The consequences of war
We honour and remember the new Zealand boys who made the ultimate sacrifice in Flanders fields but those who survived also had their lives changed irrevocably. We continue our series of Passchendaele members stories with Private Ira Wilson Mudford who was gassed in the Passchendaele region in 1917 – his health never recovered.
The use of poisonous gas was one of the most deadly aspects of the First World War. This impressive Canadian memorial at St Julien is known as the “brooding soldier” it is a landmark on the road from Ypres to Bruges. The inscription says it all:
THIS COLUMN MARKS THE BATTLEFIELD WHERE 18,000 CANADIANS ON THE BRITISH LEFT WITHSTOOD THE FIRST GERMAN GAS ATTACKS
THE 22ND-24TH OF APRIL 1915.
2,000 FELL AND HERE LIE BURIED
Gas was to go on to cause 1.3 million casualties. It was an indiscriminate killer until as Ormond Burton in “The silent division: New Zealanders at the Front, 1914-1919” states “The evolution of the gas-shell however changed everything. From being rather an expensive and ineffective novelty gas immediately became one of the most dangerous weapons of modern warfare.”
The Nelson Provincial Museum