DESCRIPTION:
This is my dedication to those who gave their lives in the first word war. Their Name Liveth for Evermore. This work is one of the cinematic soundscapes taken from my album “Indigenous”.

My original composition was inspired by a trip with a friend, and our eldest sons, to the sombre and sobering battlefields of WW1. “Passchendaele Lad” tells the story of a young Lad from Yorkshire, England, who signs up with the British Army, and finds himself in Northern France/Belgium on one of the bloodiest campaigns of the 1st World War’s Western Front. With the heaviest rains for 75 years, combined artillery having pounded any form of irrigation structure to oblivion, the battlefields from Ypres to Passchendaele resembled a moonscape and quagmire. Trenches, mines and bunkers were a limited protection from the continuous artillery, bullets, and chlorine or mustard gas clouds. This was “hell on earth”! Not the glory that “Passchendaele Lad” anticipated when he signed up. His only momentary escape is when he falls asleep in the trenches from sheer exhaustion, thoughts drifting back to his homeland and the girl he left behind. This fleeting memory is soon jolted back into reality before he goes over the top, only to become yet another victim of the millions wiped out in the conflict. “Passchendaele Lad” rests amongst the thousands of graves at Tyne Cot Cemetery.

Passchendaele, like Stalingrad or Sangin in later wars, is a name that sends a shiver down the spine for the sheer unfathomable numbers killed in the direst of circumstances. Officially known as the Third Battle of Ypres, Passchendaele became infamous not only for the scale of casualties, but also for the mud.

I hope you enjoy my dedication to those that fought, died and survived this horrendous conflict.