A Journey of Remembrance

Back at the beginning of the month we made our own personal journey of Remembrance to mark the centenary of the end of The Great War. The first part of our journey is recounted HERE.

Following the emotional visit to Sivry, we drove back into France and up to The Guards Cemetery at Windy Corner near Cuinchy, to lay a wreath on the grave of my Great Uncle, William Plant whose life I recounted HERE and who died in a bloody battle on 10 March 1915. It was late in the afternoon and the light was fading fast. It was also pouring with rain and it felt so very bleak at Windy Corner. We laid the wreath and two more of Len's poppies were planted and I thanked William for his sacrifice and reminded him that he is not forgotten either by me or by the people of Aldridge.

We then took a walk around the cemetery and came across this touching tribute to men from another continent who had travelled so far to fight for the Empire and who never made the journey home. The stone reads "To the memory of these six soldiers of the British Empire killed in action in 1915 and buried at the time in Indian Village North Cemetery Festubert whose graves were destroyed in later battles and to the memory of these four Indian Soldiers who fell near Givenchy. Their glory shall not be blotted out".

The wind was howling around us, the rain soaking us and we felt so very cold. My heart went out to these young Indian soldiers who left their warm homes and families for what must have been considered an enormous adventure and have lay for so long now, in the cold hard earth of Northern France, a land that must have seemed so alien to them. I thanked them for their sacrifice and told them that I would not forget them.

Sanctuary Wood

Next morning we arose early and once again crossed the border into Belgium, travelling across Flanders Fields towards Ypres. First stop was Sanctuary Wood just off The Menin Road. Sanctuary Wood was right on the front line of the Western Front and saw fierce fighting throughout The Great War. When the farmer who owned the land returned to it in 1919 he decided to leave part of the trench system exactly how he had found it and although some restoration work has been carried out over the years, you are still left with a complete trench system and relics, more or less how it was a hundred years ago. Of course, trees have grown and when we visited leaves carpeted the ground but it did not require much imagination to see how it would have been.

We visited for several reasons, one of which was that Aiden's Great Grandfather RSM Herbert Goulding of the Lancashire Fusiliers spent his very last Christmas on earth there. Aiden writes very movingly of what the visit meant to him HERE.

We spent a good few hours at Sanctuary Wood both inside the museum and outside in the wood and trenches. Standing in the trenches and looking out over the ground, seeing the craters from bombs and the remnants of barbed wire, it felt desperate, despite the fact that it was so very peaceful and quiet and it would have been anything but just over a hundred years ago. This was the first place that mustard gas was used during the war and inside the museum are 3D photographs that give graphic, amazingly real life vision to the effects that that invisible menace had upon men.

We then followed the Menin Road towards Ypres but taking our time to make a detour to the largest Commonwealth War Graves Commission Cemetery in the world; Tyne Cot. There are nearly 12,000 soldiers buried there of which, only a quarter are identified. That is sobering. This is the site of the infamous Battle of Passchendaele and so those buried here had died here.  On the Eastern Boundary stands a memorial wall, gently curving around the boundary. It bears the names of some 35,000 men of the British and New Zealand forces who have no known grave, nearly all of whom died between August 1917 and November 1918. It is relentless.

Name after name. Regiment after regiment. Such sorrow and suffering represented on this memorial.
It is far too much to comprehend.
All you can do is thank them for their sacrifice and say they are not forgotten.

The first sight of the Menin Gate takes your breath away. It is a magnificent memorial.  During the Great War hundreds of thousands of men from Britain and the Commonwealth marched through the old Menin Gate on the outskirts of Ypres, on their way to the battlefields of the Western Front. The Menin Gate or Ypres Memorial, now stands as a reminder of those who died and have no known grave.  It bears the names of 54,000 men, yes 54,000  who died before 16 August 1917. Again, just like the Tyne Cot memorial, it is unrelenting, columns upon columns of names, in regimental order.

One of those name belongs to my Great Uncle, Lance Corporal Charles Mason of the 4th Battalion, King's Royal Rifle Corps who died on 10 May 1915. Charles is an interesting man whose complete story I have not yet uncovered but I do know that following his brother John Mason's  exploits in the Boer War, Charles left Aldridge where he had spent most of his childhood and he too joined up to fight in South Africa. Unfortunately at barely 16 years old, Charles was unable to cope with military life and twice deserted going absent without leave. Following the second occasion, he was given a dishonourable discharge and returned to Aldridge and civilian life. He moved from Aldridge to Derbyshire between then and the outbreak of the Great War, marrying in 1912 and fathering a son who was born just a few months before the outbreak of war.

On 7th August 1914 a Royal Proclamation was issued offering a blanket pardon for all those who had previously deserted providing they surrounded themselves prior to 4th September. Charles duly did this and was immediately sent to the Western Front. On the 8th May 1915, his battalion were heavily involved in fighting near St Elois. Their trenches were destroyed and Charles was one of the 493 killed between the 8th and 10th of May 1915. He has no known grave. His name was far too high overhead for me to reach out and touch, so I placed a poppy in a ledge as close as I possibly could to where his name is etched. I thanked him for his sacrifice and told him he was not forgotten.

We walked outside of the memorial onto the ramparts that surround Ypres to be confronted with a heart stopping sight. Thousands of handmade wooden poppies, each with a message from someone in the UK, to say thank you to those named on the memorial and to show they are not forgotten. It was a beautiful memorial to commemorate the centenary of the end of the war.

We then took a stroll around Ypres, a town that was destroyed during the conflict of the Great War but was rebuilt as if it was still the medieval  town it had been and now you cannot tell that actually, the buildings are all less than one hundred years old, such a wonderful job has been done.

Just by the famous cloth hall stands Ypres own war memorial to their own dead from the town. In a place where so many foreign men passed through and then lost their lives, where those foreigners have memorials and cemeteries at virtually every corner, it would be easy to forget that the Belgium people had their own army fighting alongside all the others. They suffered threefold. They were invaded first by one foreign army and then were joined in defence and attack against those first invaders by other foreign armies. They were occupied and they suffered and they lost their own young men. I stood and looked at the memorial to those local men and I acknowledged their sacrifice and remembered them.