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Illustration by Catherine Chan
We had grown up with our grandfather’s stories of the First World War. Last summer, my brother and I and a good friend, Andrew, took a road trip to find their battlefields in Northern France. Our grandfather, Ernest Strong, 26th Battalion (New Brunswick), fought for the Allies. Andrew’s great-grandfather – Paul Kölling, infantryman – had fought on the enemy side.
At Vimy Ridge, Canada’s most visited war memorial, Andrew called to us from the German trenches. They were within shouting distance of the Canadian lines. We tried to imagine those days from April 9-12, 1917, when four Canadian divisions fighting together for the first time, stormed the ridge. Where the French and British had failed, Canada triumphed. Some credit this costly victory, 3,598 lives, with the birth of Canadian nationalism.
Not far from the old front lines are the rows of neat, white headstones. Each has a soldier’s name, age, rank and an epitaph that hints at a family’s grief: “Sadly missed” or “We will meet again.” In France alone, there are a mind-numbing 2,945 cemeteries and memorials for the two world wars.
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The sprawling Commonwealth War Graves Commission (England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India) maintains them.
As we drove past old battlefields, Andrew remarked that there were few German war cemeteries. When we found one, it was small, crowded and bleak. France, which had been so brutally invaded twice in the 20th century, hadn’t provided much land to bury enemy soldiers. In these German cemeteries, each black metal cross or grey stone noted several burials, just names, rank and death. Sometimes not even that, simply a plaque with names indicating a mass burial.
Just 90 minutes from Vimy Ridge was Grandad’s battlefield. His was an almost forgotten victory, a battlefield named for the city of Amiens, a vital railway junction. From Aug. 8-10, 1918, more than 100,000 Canadians fought alongside Australian, British and French armies. The surprise Allied attack turned the war around. Over the next 100 days, the Allies liberated France, the war ending with an armistice on Nov. 11, 1918.
Fruitlessly, we searched for something personal in this huge area. The battlefield was 20 square kilometres, now rich farming country. We were looking for the site of one of the small actions that had carried the day. Grandad, a lieutenant in the New Brunswick 26th battalion, officers and men dropping around him, rallied the survivors. He led about 150 men past the machine guns at “Snipe Copse,” and for his gallantry, was awarded the Military Cross.
That name was all we had – Snipe Copse. Some wartime planner with typical British aplomb had labelled a machine gun nest in the woods after bird hunting. That name was not on any contemporary French maps.
That night, my brother checked the CWGC website for burials from our grandfather’s regiment. Sure enough, he discovered a remote cemetery. I downloaded a trench map from the National Archives of Scotland website and found Snipe Copse near it.
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The next day we overlayed screenshots with Google Maps and drove to a lonely ravine screened by trees. We parked the car and spread out. Stumbling down the ridge, I passed a shack, a farmer’s hunting blind. I imagined a shot ringing out from the shack and the rattle of a machine gun from the line of trees. There was nowhere to hide. How did soldiers find the courage? My brother shouted. He’d found some rusting barbed wire thrust among the trees, another confirmation.
And then, on a bank of the ravine, stood a small bricked-off graveyard, Wood Cemetery. In it were 47 graves, men of “The Fighting 26th,” buried after they fell on Aug. 8. Campbell, Thibodeau, Woodbury – familiar names in Maritime Canada today – who never got home. Grandad lost his cousin.
Andrew’s great-grandfather had won the Iron Cross for his bravery in the First World War and died in 1915. Andrew couldn’t find the records of his great-grandfather’s final battle. All that he had was a wartime diary that had been passed down in the family. His grandmother had started it after her father went off to war. Early entries in 1914 could have been written anywhere in Europe, even Canada – full of excitement and pride. She planned to give her father the diary when he returned home. Eleven months later, she stopped writing when she learned that he had been killed in action.
On our last day in France, we learned of a memorial built for the centenary of the First World War. Visible for miles, “L’Anneau de la Mémoire” or “The Ring of Memory” is an enormous circle of steel and concrete, the size of a football field. It rests on a hilltop near the Notre Dame de Lorette French war cemetery.
The ring has 500 metal panels, each with 1,200 names. The names are listed alphabetically, without country or rank. The size of the ring, the loss of 579,606 young men in this part of France alone, staggers you.
We never found a grave for Andrew’s great-grandfather, but on the Ring of Memory, Andrew traced the letters of his name, Paul Kölling. Farther over, I read the name of my grandfather’s cousin, George Wilkinson. They were remembered together.
Gregory Strong lives in Vancouver.