Speech by Mayor Jozias van Aartsen at the commemoration of the victims of chemical
warfare in the Ypres room of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons, 29 April 2015
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
“It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, the grass was green. We should have been going
on a picnic, not doing what we were going to do. The artillery began heavy shelling in the
afternoon because the French had to be kept in their trenches.”
This is how Willi Siebert, member of the German Pioneer Regiment 36, that had been ordered
to carry out the chlorine gas attack, described the events at Ypres. He continued:
“After the artillery had stopped firing we sent the infantry back and opened the gas valves. ...
When the large cloud of gas began to form in front of us we suddenly heard the French
screaming. In less than a minute I heard more rifle and machine gunfire than I had ever heard
before... The French just kept on firing. Even though they couldn’t possibly see what they
were firing at. 15 minutes later the gunfire began to subside. After half an hour only an
occasional shot could be heard. Then it was silent.”
The scene that then unfolded before the eyes of our eye-witness must have been surreal.
“What we saw, was total death. Nothing was alive. All the animals had crawled out of their
holes to die. The smell of the gas still hung in the air. It lingered among the few bushes that
were still left standing. The French trenches were empty, but the following half mile lay
strewn with the bodies of the suffocated French soldiers. It was unbelievable. “
This was what took place that Thursday 22 April 1915, on the front line between Steenstrate
and Langemark, just above Ypres. The day that has gone down in history as the day on which
large-scale chemical warfare began. Evermore to be remembered as a chilling day.
Forty-six years later, Siebert, who had long since emigrated to the United States, returned to
Ypres once more. On what had once been the battlefield, by chance, he met a Canadian
veteran who by some miracle had survived the gas attack on that infernal spring day in 1915.
To paraphrase Wilfred Owen’s poem Strange Meeting, they might have said ‘I am the enemy
you nearly killed, my friend’. They talked the entire afternoon, had dinner together that
evening, took their leave of one another and never saw each other again.
A hundred years later farmers in Belgium and Northern France still turn up gas grenades
when ploughing their land...
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Much more recent is the attack on Halabja, where more than 5000 people died and another
10,000 were injured. Innocent men, women and children. Since last year there has been a
monument beside this building erected in remembrance of that dreadful event.
But today’s commemoration also requires that we look to the present and the future. Despite
the huge progress that has been made in recent years, the spectre of chemical weapons has
still not yet been entirely banished. The situation in Syria and the rest of that region continues
to give cause for grave concern.
Which makes it all the more important that the world has the Organisation for the Prohibition
of Chemical Weapons. Especially now that some 85 per cent of all chemical weapons have
been destroyed.
The Hague, which at the first Peace Conference in 1899 had already instituted a ban on firing
projectiles with suffocating or poisonous gasses, is proud that the Nobel Prize-winning
OPCW is based here in our city. And we will continue to support its work wherever we can,
as shown by OPCW-The Hague Award.
Wilfred Owen’s poem that I quoted will again be heard next Sunday at the end of a
performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, here in the international city of peace and
justice, on the eve of our National Day of Remembrance.
Owen immortalised a gas attack in perhaps his most famous poem, Dulce et decorum est, a
bitter repudiation of Horatius’ classic ode that it is ‘sweet and right to die for your country’.
Owen’s poem is a huge indictment of false war heroism. An indictment that should
reverberate down the ages. Particularly now, as young people are being beguiled into
sacrificing themselves for a cause which is falsely presented as paradise on earth.
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
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