A search goes on for lost Canadian soldiers
REMAINS OF PLATOON IN MASS GRAVE YET TO BE FOUND
At the age of 23, Pte. Thomas Albin Snelgrove left Vermilion, Alta., and became one of 200 Canadian soldiers who took refuge in a labyrinthine cave on the Douai Plain on the eve of the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
We know this because last September, in a moment that he will never forget, Robert Snelgrove Jr., discovered that his great-uncle, Thomas, had etched his name and the insignia of the 151st Battalion (Central Alberta) alongside 3,000 other, often beautifully rendered engravings in the chalk walls of the cave in northern France.
An Ottawa military historian took Snelgrove, his family, and other families whose relatives had fought here, not only to the Bentata Cave, but to a muddy, nondescript potato patch just a kilometre away. It was there that Thomas Snelgrove, who had been transferred to the 16th Battalion (the Canadian Scottish), had died and was listed as missing in action along with 43 other soldiers.
“To find ourselves exactly where he had been, and to see what he had carved underground 100 years ago was so legible, was terribly emotional,” the retired rancher and construction company owner said by phone from Vermilion, Alta. “It ties everything together for me.”
It is historian Norman Christie’s private project, supported by the mayor of Arras, which is the nearest major city to Vimy, to locate the remains of a platoon of Canadians who died to the west of the ridge on the eve of the main battle.
Documents from just after the war indicate that the men were buried together in a mass grave that the Canadian Expeditionary Force designated as CA40. For reasons known only to Canadian Corps burial officers who noted the grave and who was in it at the time — but crucially not its precise location — those bodies were never moved to any of the nearby Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries including one below a bomb crater only five minutes walk away.
“The Great War lives 100 years after it took place. It’s tangible. You can still touch it and feel it,” said Christie, whose quest to find the missing men and give them a proper burial is the subject of Searching for Vimy’s Lost Soldiers, a documentary to have its première on the Discovery Channel on April 9.
Christie, who has written more than 20 books about Canada’s wars in Europe, has paid repeated visits to the farmer’s field where the missing men of the 16th Battalion are believed to be buried. Joining him last September were geophysicists from Canada equipped with special ground-penetrating radars. They narrowed the search, but have not yet found the missing soldiers.
If the 44 bodies are found, families like Snelgrove’s hope that Canada will give the missing soldiers a proper burial in one of the many Commonwealth cemeteries below Vimy Ridge.
“It was my great-uncle’s first and last battle,” Robert Snelgrove said. “He went to change the world and it would cost him his life.”
Four Snelgrove brothers left their ranch on the prairies to fight in France. Thomas died. The other three were injured but returned home.
“It is hard to imagine the carnage and the loss of life in these fields and how it affected the world,” he said. “I did not appreciate the breadth of it until I got here. Here was a young man with all that potential and it ended. He wanted to have a herd of cattle. What I am thinking of is the opportunities missed.”
The engravings that Snelgrove discovered in Bentata Cave confirm for him that Canada had become a nation at Vimy Ridge.
“A lot of soldiers carved stuff in that tunnel and the predominate theme was the Maple Leaf,” he said. “The context is way more Canadian than anything else. You don’t see the Union Jack. You just see the word Canada. This battle is what defined Canada as a nation. I honestly believe that.”
He and his family are skipping the centenary commemorations. But “if and when the bodies are recovered, we will go back for the funeral because they deserve a proper burial with their comrades.”