Canada's War Dead: 'The funeral of a man long dead was
surprisingly emotional'
May 29, 2000 - CBC
A regular
feature from Don Murray, Senior European Correspondent for CBC-TV
News
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To travel to northern France is to come to a land of cemeteries. They are
tucked quietly into the countryside, seemingly on every road, outside
every town. This is the world of the dead of the Great War. Within a few
kilometres' radius of the great Canadian monument on Vimy Ridge there are
more than 30 such cemeteries where Commonwealth soldiers who died in the
First World War lie buried.
The ordered ranks of headstones and the tonsured grass make each one a
small island of peace, each one a bitter and abiding contrast to the
manner of the deaths of the men who lie beneath the headstones. These are
the men who died in the battles of the Somme, Passchendaele, Ypres and
Vimy. One veteran said that taking part in these battles was like walking
into the mouth of hell. Tens of thousands did not return. Some disappeared
where they fell in the butchered earth. They are the unknown soldiers of
the Great War. Canada alone counts 20,000 of them.
David John Carlson was one of the thousands who died and disappeared.
He was 19 when he was killed in the battle of the Somme, a young man from
Mannville, Alberta who had volunteered just days after his 18th birthday.
In June, 1916 he joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France. Three
months later he was dead. On May 24, 2000 he was buried. His remains were
discovered accidentally by British tourists in January, 8 1/2 decades
after his death.
The funeral of a man long dead was surprisingly emotional. His two
grandnieces, Darlene Peterson and Linda Marfleet, were at the graveside,
the guests of the Canadian government. The link to the living was thin now
but Carlson's sister, Lydia, had spent a lifetime searching for clues to
the whereabouts of her lost brother. She had come to France several times,
hoping but failing to find anything. Her failed odyssey had been like a
wound in the family. Darlene Peterson was clearly moved and spoke of her
feeling that the military ceremony had finally closed that wound.
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[PHOTO: EDITH CHAMPAGNE, CBC
NEWS]
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PHOTO GALLERY: More pictures from the
ceremonies in France
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A day later, at the base of the Vimy memorial, a unique ceremony took
place. It marked the departure from France, where he had lain in a grave
marked only 'known unto God', of a soldier killed in World War I. The
coffin, covered in a Canadian flag, was flown to Canada later that day.
The dead man lay in state in Ottawa and was then reburied as Canada's
Unknown Soldier three days later. The ceremonies at Pozières and at Vimy
were covered by the country's national media. They were front-page news.
The cynical affect not to find this surprising. The burial of Canada's
unknown soldier was, after all, a major event in what they call 'the
remembrance industry', an industry fuelled by veterans' groups and oiled
by the Department of Veterans Affairs. To be sure, these were events
organized to attract the glare of publicity, to officially stimulate
remembrance. But the killing fields of Flanders exercise an attraction far
more powerful than that which officialdom can stimulate. In the ceremony
at Vimy Ridge, the deputy chairman of the Commonwealth Graves Commission
noted, in passing, that the number of visitors to the sites in northern
France had been rising substantially in recent years. The steady stream of
books on World War 1, particularly in Britain, shows no sign of slowing.
We now live in a world where a military alliance can wage a war in
which none, not one, of its soldiers was killed in combat. This was NATO's
achievement in Kosovo in the last year of the 20th century. Indeed, the
Kosovo war seems more a war of the 21st century in that respect, a war
where technology is supreme and only civilians are killed. The contrast
with the First World War is almost total. David John Carlson was only
three months in the trenches of the Somme before he was killed. That,
tragically, was typical. This was a war where soldiers came to expect
death or a serious wound as a natural consequence of service. There is an
epic quality to the struggle that, even 8 1/2 decades on, touches the
imagination in a way that technological combat cannot.
Life in the mud, followed, for many, by death in the mud - the Great War
was hellish in a way unmatched by wars before or since. Paul Métivier was
16 when he enrolled, illegally. He was underage. He fought in the trenches
around Vimy. He was 100 when he returned to attend the ceremony honouring
the unknown Canadian soldier at the Vimy monument. "Mud, not a blade
of grass, not a tree, not a bush," he said, as he looked around at
the green fields and trees today. "In the war there were only
craters, mud and rats. War is ugly. I tried to forget that over the years
but I cannot." In this dreadful landscape the 20th century was
shaped. In his book, The Great War and Modern Memory, the historian
Paul Fussell wrote that the reshaping was as much psychological, even
literary, as political. Optimism was replaced by irony, the bitter irony
of soldiers who fought and knew that their fighting was futile. The irony
was fed into the books written by men like Robert Graves, Siegfried
Sassoon and Erich Maria Remarque. It became the template of war-writing to
this day. Even the way we look at the world around us changed. Sunrise had
been celebrated by poets for generations as a time of joy, of innocence,
of new beginnings. But dawn in the Great War was when men went over the
top, when battles began, when so many died. The red of 'rosy-fingered
dawn' became the red of blood spilled and about to be spilled. "Dawn
has never recovered from what the Great War did to it," Fussell
wrote. "The new, modern associations of dawn became: cold, the death
of multitudes, insensate marching in files, battles, and corpses too
shallowly interred." Just four years after the Armistice, T.S. Eliot
wrote The Waste Land:
'Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.'
So many undone by death. Among them Canada's Unknown Soldier, one of
28,000 Canadians who died and were lost in 20th century wars. At Vimy Paul
Métivier said: "It seems to me they merit their place in history. We
cannot simply abandon them to oblivion." |
