ANZAC Ceremony, Tyne Cot Cemetery, Flanders, Belgium

A service remembering the New Zealand and Australian casualties of the battle of Passchendaele.

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Tyne Cot Cemetery
Flanders,
Belgium

Today we commemorate the Anzac sacrifices at the battle of Passchendaele - a battle in which New Zealanders and Australians stood together against a common foe.

For New Zealand, the word 'Passchendaele' evokes many images. For many, it is a byword for military futility - evocative of an offensive which continued long after it should have been closed down. It calls to mind soldiers struggling against all odds in a morass of mud. That gains were measured in metres at a cost of so many lives leaves us struggling to comprehend the military logic of the effort.

Overall Passchendaele is also a byword for disaster. Our soldiers were bombarded by their own guns on the start line. The planned artillery barrage failed to provide the necessary support. Uncut wire barred the way forward. Enemy machine gunners cut a swathe through our division's ranks.

But Passchendaele also is a byword for courage in adversity. It speaks of people bravely doing their duty as their comrades around them were being cut down, of desperate efforts to advance under a merciless hail of machine gun bullets, of stretcher bearers struggling to extricate the wounded lying in the quagmire.

For so many New Zealand families, Passchendaele is a name indelibly linked with the loss of relatives, long gone but not forgotten, and of family memories of mothers inconsolable at the loss of a son, and of fathers, brothers, sisters or children bereft.

At least five sets of brothers fell during the two attacks at Passchendaele. One family, the Newloves of Takaka, lost three sons.

None of the Newloves have a named grave. Their bodies were lost in the mud or, if recovered and buried in temporary graves, they disappeared in subsequent shelling. They may be among the more than 300 unknown New Zealand soldiers buried here, in this cemetery. Their names are etched on the memorial to the missing on the wall at the back of this cemetery, along with those of more than 1,100 of their compatriots.

For the survivors, the horror of Passchendaele remained with them for the rest of their lives. More than 2,000 had suffered wounds in the two attacks. Many were maimed for life. Others recovered but carried psychological scars that would trouble them, and their families, for decades.

Some carried actual reminders of their ordeal in their bodies. In 1999 101-year-old Mr Bright Williams of Hastings had an operation to remove the last shards of metal from his thigh - the remains of three machine gun bullets that struck him down as he struggled forward near here on the 12th of October 1917. Sadly, Mr Williams' death in 2003 cut our last link with the men of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force - and with Passchendaele. He was the longest-surviving of the 104,000 men and women New Zealand sent overseas in the Great War.

New Zealanders also recognise today the sacrifice of the Australian soldiers alongside whom our people served. All were proud to be ANZACs.

We recognize, too, the sacrifices of the Belgian people - also victims of these battles. For them the struggle was immediate and brutal, and fought on the soil of their country. And we remember the many others - allied and foe- who fell in this vicinity, and elsewhere on the Western Front.

On the New Zealand monument at Graventafel are the words 'From the Uttermost Ends of the Earth'. It is a reminder that our soldiers came the furtherest to this battlefield, and that they paid a heavy price. Even when finding themselves in a veritable hell at Passchendaele, they did their duty with courage and determination. We will remember them.