Destinations
Visiting these war memorial sites brought a son closer to his father—and his country
Almost no one visits the postagestamp-sized Valley Cemetery in what was once the Western Front of France and Belgium. Almost no one visits this tiny cemetery because only a few know where it is. Situated in a soothing, peaceful grain field in the Artois region of north-west France, it contains a mere 50 identified graves. Most of which are Canadian.
What is poignant about this cemetery is that it is the final resting place for nearly the entire leadership corps of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Battalion. A captain, three lieutenants and a company sergeant major were all killed on August 30, 1918—just a few months shy of the end of the Great War. Their five headstones are grouped together on the far wall of the immaculately maintained grounds. Lying to their left is a similar five-grave grouping, all privates from the same Battalion and all killed on that same day, too. To their right are the graves of four British soldiers, all killed two days later, on September 1, 1918.
Now in my 70s, I have been retired for over ten years, living a charmed life and checking off one or two bucket-list items each year.
Last year, I booked a trip with a company that specializes in visiting war sites at the Western Front of the First World War and at Normandy, France from the Second World War.
My father had fought alongside Canadian forces during the Second World War, and I wanted to trace the trail of his army division. With the help of my guide, Jim Smithson, I located an airport that had been rebuilt by his battalion of the Royal Canadian Engineers, and the remains of a Bailey bridge they constructed—both near Caen in Normandy. I crawled through an overgrown tangle of scrub bushes and weeds to find the deteriorating ruins. On the cement footing of that long-forgotten bridge were the etched names and serial numbers of four men—who could have been fellow soldiers of my father.
We visited museums, battle sites, monu
ments and cemeteries, of which there are hundreds in France, Belgium and Holland. I brought home with me some sand from Juno Beach, France, where my father and the Canadian forces landed in June 1944. As his division moved northward, my father had been hit and wounded in the leg by a piece of shrapnel, somewhere in a field near Flanders, Belgium. While visiting the area, I also took home some pieces of shrapnel, as a memento from the First World War.
My guide Jim was an affable Englishman, and like me, a retired teacher. He had a passion for and an encyclopedic knowledge of the events of the Western Front, and of the D-day landings and what occurred during the aftermath of the war.
He took me to a number of places associated with Canadian forces during the First World War. We went to the field hospital of Lieutenant-colonel John Mccrae, famous for his poem In Flanders Fields. I also saw the very impressive and moving monument at Vimy Ridge, where the names of 11,000 Canadian soldiers whose remains were never identified lie in graves marked “A Soldier of the Great War.”
There are many other monuments in the area dedicated to those killed in the First World War. Almost 12,000 soldiers lie buried in Tyne Cot Cemetery, located near Passchendaele, Belgium. It is, by area, the largest Commonwealth war cemetery in the world. Not far away from there, at the Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres, are the names of over 54,000 soldiers who were killed on the Western Front and whose remains were also never identified.
The Thiepval Memorial is to Great Britain what the Vimy Memorial—just 50 kilometres to its north—is to Canada. What is especially tragic about Thiepval is that over 90 per cent of the names commemorated at the site belong to men killed at the Battle of the Somme, between July and November of 1916. Their remains were never identified.
Almost 20,000 Allied soldiers lost their lives on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Out of the 801 members of the Newfoundland Regiment, who went into battle that day, 233 were killed, 386 were injured and 91 went missing.
In Canada, July 1 is celebrated as Canada Day, but in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador it is also recognized as Memorial Day. The names of over 800 Newfoundlanders are honoured on the Beaumont-hamel Newfoundland Memorial site in France.
Comparatively speaking, the Valley Cemetery in Artois is minuscule in size to the other sites I have visited, but not in significance. I went there because my guide Jim lives in the area and he knew the way—over a rough back road and then up a bit of a walk on a path through a grain field along a farmer’s allowance.
After eight poignant and emotional days of travelling together to those war sites, he judged that I would be interested in this one. He was right. n