Marrieres Wood

For those of you who are history buffs, especially who have read of the field battles fought as a segment of the great campaign battles such as the Somme, Ypres and Verdun battles which ring with both great bravery and deep unabated stupidity. 

The men in the front line were there not sons of famous families, carrying on as bearers of family tradition but ordinary men who had been caught up in the patriotic fervour which Kitcheners poster "Your Country Needs You" aroused. Men who a month before had been a labourer in the factory or leading great shire horses up and down the fields of England. They were no more equipped for the assault on the Passchendaele Ridge than I am for a trip to Mars and yet in uniform under the gaze of men like himself he combined with the others to exceed all expectations.

I wrote of the heroism of the South Africans at Delville Wood and now again of the same heroism by men from the same country at the battle of "Marrieres Wood" a junction point between two British Armies which had to be held against all odds. The South African 9th Division were chosen to plug the gap and hold on.  With the strength of the brigade at 500 men these men were to hold on at all costs. And so they fought against huge odds, gradually being whittled away slowly running out of ammunition but not flinching in their duty to hold their line. As the men around them fell under the withering hale of machine gun fire, they counted their bullets as the enemy got ever closer 250yds 200yds they could nearly see the whites of their eyes. For three bloody days the little troupe of men fought battle after battle. Giddy with lack of sleep grey, with fatigue, poisoned with gas tortured by ceaseless bombardment they were beyond human praise.

The Germans tried everything to dislodge them. The promised relief never came but still they held their ground.

One must pause here to think of these conscripts from the High Veld and the Low Veld, men from a sunny warm African country fighting a 'strangers war' in a strange land, a hell hole of unimaginable proportions. They must have questioned what the were they doing here, away from their beautiful open grassland and rolling hills, away from the birdsong and the night time cicada serenade, away from their families and loved ones fighting a war that was not of their making. And yet along with the Australians and Kiwis, along with the Gurkha these men were prepared to lay down that most precious thing, their lives for a a few hundred yards of French soil. 

At 3 in the afternoon with the ammunition well ne'er gone would they retire under cover of darkness, the shell fire was unending the casualties so high that the line was held by small pockets of men counting out the ammo and the time to darkness. Their spirit unconquered their  commanding officers entry into his diary before he to was shot "that it was better to go down fighting than to have failed to carry out orders". Tributes from the enemy include one from the German Emperor himself who on stopping some captured British Army Officers asked if they were from the 9th Division "I want to see a man of that division" he said, "for if all divisions had fought as well as the 9th, I would not have any troops left to carry on".

And so history once again gives us pause for thought in asking would today's sceptical populous be as courageous or would they have found some plausible reason for being somewhere else.

The wars of political leaders are no reason to give up ones own life, unless it to defend your own family and the fact that so many men from the far flung corners of the earth did so in our time of need must should make us cringe when we effectively turned away from them and the Commonwealth in favour of closer ties to that same enemy, all for the glitter of gold.