I wrote my most recent column from Lens, France on the morning of July 20 just before setting out to visit nearby Vimy Ridge. That visit was an intensely emotional start to an emotional day, and I intend to write more about it this fall.
I visited two other First World War memorials that morning (although for anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Canada’s history in that war, the name of almost every village in the region stands as a memorial).
On the suggestion of my hôtelier in Lens, I drove to the French memorial site at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. It is very near to Vimy, and I’m sure that for the people of France it is every bit as moving as Vimy is to a Canadian. It is on a beautiful site with spectacular views.
Unlike Vimy, Lorette is a formal cemetery with marked graves of thousands of French soldiers who died in defence of their country.
In my travels I passed through Neuville-Saint-Vaast and returned to a site I had visited once before. In the 1980s, on a tour with the Royal Canadian Artillery Band, our bus driver was a German civilian. He brought us to see the German cemetery in that village: 44,000 marked graves in addition to other monuments to the many Germans who were killed in nearby battles.
Most of the German graves are marked with black crosses, each with a plaque bearing the name of the soldier buried beneath. Some of the graves are marked instead with headstones bearing the Star of David: German Jews who had fought and died alongside their Christian countrymen.
Of course Germany was our enemy in 1914 – 1918; but this was two decades before the rise of the Nazis and the Third Reich. The young men buried at Neuville-Saint-Vaast were soldiers like our own, sent to fight for what they believed was a noble cause in a clash of empires.
I had personal business to attend to later that day. I drove to Ypres in Belgium, the scene of three horrific battles in the First World War. I had visited there, too, in the 1980s. What I didn’t know then was that my great-uncle Ernest had been killed at nearby Passchendaele in 1917 in what is known as the Third Battle of Ypres.
At the outbreak of the war, the citizens of Ypres decided to evacuate the city’s maps and plans in case they might have to rebuild. This proved to be a wise move: the city, including its striking 12th-Century Cloth Hall, was completely destroyed.
After the war, the British wanted the ruins to remain as a monument. The people of Ypres wanted to rebuild. Ultimately, the old city was restored to its former beauty with construction finally completed in 1967.
Perhaps as a compromise, the Imperial War Graves Commission was granted permission to construct a memorial gate bearing the names of the soldiers from the British Empire who had died at Ypres, but whose remains were never found. Ernest Gaye is among them.
To this day, the people of Ypres hold a remembrance ceremony every evening at 8:00. Traffic through the Menin Gate, an important thoroughfare, is stopped while buglers sound The Last Post and observe a minute of silence. This tradition has been conducted every single day since it began in 1928, with the exception of the period when Belgium was occupied by the Nazis during the Second World War.
I attended the Last Post ceremony on the day of my visit. As a former military musician myself, I had written ahead to ask if I might buy the buglers a beer afterward; they were gracious enough to accept.
Before the ceremony I was received by Mr. Jan Matsaert, secretary of The Last Post Association. He explained the proceedings to me and we talked about the ceremony’s history and significance. Just before it began he asked if I would recite The Act of Remembrance during the ceremony.
Of course, I was honoured to accept. He handed me a card with the verse from Laurence Binyon’s poem “For The Fallen” printed on it. (I assured him I wouldn’t need it, but he said to carry it just in case—when speaking before a few hundred people, some have been known to “freeze.”)
I was glad to have his advice, and I had the card in my hand when I walked to my designated place. But after my experiences all through that day, and my familiarity with the rituals of Remembrance, the words came to me as naturally as the notes of The Last Post itself.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.