Newfoundland remembers its bloodiest battle
NEWFOUNDLAND AND THE HEROES OF BEAUMONT-HAMEL
R obert Herder’s father has been dead for almost 60 years but his son can still picture him clearly getting dressed each July 1: putting on a dark suit, adjusting his black beret with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment badge, and exiting the family’s home on Rennie’s Mill Road in St. John’s for the walk down to the National War Memorial on Water Street.
Ralph Herder wouldn’t say a word, and he never invited his children or his wife to go along with him.
“It is hard for me to explain,” says Robert Herder, now 90. “But my father was very obviously not himself on that day. It was understood, if unspoken, that he wanted to be alone.
“When he would get back to the house he would find a quiet corner, just to be by himself. Never, not once in his entire lifetime, did my dad speak of anything that occurred in France during the war. “He lost two brothers there.” On July 1, 1916, at 9:15 a.m., 800 Newfoundlanders, including Ralph Herder and his older brother, Hubert, clambered out of their trenches near the French village of Beaumont-Hamel for an attack on the German lines. By 9:45 a.m., 732 Newfoundlanders either lay dead, wounded or were presumed missing, a slaughter of almost unimaginable magnitude for a tiny Dominion of 250,000 people.
To put the numbers in perspective, the modern day equivalent would be an attack where 110,000 Canadian soldiers were killed or wounded in half an hour. Hubert Herder was among the dead. His younger brother, Ralph, was shot through the ankle, while Newfoundland was battered by grief; a sorrow that became ritualized on July 1, 1917 — and every July 1 since — with the observance of Memorial Day.
So while most Canadians prepare to party on July 1, most Newfoundlanders will bow their heads in silence, however briefly, during the morning hours, to mark the 100th anniversary of a battle that, disastrous as it was, became entwined in a people’s sense of nationhood.
“It is kind of a schizophrenic day for us,” says Joan Herder, Robert Herder’s sister-in-law.
It is kind of easy to forget, at least for a mainlander in 2016, that Newfoundland came late and rather reluctantly to Confederation, only signing on with Canada in 1949 after a heated referendum where 47.7 per cent of Newfoundlanders voted against the idea.
When war broke out in 1914 and the Herder brothers rushed to the enlistment office in St. John’s, they weren’t going off to France to fight as Canadians. They were Newfoundlanders, from the Dominion of Newfoundland, and to be mistaken for a Canadian was a point of supreme irritation. Mayo Lind, an enlistee and voluminous letter writer whose wartime dispatches were published in The Daily News in St. John’s, openly scolded the Brits for failing to grasp this distinction.
“Do they teach geography in your schools here?” he wrote from Scotland.
Trace back along the branches of today’s longtime Newfoundland family trees and not an insignificant number will intersect on July 1, 1916. When great-great-uncle-this or great-grandfather-so-and-so were massacred at BeaumontHamel. The Newfoundlanders advanced without covering fire from heavy artillery; the German barbed wire perimeters hadn’t been cut as promised; reports of early Allied gains were incorrect; the regiment’s battle plans changed at the last minute; the assault they engaged in was one they hadn’t trained for; many of the wounded lay on the battlefield for days afterwards, silent, or moaning in agony. Disaster.
But in 1916, and for years thereafter, what happened on the morning of July 1 wasn’t interpreted as a colossal waste of life and complete military cockup. One British divisional commander described the slaughter at Beaumont-Hamel as a “magnificent display of trained and disciplined valour, and its assault failed of success because dead men can advance no further.” Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the British commanderin-chief, said of the Newfoundlanders: “The heroism and devotion to duty they displayed on 1st July has never been surpassed.”
The Newfoundlanders were indeed brave. Heroic. How else to describe a headlong dash to certain death? (Not one Newfoundlander even managed to fire a shot at the Germans.) Every nation requires its founding myths. Stories that speak to a common purpose, a shared quality, a distinguishing moment that identifies the nation as unique and binds (in theory) the generations together. For English Canada, it is the story of Vimy, a great victory won by Canadians — and Canadians alone — in April 1917.
In Newfoundland, the story is Beaumont-Hamel. David FaceyCrowther spent 35 years at Memorial University in St. John’s. The retired historian has written extensively on BeaumontHamel. He says that as news travelled across the Atlantic and casualty lists appeared in local newspapers, all of St. John’s mourned. The mood was black. What evolved, was a need for politicians, priests, newspaper editors — and everyday Newfoundlanders — to ascribe some kind of “purposefulness to the dead.”
Beaumont-Hamel had to mean something, didn’t it? In this way, a death march became a noble advance, and a source of Newfoundland pride where, “with their glorious sacrifice, Newfoundland had secured a place for itself within the rank of the international community and within the British Empire especially.”
“July 1 ceremonies in the early years after the war were as much an affirmation of the nation itself as an acknowledgment of the country’s war dead,” FaceyCrowther says.
Newfoundland, the tiny Dominion, was dreaming big. But by the early 1930s, the nation was struggling. BeaumontHamel robbed the island of a generation of young men, and a generation on, the island was crippled by debt left from the war, battered by government corruption scandals and besieged by a global economic crisis. The brave who sacrificed — and survived — BeaumontHamel, were among the penniless, scrounging for meals.
By 1949, the nation had become an appendage of Canada, an eastern outpost, a place with its own distinct past forever diminished by its addition — in some minds — to the larger Canadian whole.
“World War I might have been Canada’s road to national maturity, but it ended Newfoundland’s national potential,” historian Robert Harding writes. “From this Canadian perspective, Beaumont-Hamel is a reminder to Newfoundlanders of their country’s mortal wounding.”
Robert Herder plans on going to the National War Memorial on Water Street early Friday with his son, David, to lay a wreath before the crowds arrive and the ceremonies begin. The old man can’t say what he will be thinking of because the war, for him, has always been present. Etched in the memories he has of his own father, who lost two brothers and never spoke of it, not once.
Robert Herder buried his father in 1955 and built a life of his own, but has stayed away from the Memorial Day services until now.
“I can’t say why I stayed away,” he says. “Beaumont-Hamel has just always been there for us. It has been with us for 100 years.”
Herder has no plans for after the ceremony. Canada Day, with its fireworks and cold beer to drink, just isn’t for him.
“Canada is my country now, but for the first 23 years of my life I was a Newfoundlander, and I will always be a Newfoundlander first,” he says.
“We are a different people here. We always have been.”
THE HEROISM AND DEVOTION TO DUTY THEY DISPLAYED ON 1ST JULY HAS NEVER BEEN SURPASSED.