Today we had the opportunity to see some lesser-known memorials, which provided a strong contrast to the famous Vimy monument of yesterday. This prompted me to question our process of commemoration and try and understand it.

We began at the monument to Hill 70, which now sits beside a highway and roundabout. It’s a simple brick structure, dedicated in particular to the 48th Highlanders. The grass was long around it, and we were the only ones in the parking lot. There was no interpretive centre and no guestbook to say our thanks.

Then we went to the Communal Cemetery at La Tourelles, where commonwealth soldiers are buried in a separate area of a local cemetery. Here again, there were no crowds, it was a quiet, rainy morning and the graves almost seemed as if undisturbed since they were placed there. This was emphasized by the nearby trees that have started to absorb some of the headstones. It made me think of the Anglican burial verse, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” We are all equal in death, however many of these soldiers had even less life than I have had.

From here, we moved onto another communal cemetery at Barlin. Here the graves were in better condition and we laid flags to commemorate Canadian soldiers.

I also had a chance to read some of the epitaphs and was struck by that of Sergeant Wingfield, of the Canadian Field Artillery. “Justice owes him this, that what he died for be not overthrown.” And yet, justice did not prevail. He died on May 15th, 1917. Even in the same war, the ground he had lost his life for was regained by the Germans in the Spring Offensive of 1918. Yes, the war ended that year and there was a peace settlement following that. However, 20 years later, the world was at war again.

Some of the same regions were effected by both wars. Our next stop was the Australian Monument to the missing. This great tower is their “Vimy” and contains the names of those who do not have graves or who could never be found. Even more remarkable, there is shell damage throughout the memorial, as the Germans passed through this area on their way to Paris. To me, this really hit home that the Great War was not the war to end all wars as advertised.

Throughout all its efforts to be billed as a modern war with the advent of mechanized vehicles and aircraft, it also retained vestiges of past eras. We visited the Canadian Calvary monument today and learned about their charge at Moreuil Wood. It was in the middle of the last German push and the Allies needed to regain high ground near Amiens to take it. After the Calvary charge, they did so successfully.

So our day ended by visiting Amiens and the beautiful gothic cathedral there. It suffered damage in the war but remained intact throughout. It was even fortified with sandbags to keep it standing and useful. Although beautiful, it also made me contemplate the fact that the stone church could withstand a war while ordinary man could not. Truly in the end, man returns to dust.

And yet, they left so much behind. Wives, children, parents, stories, letters, and memories. It is up to us to honour them, and that is the purpose of commemoration.

-Laura Blackmore, University of Ottawa

In 2003, John Garth wrote a book about how J.R.R. Tolkien’s experiences on the Somme influenced the writing of his Lord of the Rings trilogy. On the first page of the book, Garth describes a scene from Tolkien’s early 20s that, at face value, seems to be seared into our collective consciousness of the war:

“Chill gusts buffet the flanks and faces of the attackers struggling to advance across a bare hundred yards or so of mud. They are a ramshackle group, some of them mere novices …. most of the time there is chaos. Again and again their opponents shrug off the assault and land a fearsome counterblow, so that all the guile, fortitude, and experience of the veterans can barely hold back the assault.”  1 

Today our group visited the Somme. For much of the day it was pouring rain outside, and many of us shivered in the rain and gusting winds. The sky was grey and overcast, and enough mist covered the green earth that the otherwise tall and impressive British monument of Thiepeval was shrouded in clouds and hard to see from a distance. We were in a rural area, so once we got out in the fields, you could not hear the sounds of cars.  The fields looked the part.

Not for the first time on this trip, I was struck by the great beauty of the landscape. So much of the land that we have visited in France and Belgium is dominated by long, yawning fields of green. The picturesque images contrast strongly with the ugliness of what had to happen.

At Beaumont Hamel, we visited the the memorial to the Newfoundlanders. There is a statue of a moose atop a walkway, and below you have a view looking down at the battlefield. There you can see the tree the Newfoundlanders advanced to on July 1, 1916. It is not very far from the front of the trenches. The mist was not so great that we couldn’t see that far.

Later, we visited the Adanac Cemetery. Adanac is Canada spelled backwards, and this site is a cemetery on the Somme with many Canadian soldiers. When we were here, our guide Dr. Marc Milner gave each of us a small Canadian flag and told us to pick the grave of a soldier and place our Canadian flags before their graves. Not all the graves were marked; some were labeled as being known only by God. In the blustery wind, cold, and rain, kneeling before these soldiers’ graves to place our flags was an affecting experience. Many of the soldiers were as young (or younger) than we are. I placed my flag at the grave of one J.M. Strike–who was from the 2nd Battalion of the Canadian Infantry. He was 20 when he died.

It reminded me of that passage in Garth’s book on Tolkien. However, although most of that book is about the War the passage I quoted above is not. The reader is set up to think it is, but then told: “The year is 1913: the Great War is eight months away and this is just a game.”2 The passage describes Tolkien and his friends playing rugby outside in muddy conditions. Some of them will die in the war, but that day, they are doing something that men in their early 20s should be free to do: enjoying life.

Because of the war, men like J.M. Strike had that opportunity cut short.

By Robert Revington

 

Notes

1. John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2003), 3.
2. Ibid.