IN 2004 DIRK DECUYPERE, AN AMATEUR HISTORIAN IN BELGIUM, STUMBLED ACROSS A MYSTERY THAT TURNED INTO AN OBSESSION; WHAT HAPPENED TO THREE CANADIAN PILOTS SHOT DOWN DURING THE GREAT WAR?
BELGIAN GRAVE-HUNTERS SOLVE 100-YEAR-OLD MYSTERY
Dirk Decuypere is a retired language teacher from a tiny village near the Belgian town of Ypres, a boneyard of a place full of fragments of dead soldiers, unexploded shells, spent bullets and blood from the Great War.
Decuypere grew up with the stories of his Grandpa, Jules, a veteran of the trenches, who spoke to him about mud and death and friends and loss of human life on an incomprehensible scale. Decuypere was drawn to the stories of the individual soldier. As he grew older, he dug into archives in Belgium, Germany and England, feasted on local history books and war diaries and, in 2004, stumbled across a mystery he couldn’t shake while researching a German military cemetery near his home in the village of Geluwe.
“I became obsessed by it,” the 67-year-old Decuypere says from Belgium.
Listed among the dead in the cemetery register were three Canadian airmen shot down behind enemy lines. Two were misidentified in the German records. The third, Lt. Arthur Metheral of Moose Jaw, Sask., was correctly named. The three Canadians were relocated to a Commonwealth cemetery in nearby Langemark in 1956.
Metheral’s mother was still alive at the time, but the Canadian government neglected to inform her that her son’s original grave had been located — or that he had been moved. The two misidentified men, meanwhile, were reburied in graves marked: “Known unto God.”
And there the three lost Canadians remained, loved by those who mourned them and misplaced by those who buried them until Dirk Decuypere encountered them and began a 13-year quest to “rescue their stories.” “I needed to know what happened to these men,” he says. He wasn’t the only one. Claire Bennie Clark’s mother, Jane, adored her older brother, Bob Bennie. Jane was eight when Bob was shot down in Europe in June 1917, and a teenager in 1924 when her family travelled from Leamington, Ont., to France to look for his grave, without success. The story of that trip would be told and retold at family gatherings for decades.
“My uncle was never a distant memory,” Clark says. “He was very much a presence in our family.”
Bob was a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in Pelee Island, Ont. He used his first paycheck to buy his mother, Ada, a crystal bowl. He rode a motorcycle. He went away to war and didn’t come back.
Decuypere found Bob in the war diary of a clergyman in Geluwe and in the report of a German officer from 1917. Lt. Robert Smith Bennie flew a Sopwith Strutter, a two-seater plane. His observer was Arthur Metheral of Moose Jaw. Bennie and Metheral were taking photos over Menin, Belgium, on June 5, 1917, when 16 German fighters appeared.
“When they were shot down they jumped out of their burning aircraft,” Decuypere says. “In that moment, they had a choice — and they decided to jump together.”
Decuypere’s wife, Mieke, shares her husband’s passion for the stories of the dead. Decuypere is dedicated, but disorganized. He takes notes. Mieke reads and tends to their files, a stack of papers that, in reference to the three Canadians at Langemark, measures a metre high.
“That doesn’t include all the emails,” Decuypere says.
The third missing Canadian flyer materialized in another German war report. Lt. Lindsay Drummond was shot through the heart on the evening of May 18, 1917. He was attacking a German observation balloon when the fatal bullet struck.
“The field where Drummond crashed, I know it,” Decuypere says. “I found an old German trench map, and so I could know that this is really where he fell.”
For five years, Decuypere and Mieke sifted through written accounts, eyeballed old photographs and plotted dots on maps, piecing together the fates of Bennie, Metheral and Drummond. They submitted their findings to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, judge and jury in the affairs of the dead. For a soldier who is “Known unto God” to be given a name and be known — after 100 years — is a delicate matter.
“In the past six months, the Canadians haven’t left my thoughts,” Decuypere admits. Finding the men wasn’t a hobby. It was something he needed to do. “A human life deserves to be kept for eternity.”
“The most important thing for me,” adds Mieke, “is the emotion that comes free — when you find somebody — and then you find their family.”
The Decuyperes’ findings were confirmed by the CWGC on Feb. 9, 2017. After 13 years, the search was at an end. Now a reunion in Belgium is in the offing, featuring three Canadian families that have never met and the remarkable Belgian couple who brought them together.
“This is a journey we would never have taken without Dirk,” says Mary Ann Bertrand, Metheral’s great-niece.
Decuypere and Mieke are hosting nine descendants of the dead men for dinner at their home in Geluwe on May 17.
Claire Bennie Clark has an old family diary detailing the pilgrimage the Bennies made to the battlefields in 1924 to search for their son and sibling. She plans to retrace the steps her mother once took, only this time with a different outcome.
“What Dirk has done for our family is lifechanging,” Clark says, her voice breaking. The morning after the dinner, Bob Bennie and Lindsay Drummond’s new headstones will be unveiled at the cemetery, while two new monuments will be dedicated to the three Canadians in Geluwe.
“You see the effort, 100 years ago, of the Bennie family, trying to find their son,” Decuypere says. “How couldn’t I have put in the effort now, to give these men a known grave?”
I NEEDED TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO THESE MEN.