Walking with my grandfather’s ghost
THEY will be sending children to the front line in Flanders as part of the centenary commemorations of the First World War. Sadly, for me, there were no such school trips on the 50th anniversary, when I was an avid student of history under the influence of iconic teacher Bob Crampsey. I read as many books of eye-witness testimony as I could find in Pollok library and was fascinated and horrified by accounts of trench warfare.
The story I did not pursue was the death of my own grandfather, Gunner John Shields of the Royal Field Artillery. Ancestry research was not a common pursuit in 1964. The question “Who do you think you are?” was more a put-down than encouragement to investigate the family tree.
I remember my father, Charlie, speaking only once on the subject – how, as a seven-year-old, he witnessed the screaming and sobbing of his mother, Maggie, when she received
He was a riveter in the Clyde who found himself fighting in the front line in the First World War. Two years later he was dead. Tom Shields visits the burial place of the grandfather whose face he has never seen
the War Office telegram. The ensuing grief, sadness, and no little hardship gave my father no appetite for discussing the Great War.
Family documentation about John Shields is scattered and scarce. There is no “old photograph torn, tattered, and stained and faded to yellow in a brown leather frame”, as Eric Bogle sings in The Green Fields Of France. That war telegram is somewhere around but can’t be found. There are no letters or postcards from the front line. There is a tin with three medals.
He has no marked grave in Ypres, the Belgian town where he was killed in June 1916. His name is on the Menin Gate memorial with 60,000 other British empire soldiers with no known resting place.
I went to Ypres to see how present generations remember the fallen, but mainly to find a name chiselled in stone, to walk in my grandfather’s footsteps, find where and how he died, and contemplate why.
Modern genealogy tools made it easy to discover the basic facts. A slim dossier, The Military History of John Shields provided by Great War Family Research, reveals he was among the first sent out to the battlefields and speculates that he was either a regular soldier or high on the reserve list.
It is unlikely he was a regular soldier. The 1911 census has John Shields living with his family in Atholl Street in Lochee, Dundee. The area was known as Tipperary because of its large Irish population. He was working as a riveter in the shipyards.
When my grandfather was called up in Glasgow on August 5, 1914, he was most likely working in a Clyde yard. He left his wife and five-yearold son in Errol Street in Gorbals and two weeks later was with the Fifth Divisional Ammunition Column of the Royal Field Artillery, facing the Germans in Armentieres.
His unit was quickly in battle at Le Cateau, where the conflict was described as dashing, and reminiscent of Waterloo and Balaclava. By October 1914, he was in Ypres as the
two armies dug in and the long war of attrition began. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we assume he spent nearly two years in Ypres shelling the German trenches and being bombarded in return.
Ypres was a prime example of the futility of trench warfare. The Allies and the Germans spent four years fighting over some high ground (at least, as high as any hills get in the Low Countries) with little territorial advance by either side.
Gunner Shields would have been involved in the First Battle of Ypres, then the second, and “the brilliant capture and defence of Hill 60” (as it was reported in the popular magazine of the time, War Illustrated). The rest of the time, his ammunition column would be providing back-up for what the military men called “artillery duels”. These were like pistols at 10 paces, except it was with shrapnel and one-tonne shells as generals with a 19th-century mindset played war games with 20th-century weapons of hellish destruction.
The war zone was called the Ypres Salient because the frontline was arc-shaped. The ability to indulge in cross-fire made the killing fields even more dangerous.
British soldiers called Ypres “Wipers”. The Flemish town authorities not so long ago renamed it “Ieper” with the curious typographical result that many people now think it is called “Leper”. I will stick with Ypres.
With visions of Ypres as a place of muck and bullets, I arrive to find a neat town verging on picture-book with simple but pleasant brick buildings, brick streets, and brick pavements that appear centuries old.
My B&B establishment is in Lille Street, a road down which my grandfather would have walked on his way to the battlefields just outside town. He may have stopped at the inn beside the Lille Gate. It is now a pub and the First World Curiosity Museum and sells vredesbier – “peace beer”. A military mannequin in the uniform of the Blues regiment stands guard at the door.
It is too late in the day for me to take the battlefield tour, but the lady from the B&B recommends a walk along the town ramparts just a few steps away. It is a tranquil spot, looking over lakes to the green and pleasant countryside that was once the scene of death and destruction.
On my own hand-knitted Great War mobile-phone app, Eric Bogle sings about sitting at a young soldier’s graveside, hoping that he died quick and clean – or was it slow and obscene?
As I sit on the ramparts it is 97 years to the day, June 3, 1916, when my grandfather was killed. Copies of the artillery war diaries sketch brief details of his demise.
He is no longer with the ammunition column, which has moved on to Arras and the Somme. He is with the 83rd battery of the Lahore division of the Indian