Sarkozy apologises to Queen after vandals desecrate British WWI graves in France with racist slogans

By Peter Allen for MailOnline
Updated: 06:42 EST, 12 June 2010

Nicolas Sarkozy has personally apologised to the Queen after a cemetery commemorating thousands of British war dead including one of her uncles was desecrated.

The French President said it was ‘revolting’ that Nazi graffiti should have been daubed in bright pink paint around the graveyard in Loos-en-Gohelle, near Lens.

Mr Sarkozy said he also wanted to say sorry to the ‘entire British nation’ which had fought so hard to free France during two world wars.

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Vandalised British WW1 graves

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Offensive: Graffiti including Nazi swastikas and SS-signs were painted on tombstones and a monument to thousands of British soldiers who died

A 'GHASTLY WASTE'

Captain Fergus Bowes-Lyon, the older brother of Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (right), is one of thousands of fallen soldiers commemorated on the Loos Memorial. He served with the 8th Battalion, Black Watch, and was killed at the beginning of the battles on September 27, 1915.

That day, during an attack on the German lines, his leg was blown off by an incoming shell. As he fell back into a sergeant's arms he was struck by bullets in the chest and shoulder and died.

His death cast a long shadow over the Bowes-Lyon family, and so affected Elizabeth's mother Cecilia that she became a semi-invalid and recluse.

Elizabeth herself recalled Fergus' death as a 'ghastly waste'. In a letter written shortly after the outbreak of war in 1939, she wrote: 'What breaks one's heart is to see yet another generation going cheerfully off to face death. 

'I went to see the Black Watch the other day, one of my regiments, and suddenly saw my nephew John Elphinstone among the officers. I had not seen him before in uniform and received a great shock, as I thought for one awful moment that it was my brother Fergus who was killed in France when serving with the same regiment. It was only for one second - a flash - but how tragic to think of all that ghastly waste.'

A dozen graves were covered in swastikas and SS symbols, as well as a monument commemorating more than 20,633 soldiers who died in the infamous Battle of Loos but have no known graves.

They include Fergus Bowes-Lyon, brother of Elizabeth, who went on to marry George VI and later become the Queen Mother.

Captain Bowes-Lyon, of the 8th Battalion, the Black Watch, was 26 when he was gunned down as he led an attack on the German lines in one of the most infamous battles of World War I.

Also commemorated is author Rudyard Kipling’s only son, John, who was just 18 when he was killed on his first day of fighting with the Irish Guards.

France’s veterans minister Hulbert Falco said: ‘The British and Canadian soldiers buried in this cemetery are, mostly, those who fell during the Battle of Loos-en-Gohelle in October 1915.

'They came to die on the soil of France and they made the ultimate sacrifice to defend our country.’

Mr Falco described the attack as a ‘wound on their memory’ and ‘an insult to France.’

There are some 3,000 graves in the Loos cemetery, with the vast majority of those buried being British troops who fell during the battle. 

Canadians and a small number of 1939-45 war casualties are also commemorated, but it was just British graves which were attacked.

Last year Mr Sarkozy pledged to provide 24-hour protection to the last resting places of British and Allied troops who died during the two world wars.

Hi-tech security devices including thermal imaging cameras were installed at Notre Dame de Lorette, the largest war cemetery in France, but others have yet to be made secure.

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Among those who perished at the Battle of Loos were the future Queen Mother's brother Fergus Bowes-Lyon (left) and Rudyard Kipling's son John (right)

Trench warfare: Daniel Radcliffe (left) played Rudyard Kipling's son John in the ITV film My Boy Jack which depicted his wartime role

KIPLING AND MY BOY JACK

Rudyard Kipling (right), the creator of The Jungle Book, was recognised for his patriotic fervour and was even consulted on propaganda during World War I.

He also used his considerable influence to get a commission in the Irish Guards for his son, Jack, who was severely myopic and had been turned down several times. But just two weeks after arriving in France he was killed at the Battle of Loos. It took his parents months to find out what had happened to him.

The following year, in 1916, Kipling wrote the poem My Boy Jack

 “Have you news of my boy Jack?”
Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Has any one else had word of him?”
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind —
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!

War cemeteries are often targeted in the area, with those carrying out the attacks attributing them to everything from support for the defeated Germans to the highlighting of ‘war crimes’.

The Battle of Loos took place between September 25 and October 8, 1915, and saw British forces using poison gas for the first time. It is otherwise remembered for the wholesale slaughter of thousands of brave young men from the UK.

Robert Graves, the poet, also took part in the battle and later immortalised it in the military memoire ‘Goodbye to All That’.

The devastating effects of the Battle of Loos on future members of the Royal Family were typical of those experienced by thousands of ordinary Britons.

Just before Fergus’s death in action, 14-year-old Elizabeth had started nursing badly wounded British officers at Glamis Castle in Scotland, and news of her beloved brother’s fate left her inconsolable.

Two years later another brother, Michael, was reported missing in action from his regiment, the Royal Scots, leaving the family suffering huge anguish for three months before he was located in a German prison hospital.

Fergus’s death almost robbed his mother, Cecilia Bowes-Lyon, of the will to live, and she did not return to public life until Elizabeth’s marriage to the future King – the current Queen’s father – in 1923.

Rudyard Kipling, renowned for his brilliant books celebrating marital glory at the height of the British Empire, was also left a broken man when John – a chronically short sighted teenager – was cut down in the mud and rain of northern France.

In his letter to the Queen, Mr Sarkozy said the vandalism was even more upsetting because it took place days before he travels to London to celebrate Charles de Gaulle's famous June 18, 1940 appeal from the BBC, in which he called on the French to resist Nazism.

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