Dundee gears up to remember the Delville Wood centenary

The Somme Offensive and Delville Wood – a century later 
On Passing the new Menin Gate – a poem by Siegfried Sassoon
“Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
the unheroic dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,-
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.
Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride
‘Their name liveth for ever’, the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
as these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.”
Siegfried Sassoon
“Was ever an immolation so belied as these intolerably nameless names?” Having stood under that “sepulchre of crime” myself, gazing in unreported wonder at those 42 000 plus names of the forever lost dead, I could only agree with this English poet’s silent fury, as I knew he was an infantry officer, one of millions, who was plunged into the immolation of what later became the Western Front. The event was Remembrance Sunday 1998, and I was witnessing a spectacular ceremony.
Two buglers of the Fire Brigade stood underneath the Menin Gate. They gave a stirring rendition of the Last Post, and the ever-shrinking parade of old soldiers, each man over a hundred years old, in their wheel chairs pushed by a nurse, or a favourite niece, paused under the names of the Lost, trapped in memories of fire and blood that will never leave them.

The silent pilgrimage over, their energies spent, they left as unobtrusively as they came, leaving only an uncomprehending West European youth, unfamiliar with war and uncaring shrugs as they continued on their way. The Western Front, 1916. A static cesspool of mud and slime, a veritable human soup, a soldiers’ alphabet brew that indelibly marked the psyches of its survivors. Delville Wood was but one desperate struggle at the bottom end of that Witches’ Cauldron where South African soldiers carved their legacy into the fabric of our Remembrance with their own blood.
Many a South African lad breathed his last under the pounding and merciless fury of the German guns. They are still there, silently witnessing our respect, their descendants who ventured into that awesome place of bloody memory. A local stalwart and fellow military historian, Foy Vermaak, visited Delville Wood, and brought us back some of these pictures.

This year 2016 marks a hundred years which passed since that violent confrontation, and Dundee will mark the splendid courage of local men who paid the ultimate price with the creation of a War Memorial Precinct that honours our fallen soldiers, from the destruction of the troopship SS Mendi to the rigours of the Border War.