Sunday WW1 Remembered..

Ellis Humphrey Evans

13 January 1887 - 31 July 1917

Trawsfynydd, Meirionnydd

North Wales

In 1917, the Welsh poet Ellis Humphrey Evans, 'Hedd Wyn' died at the third Battle of Ypres.  He was one of 25,000 British casualties on the first day of the battle to take Pilckem Ridge.

The thirty year old  shepherd poet had enlisted into the Royal Welch Fusilers at Blaenau Ffestiniog and was initially sent to Liverpool for basic training. He was there at the same time as another WW1 poet, Siegfried Sassoon. In July, Hedd Wynn joined his battalion at Nord-Pas-de-Calais and on the 31st July he went 'over the top'. He was fatally wounded by shell fire and died later that same day.

This is one of his poems.

War

Why must I live in this grim age,

When, to a far horizon, God

Has ebbed away, and man, with rage,

Now wields the sceptre and the rod?

Man raised his sword, once God had gone,

To slay his brother, and the roar

Of battlefields now casts upon

Our homes the shadow of the war.

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

Ellis Humphrey Evans is buried at the Artillery Wood Cemetery, near Boezingeat, Belgium. 

He was posthumously awarded the bard's chair at the 1917 National Eisteddfod.

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