As the Crowe flies

The Somme 2014

It is ten in the morning, we’re not half an hour into our tour of the Somme battlefields and I am already in tears.
This morning started with an unexpected twist. Our tour guide showed up at the hotel and told us there had been a change of plans.
The original tour guide had been called back to England to tend to a sick relative. The man in the lobby was the substitute guide and “would we mind if we took the tour with two Australian couples?”

We didn’t mind at all. So we climbed into the back of the van, introduced ourselves to the two Aussies and away we went.
Our tour of Canadian and Newfoundland sites had become a tour of Australian, Canadian and Newfoundland sites. Our goal of course, was to see Newfoundland Park and the battlefield at Beaumont Hamel. But we had a couple of stops to make first.

So that’s how twenty minutes later I found myself standing in the middle of a farmer’s field crying my eyes out. We’d climbed out of the van at the Australian Memorial. From the Memorial you can see the tiny village of Pozieres. Such a peaceful setting on a late summer morning. But then our guide explained that the Australians suffered terribly here. In the summer of 1916, 23,000 men were killed or wounded trying to take the little village on the ridge. That’s enough men to fill Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, with two thousand left over. Basically the field between the Memorial and the village is one massive graveyard. The thought of that is is what brought me to tears.

The Picardie region of Northern France is lovely. For centuries it’s been the breadbasket of Europe. It’s hard to picture such a beautiful region churned to poisonous mud by tonnes of high explosives. Even harder still to imagine the remains of so many young men buried not far away, under the fields of sugar beets and potatoes. But a hundred years later, the War To End All Wars keeps coming to the surface. Besides the graveyards and memorials large and small, the landscape has a habit of reminding you.

The community museum in nearby Albert is full of the rusted belt buckles, insignias, helmets, rifles and other reminders that are ploughed up every spring by farmers.
There’s also plenty of evidence of more dangerous souvenirs. As our tour continues we slow down to look at something piled up on the road’s edge. It’s a cairn of unexploded shells, five or six of them. They’ve been daubed with paint. Apparently, the colours signify whether they’re shrapnel, high explosive or poison gas shells. In this beautiful corner of France, even in the twenty-first century, there’s no escaping the war.

This trip is a bit of a pilgrimage for me. I was born fifteen years after the end of the Second World war. Like so many boys my age, the wars were a fascination. My English granny used to send me the UK comics, Boy’s Own, Hotspur, Commando. To say they glorified war is an understatement. To say they made my imagination run wild is also an understatement.

My granny Brunskill never threw anything away. In her living room cabinet, among the old seaside postcards and newspaper clippings were two sets of First World war campaign medals. Every returning soldier came home with the 1914-18 Star, the British War Medal and the Victory medal.
Another treasure is a full page clipping from the Yorkshire Evening Post. The headline reads “Naburn Pensioner’s Pride, eight members of his family serving in the British Army”. Bustards, Brunskills, Wiiliamsons and Silversides-they all served in France and they all came home.
George, Robert and Guy Silversides were already army veterans, having served in South Africa and India.

Robert was wounded in France and sent home. Corporal B.H. Bustard of the Durham Light Infantry enlisted in 1910. The article casually observes that he went to France in 1914, was wounded twice and slightly gassed.

This was my family’s contribution to the Great War. They were in so many ways typical of he men who went to fight in France. Those that weren’t career soldiers were railwaymen, farm labourers and domestics. The war was a chance to see the world, and off they went. Pushed into the first big war of the twentieth century. The war where flesh and bone and nineteenth century tactics met twentieth century industrialization head on, and lost every time. So many marched into the meat grinder of Gallipoli, Mons, the Somme, Ypres, Vimy Ridge.

My family members went home, dealt with whatever trauma they’d endured and got back to doing what they could to feed their families. I was never able to sit down with any of these men. They were long gone before I arrived. But the war must have left a mark on them, just as it did on millions of men and women the world over.

So much goes through your mind on a tour of the battlefields. My adopted home is Newfoundland and Labrador. Just down the road from Pozieres is our Memorial- Newfoundland Park. It was here on July first, 1916, that the Newfoundland Regiment was just about wiped out. The fields surrounding the park were reclaimed by the farmers long ago. But the park still carries the old scars. of battle.

The trenches are still here, their outlines rounded by the decades and softened by flowers and grass. The shell holes have also been softened over time. Here and there, large areas of land are cordoned off. There are unexploded shells under the grass, I am not a religious man but if there’s ever a place to have a religious experience, this is it. Newfoundland’s role in this battle lasted half an hour, but that 30 minutes wiped out the regiment. 801 men went over the top. Just 68 were around to answer roll call the next day.

Historians argue that Beaumont Hamel took the province’s best and brightest, that the province never fully recovered.
There’s a lot of time to think about that as you stroll around the park and read the names on the dozens of headstones.

Newfoundland’s experience is a small example of how this “war to end all wars” shaped the world that we live in now. The Great War reshaped, reset, and dissolved great empires. The Ottoman Empire ceased to exist, the Romanov dynasty gave way to communism. The Treaty of Versailles redrew the maps of Africa and the Middle East.

And the idea of a war to end all wars proved to be a cruel joke. A corporal from Austria survived the First World War and twenty years later, led Germany into the next.

War spawned war. The second World War, Korea, Vietnam, The Six-Day War, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan. All in some way the direct or indirect product of that first great war of the 20th century.

There’s a field of study that says trauma is handed down through our DNA. So where does war figure in all this? Like buried bombs, rusty bayonets and belt buckles, it has a way of pushing itself to the surface.
On our last evening in France I was reminded of that by a man we’d met in the local brasserie in Albert. Jean Simon is a retired veteran of the peacetime French army. He’d served with NATO in Germany before an accident put him in a wheelchair.
At the end of an evening of good food and calvados, Jean apologized that he didn’t speak English. Jean added that he spoke fluent German. The story goes that when he was a boy his father made him take lessons. The reason was pragmatic. “After all”, said Jean Simon,”Les Allemagnes have a habit of invading us every twenty years or so.”