Hedd Wyn (Artillery Wood Cemetery, Ieper)

Hedd Wyn

The Passchendaele Society, which managed the memorial Museum
Passchendaele 1917, has launched an appeal to raise money for a
memorial to the men of Wales who died during the Battle of
Passchendaele as well as elsewhere during the conflict. Hedd Wyn has
become the most prominent representative of the many Welsh who
volunteered for the First World War and lost their lives in the fields
of Flanders.

Hedd Wyn, which means "blessed peace," was the pen name of Welsh poet
Ellis Humphrey Evans, born inTrawsfynydd, North Wales, in 1887. The
son of sheep farmers, he was a poet from an early age, writing in the
Welsh language and winning several competitions. He volunteered for
the war in February of 1917, but returned to Wales on leave to help
with the farming. During that time he wrote what is considered his
masterpiece, Yr Arwr (The Hero). Evans was killed on 31 July, 1917 in
the battle of Pilckem Ridge, near Ypres, in which Edmund Blunden's
Royal Sussex Regiment was also invoplved. On 6 September, he was
elected, under the name of Fleur de Lys, as chief bard at the National
Eisteddfod, the Welsh language poetry competition. When Fleur de Lys
was called on to accept the award, no-one rose, and it was announced
that the winner had in fact died on the battlefield two months
earlier.

Third Ypres or the Battle of Passchendaele (July – November 1917) took
place in atrocious conditions that have become iconic of trench
warfare: constant rain, thick mud, bloody slaughter and indeterminate
goals. The dead and wounded by the end of the battle came to about
half a million: 300,000 on the Allied and 200,000 on the German side.
Another poet, the Irishman Francis Ledwidge, also died at
Passchendaele. Both Hedd Wyn and Francis Ledwidge lie buried at
Artillery Farm military cemetery, to the north-east of Ypres. One of
the German casualties, injured in a British gas attack, was the then
28-year-old Adolf Hitler.

The Irish and the Scots both have their own memorial to the fallen of
the battles of the Ypres Salient, but as yet the Welsh did not. Erwin
Ureel, secretary of the Passchendaele Society, told the BBC: "This was
something we had been thinking of for a number of years; we wanted to
do something for the Welshmen". If the appeal is successful, the Welsh
monument is to be inaugurated in
2017, on the anniversary of the battle, in Langemark. There you can
already find a memorial plaque as a tribute to Hedd Wyn.

Chris

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