Exhibit brings to life horrors of the trenches
First World War project dug by 50 volunteers in Port Moody
For the next three years, a patch of ground in Port Moody will resemble a First World War battlefield.
Volunteers have spent months digging trenches — the kind in which thousands of Canadians fought and died in France — for a special exhibit.
“This exhibit commemorates the tragic and heroic events of the First World War,” said Robert Simons, president of the Port Moody Heritage Society.
“We wanted to show people what the trench system was like.”
There is a gnarly tangle of barbed wire out front, a machine gun nest, rusty pots for cooking, a wood stove, sandbags, firing slits, a fortified bunker with wire-frame beds, shell holes, a shooters’ parapet and, above all, mud and dirt. Everything is open to the weather except a few earthen cubbyholes.
“Cold, damp, soil was all over you,” said Simons.
“This is what it would have been like on the front lines.”
Jim Millar, executive director at the Port Moody Station Museum, said life in the trenches was grim.
“The rats would eat the buttons off your coat because they were bone,” he said.
One of the most striking features of the exhibit is the formidable barrier of barbed wire which crisscrosses no man’s land and snagged many a rifleman in its deadly web.
Millar said 700 men of the Newfoundland Regiment charged a barbed wire field they thought was destroyed.
“In 22 minutes, they were wiped out. Only 68 answered roll call the next day,” he said.
The location, in the museum’s back yard at 2734 Murray St., was dug with picks and shovels by 50 volunteers who have been working since last September.
“It was really tough,” said Simons. “They went through hard pack, gravel layers and asphalt.”
The exhibit opens to the public on Easter Saturday, April 4. Plans call for the display to run until Nov. 11, 2018, the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War. Opening day roughly coincides with Vimy Ridge Day, a bloody Canadian victory on Easter Sunday, April 7, 1917. The exhibit is in honour of Port Moody Lieutenant Augustus Wilberforce McKnight, who was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Aug. 16, 1917.
The last thing Millar wants is for anybody to think war is being glorified.
“This wasn’t fun at all. I don’t know what hell is like, but this could describe it,” he said.