane, “will show you where I am”. Brandishing his cane in the air, he led them out of the road, up and on to the four hundred yards of bare open ground which led to the impenetrable tree line and the machine guns within it. He shouted. “Come on, boys”, and started to run forward. He was hit almost immediately, but staggering up and still encouraging his men, he made another dash forward before he was hit a second time and fell dead.
Waves of the 14th (Caernarfon and Anglesey) and the 15th (London Welsh) Royal Welsh Fusiliers followed, breaking through a hail of bullets and bombs in which, so the survivor said, it seemed impossible for men to live. The Swansea, Rhondda and Carmarthen battalions of the Welsh regiment attacked through the very centre of the German lines. The wood rang with the noise of rifle and bomb and the cries of men shouting their battle cry, “Stick to it, Welsh”. Captain Wyn Griffith of the 15th Royal Welsh Fusiliers described what he saw:
“Blue sky above, a band of green trees, and a ploughed graveyard in which living men moved worm-like in and out of sight three men digging a trench thigh deep in the red soil, digging their own graves, as it chanced, for a bursting shell turned their shelter into a tomb. There were more corpses than men, but there were more sights than corpses. Limbs and mutilated trunks, here and there a detached head, forming splashes red against the green leaves”.
It was, he said, “our crucifixion of youth”.
But it was not just the fighting soldiers of the 38th Division that showed courage. The stretcher bearers climbed again and again from the battlefield up over the ridge, taking the wounded by the shortest route to the 13th RWF aid post beyond. They were in full view of the enemy with no cover from the barrage of hostile guns. In the middle of the afternoon, a howitzer shell destroyed the aid post, and with it, the battalion doctor and six stretcher bearers.
On the following day, Mametz Wood was penetrated to its furthest edge and finally taken with devastating losses. The 38th Division suffered 8,000 casualties over those two days. The 13th Rhondda Battalion of the Welsh Regiment went in over 1,000 strong and only 135 answered their names at the first roll call afterwards.
Today, the Welsh Dragon stands proud over Mametz Wood as a memorial to the 38th Division. It is in the process of being refurbished for ceremonies to remember the battle and its terrible toll.
The Royal Welsh Fusiliers was the regiment of the poet, Robert Graves, who fought at Mametz Wood. It was the regiment of Siegfried Sassoon, who won the Military Cross for bravery. Sassoon rescued two wounded men from a 25-foot deep crater under enemy fire. He was known as “Mad Jack” for his reckless courage and later, for another feat of valour, he was recommended for the Victoria Cross. Yet Sassoon became sick of the killing fields. Emmeline Pankhurst published his A Soldier’s Declaration, a statement read out by a Labour Member of Parliament to a shocked House of Commons. Sassoon wrote:
“I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed”.
The War Office could not court-martial a decorated soldier, so he was deemed to have suffered a nervous breakdown. He was sent to a hospital, where he met a fellow patient, Wilfred Owen, a man born at Oswestry on the Welsh border of Welsh and English parents. Sassoon encouraged and helped Owen to write those scorching war poems, set to music by Benjamin Britten in his moving “War Requiem”, which we in the Parliament Choir have performed both in Coventry Cathedral and at Westminster.
Both Sassoon and Wilfred Owen returned to the Western Front, Sassoon to be wounded severely in the head, and Owen to win the Military Cross for bravery but alas to be killed just at the end of the war. His parents learnt of his death on Armistice Day.
The Welsh poet, Ellis Humphrey Evans, whose bardic name was Hedd Wyn or “Blessed Peace”, was also of the 15th Regiment of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. While released briefly to get in the harvest on his father’s farm at Trawsfynydd, he wrote a poem which he entered for the chair competition at the 1917 National Eisteddfod in Birkenhead. However, on the day of the ceremony, he did not answer the call of the bardic trumpets; Hedd Wyn had been killed at Passchendaele five weeks before. The chair he had won was draped in a black shroud.
So what should we commemorate in these coming four years? I shall be joining with the Parliament Choir and the Bundestag Choir to celebrate more than 70 years of peace between the nations of western Europe in our joint concert in Westminster Hall on 4 July. We shall be singing together Mendelssohn’s “Lobgesang”, whose climactic conclusion is:
The night has passed, the day has come.
Let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armour of light.
I know that I shall be thinking of my mother’s cousin, 2nd Lieutenant Jim Morgan Williams, who said goodbye to his wife a fortnight after they were wed to join the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. She never saw him again. He was killed at Ypres on the 9 May 1918. She was by that time carrying their son, Glyn. She brought him up as a single mother and a widow. He attended my grammar school in Wrexham, gained a Meyricke scholarship to Oxford, took his degree, and then joined his father’s regiment as a lieutenant. He was killed on 28 July 1945, after the war in Europe had ended, when his jeep was driven over a destroyed bridge at the Rhine.
Hedd Wyn wrote in his poem “Rhyfel”, or “War”:
Mae'r hen delynau genid gynt,
Ynghrog ar gangau'r helyg draw,
A gwaedd y bechgyn lond y gwynt,
A'u gwaed yn gymysg efo'r glaw.
The harps to which we sang, are hung
On willow boughs, and their refrain
Drowned by the anguish of the young
Whose blood is mingled with the rain.