Thank you for the opportunity to commemorate the great war. In 1916, my grandfather was 21, was recently married and was in the Royal Welch Fusiliers in the Somme and in Ypres. My grandfather was a Dolgellau boy and he served alongside boys from Trawsfynydd in the great war. They were together on the battlefield and they communicated through the medium of Welsh on foreign fields, and the death of close friends had a severe impact on them all in the battle, and ripped the hearts out of wives, mothers and rural communities across Wales. It also broke the pacifist traditions of Welsh nonconformity simultaneously. It was boys who rejected conscription on the basis of their faith who were prosecuted and ridiculed, and chapels at the time were full of anguish. It was the farm boys of Meirionnydd who went to war and the boys of the masters were allowed to remain at home. Yes, people do remember.

One day in the heat of battle, a friend of my grandfather was severely injured, shot while fighting next to my grandfather. My grandfather picked him up and carried him on his back and tried to take him to shelter, but another enemy bullet shot his friend from Dolgellau dead whilst on my grandfather's back. My grandfather, surprisingly, survived. But as the battle continued over the bloody fields of Flanders and France, my grandfather was poisoned by the mustard gas. He was among these deadly fumes, and his feet rotted as he stood in the water-filled, blood-filled trenches, facing the remains of bodies on the barbed wire.

Miraculously, my grandfather survived, or I wouldn't be here, but he barely spoke of his horrific experiences and all the suffering. It was a silent remembrance for my grandfather, so different to the fate of Hedd Wyn, the poet of the black chair in the Birkenhead Eisteddfod of 1917. Hedd Wyn, the poet and farmer from Trawsfynydd, won the chair that year at that Eisteddfod, but he had been killed at Pilckem Ridge in the battle of Passchendaele on 31 July 1917—a month before the Eisteddfod, but after he had sent his awdl Yr Arwr into that Eisteddfod. The day of the chairing at the 1917 National Eisteddfod arrived, in September, and David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, was in the audience on that day. But despite the name of the poet being called, the chair remained empty and a black cloth was placed over that chair, with tears flowing as everyone learnt of the fate of the winning poet.

Yes, we remember. Hedd Wyn joined the army so that his younger brother could avoid conscription. Today, the home of Hedd Wyn, Yr Ysgwrn in Trawsfynydd, has been restored and stands as it was in 1917 so that we can remember the sacrifice of that young generation. Hedd Wyn, who left a whole host of excellent poetry, was killed at 30 years of age. 

I will conclude with his poem 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.'

We will remember the sacrifice of my grandfather's generation.