Posts with the Great War tag

Barris Beat

Cuts more than skin deep

Written by Ted Barris on . 1 Comment
Parks Canada guide, Sylvie, greeted our tour group to Beaumont-Hamel, this past spring.

As we arrived, she emerged from the information pavilion. She wore her identifiable green uniform, complete with department identification and Maple Leaf insignia. She offered a warm welcome and explained she would be our guide for the next half-hour. She was a long way from home, but made us feel as if we had never left Canada.

“Welcome to the Beaumont-Hamel National Historic Site,” the young woman said. I learned later her name was Sylvie, a student from Winnipeg, and that she was employed for several months by Parks Canada to guide visitors around the site.

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Barris Beat

Of fathers and sons

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Jeff and Tony pass the walls of the Menin Gate in Ypres, where the "missing" Commonwealth soldiers of the Great War are remembered every night.

About three days into the tour, I saw the two of them walking and talking. Tony and Jeff Peck were pausing to look up at a wall of inscriptions. There in front of them the names of some 54,896 Commonwealth soldiers, for whom there are no known remains, lay chiselled in the stone. They are the so-called “missing” from the Great War. A couple of days later, father Tony watched son Jeff participate in the famous Last Post Ceremony under the same barrel-vaulted archway known as the Menin Gate.

“They shall grow not old, as we who are left grow old,” Jeff recited to the hundreds watching in silence. “Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.”

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Barris Beat

Weathering Vimy then and now

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Students from Uxbridge Secondary School display their Vimy 95th anniversary banner at precisely the spot where Canadian troops made first contact with German soldiers on the morning of April 9, 1917.

It had rained all day. The sun had tried to poke some light through the low-lying clouds and mist of the ridge. But the strong westerly wind – that seemed to cut right through you – quickly erased every attempt. It was not a day to be outside. And yet, people came by the thousand. In particular, the young Canadians – about 5,000 high school students – paraded with banners, cheers and a resolve that was characteristic of their forefathers. One of their teachers summed up the scene.

“They’re wet and chilled to the bone,” she said. “But they realize it’s not right to complain. They’ll get through it.”

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Barris Beat

Victories of heart and territory

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Mother Canada mourns her dead: key element of Walter Allward sculpture at Vimy Ridge memorial in France.
Mother Canada mourns her dead atop Vimy Ridge memorial in France.

It’s not often a person walks in the footsteps of an ancestor. Nor are there many opportunities to sense the sights, sounds and smells that someone who lived nearly a century ago experienced.

Recently, I read about such an experience when I was asked to endorse an application by a member of our community for the Beaverbrook Vimy Prize. As part of her application, Rebecca MacDonald, 17, wrote about her great-grandfather, Walter James MacDonald, an engineer in the 13th Canadian Mounted Police who served at the Battle of Vimy Ridge in April 1917.

“Standing in the trenches and the fields of Vimy Ridge, I could feel his spirit,” she wrote.

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Barris Beat

Springtime poppy

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Walter Allward's marble sculpture of Mother Canada mourning her dead at Vimy Ridge memorial site in France.
Walter Allward's marble sculpture of Mother Canada mourning her dead at Vimy Ridge memorial site in France.

About a year ago, I received a letter from a stranger. He had read my book “Victory at Vimy,” the story of Canadians pushing the German Army from its nearly three-year occupation of strategic heights in north-central France. Born in Chile in 1944, the man said he had immigrated to Canada in 1976. In what had clearly been an important step in their lives, Pat Carvacho, his wife and two children became Canadian citizens soon after. Now a semi-retired architect, he wanted to share a dream he had experienced prior to reading my book.

“I saw a soldier of the Great War. I instantly learned his name, Charles Roy,” Carvacho wrote me. “Later (in the dream) I saw this soldier in a trench immediately before an attack, then advancing with his rifle and bayonet. There was a powerful explosion and the rifle and bayonet broke in pieces.”

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