Yesterday was November 11th – Armistice Day. What are we to remember? Has time dimmed and shrouded the haunting shadows of those not-so-distant wars?
We are now 65 years past the end of the last war and 92 years since the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918.
Let’s remember the gallant men and women who gave their lives for their country.
The summer of 1914 was the finest in living memory - until a Serbian jumped in front of the Austrian Archduke’s car as it drove through Sarajevo. Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were killed and old and new grudges bubbled to the surface in the Balkans and spread across Europe.
Peace negotiators bungled. The team sweaters came out and everybody marched off to the great undertaking – the “Great War.” Waving crowds sang "God Save the King" or the "Marseillaise" or "Deutschland Uber Alles", cheering on young men at the docks and depots as they boarded ships and trains for the wartime adventure. Volunteers hurried to enlist so as not to miss the glory. Bands played and ladies threw flowers. Here at home, Maori soldiers departing new Zealand for the First World War sailed off to the beautiful and mournful singing of “Po Atarau”, later to be known as "Now Is The Hour" - New Zealand`s first million selling recording.
Just days after war was declared, fourteen ships with more than 8,000 soldiers were preparing to leave Wellington. Anxious young lads were worried that the war might be over before they arrived. Their September sailing date was delayed until mid-October, awaiting a naval escort. Sadly, for many of them, it would be a short war. A mere nine months later, hundreds returned from battle, maimed and battered at Gallipoli, but lucky to be alive.
In spite of that war to end all wars, within 25 years, it was all re-enacted. There were different names and different reasons. And some of the same names and the same reasons – but of a newer generation, plodding through the bloodied battlefields of their fathers.
Their legacy? Today, there are 23,175 cemeteries around the globe, with crosses marking the dead from the Empire and The Commonwealth. Almost two million markers scattered in every corner of the world bear the names of brave young men brought together by death.
In a British cemetery, near the tiny village of Anneaux in Northern France, Canadian and New Zealand soldiers, who fought and died together in the Battle of Bourlon Wood in the last weeks of the war, cry out to be remembered. One of them is Clarence Westcott, my grandfather`s twin brother.
"Colonial" soldiers fought to seize the desolate high ground around the wood overlooking Cambrai, the last major city in France held by the Germans. He and my grandfather, his twin, scurried from trench to trench, never far apart, until my grandfather was hit in April. As the war moved into summer, Canadian, New Zealand, Australian and South African infantrymen pushed North from Amiens and Courcellette as part of the British section of the long allied line manned as well by the French and Americans.
In short lines in his diary, my grandfather Clarence – then a young man of just 21 tender years from a small Canadian town - tells of the boredom and the excitement and the sorrow of their lives. Sad words telling of the wounding and sudden death of fellow soldiers in the muddy trek toward the Belgium border, paying dearly for every foot of ground. In looking at random dates through the pages of his battered diary, you glimpse a picture of a soldier`s life in the final months of the war. Read for yourself what he and so many other young men endured:
Sunday, March 10th - Rode in boxcar all day. Slept in stable with a dozen from the 161st.
Monday, April 29th - Raining hard. Shelling heavy. Livermore and Dilling killed. Arnold (my grandfather’s twin) badly wounded.
Tuesday, May 14th – Went to bible class. Spoke to Chaplain. Very lonesome.
Monday, June 17th - News from England. Arnold is alright. Lent 2 and 6 to Jim Gillespie.
Friday, July 12th - The glorious 12th. Gas attack at 3 am.
Thursday, August 28th. - Had bath in captured Heinie tub. Heard big push started.
On September 27th, the man I was never to know wrote "Moved to front lines" in his tiny diary. Three days later, he was dead. Shrapnel tore away his chest. His diary was found days later in the mud by a medic and eventually mailed home to Canada to his mother, Annie Westcott. It is a cherished testimony to a young man’s courage.
Thousands of sons, fathers, husbands and brothers died in battle and are buried but still not identified. They are all remembered by name and rank and unit on memorials in every corner of the world. So scattered and like the old Empire, the sun will never set on them.
Little did Lt. Ed. Duckworth know that a few days after writing home to thank his dad for sending cigarettes, his 6th battalion New Zealand Lancashire Fusiliers would attack Helles and he would be killed. He was a lad of 19 with his whole world ahead of him. He was one of the thousands who moved King George IV to comment, "Our sons of every portion of the Empire died so that freedom might be saved in the uttermost ends of the earth. A generation of our manhood that offered itself without question."
The Great War was a dirty war. Men fought hand-to-hand with bayonets. Cavalrymen rode into battle carrying swords. It was a war of endless barbed wire and mud, body lice, terrible food and the stench of dead and rotting men and animals.
Indeed, it was not today’s war of pushing buttons. Between 1914 and 1918, 750,000 officers crossed the channel to fight in France. So did 805,000 horses and 63 million horseshoes. It was a war that saw 5,400,000 tons of hay and oats shipped to France and only 5,200,000 tons of ammunition. A measure of the suffering can be seen in The Royal Army Medical Corps issuing 22,386 artificial glass eyes. And it was a war that tested the colonial outposts of the Empire. 11% of the male population of South Africa enlisted and fought for King and Country. In Canada it was 13%. In Australia 13%.
Almost 20% of New Zealand men proudly answered the call.
There are Commonwealth war graves in 128 countries, from Algeria to Zimbabwe. And although New Zealanders and Canadians are not buried in all of them, the men who are there were on the same side and fought the same enemy – and deserve our thoughts and prayers, and yes, even our tears. So many have been in the ground in remote and godforsaken places for over three-quarters of a century. And for what? For them, everything is gone. The debt we owe them is awesome. For we are here safe and alive because they died.
There are so many to remember. Canadians like John McCrea, who served first in the Boer war as did New Zealand’s first Victoria Cross winner, Major William Hardham. Col. McCrea left Canada as a medic in 1914. Before he died in 1918, he left a legacy of words that has stirred the soul of the world. He lies in a grave in Wimereau, France not knowing that he wrote the most famous war poem of all time, "In Flanders Fields."
Tom and Claude Gronant were Brits. They were soldiers. And like my grandfather and his brother, they too were twins. They were killed together in Holland on September 17, 1944 and are buried side by side in Arnhem.
With no Air Force of their own, many New Zealanders joined The Royal Flying Corps. The first Victoria Cross ever awarded to an Airman was won by a New Zealander for bravery during a bombing raid at Courtrai.
In the Holten war cemetery in Holland lays the only husband and wife buried in adjoining graves. Edward Brewster of The Royal Canadian Engineers and his wife Winnifred of The Women’s Army Corps lie forever alongside each other.
Heroes come in all ages, all colours and all ranks. Some were rich and some were poor. And some were even titled. Ordinary Seaman Peel was killed on April 5, 1942 when Japanese bombers struck his ship, the HMS Tenedos in Ceylon. His gravestone in the Colombo cemetery reads, "Ordinary Seaman Sir Robert Peel, son of Lady Peel." She is perhaps better known as the actress Beatrice Lillie.
Pilot Officer Arnold Wilson was an air gunner. He attended Sandhurst and was a Colonel in the army in India in the 1930s and later became a Member of Parliament. He was 56 in 1939 and the army offered him a desk. So he joined the R.A.F. who were desperate for air crew. He was killed in action on May 31, 1940. Air Gunner Sir Arnold Talbot Wilson K.C., C.M.G., D.S.O., is buried in Eringhen Cemetery, not far from Dunkirk.
And some were family. George Lee was a sergeant. He was 46. His son Robert was a Corporal. He was 19. They were in the 156 Brigade, Royal Field Artillery and both were killed in action on September 5, 1916. They are buried together in Dartmoor cemetery in the Somme, France.
Can you imagine a soldier winning the Victoria Cross twice? There are only three. Captain Arthur Martin-Leake won his first in the Boer War and another in the Great War. Captain Noel Chavasse won his in 1916 and 1917, and New Zealander Charles Upham won his Victoria Cross as a Lieutenant in Crete in 1941 and a second as Captain Upham in the Western desert in 1942.
Andrew Fitzgibbon was a young Irishman with the 67th Indian Regiment. He won the Victoria Cross for extreme bravery as a Medic. He was 15.
Picture in your mind a General with a Victoria Cross and a Military Cross. He would have to be a seasoned old soldier. Brigadier General Roland Bradford, V.C., M.C., was commanding the Durham Light Infantry in France when he was killed on November 30, 1917. He is buried in the British Cemetery in Hermies, France. Brigadier General Bradford was a lad of 25.
Even younger was Private John Condon of The Royal Irish Regiment who was killed in Belgium on Queen Victoria’s birthday in 1915. He is buried in Poelcapelle Cemetery. Private Condon was 14.
And in the next war, Galley Boy Steed was killed when his ship The Empire Morn was mined and sank off the coast of Africa. He is buried in Morocco. Robert V. Steed was also just 14.
Many who died were grandfathers. Lt. Webber of the South Lancashire Regiment was killed in action on July 21, 1916 and is buried in Dartmoor Cemetery in the Somme. Henry Webber was 70.
At dawn on August 8, 1915, the Wellington Infantry Battalion and the Auckland Mounted Rifles, under Col. Malone and Major Cunningham, fought off the Turks in the bloodiest of battles. The sad story of war is in the measure of the number of the dead and wounded against the value of taking the high ground. In Gallipoli, it was the terrible struggle to control the strategic high ridges along the peninsula. It is truly hard to imagine the horrors and deprivation suffered so many years ago by these brave men. Corporal Cyril Bassett was awarded the Victoria Cross but sadly, the chaos that was "the battle of Chunuk Bair" saw Col. Malone killed by his own New Zealand artillery fire. Only 520 of the Gallipoli dead are identified by name. Almost 2,000 are simply "missing" and their names are recorded on memorials.
When the war was only weeks old a young lieutenant was killed in action at Zonnnebeke. It was October 27, 1914 and he is buried in the town cemetery at Ypres in France. The young Lieutenant was his Highness Prince Maurice of Battenberg, grandson of Queen Victoria. The Prince was 23.
A soldier fought in a mysterious way for his country after he died. He is buried in Heulva Catholic Cemetery on the South coast of Spain. The gravestone says Major William Martin of the Royal Marines - but that is not his real name. With the consent of his family, his body was cast adrift from a Royal Navy submarine by British Intelligence. The dead Marine carried bogus documents to persuade enemy agents in neutral Spain that Allied landings would take place in Greece rather than at the spots chosen in Sicily. It is believed it did, in fact, lead to the enemy deploying its defences in the wrong areas. The dead soldier’s part in the war became a movie, "The Man Who Never Was."
They were not all men who paid the price. Thirty-eight-year old Amy Johnston was a pilot in the Air Transport Auxiliary. She drowned when she parachuted into the Thames Estuary in 1941. Her body was never found. Her name is on the memorial in Runnymede, England.
Nor were the sons of the famous and powerful spared. Young Raymond Asquith was killed on November 1916 and is buried in Guillemont Cemetery in France. He was a Lieutenant in The Grenadier Guards and the son of Prime Minister Asquith. Anthony Eden served with the Rifle Brigade from 1914 to war’s end and was awarded the Military Cross. All during the Second World War, he was Britain’s Foreign Secretary. His son, Pilot Officer Simon Eden was killed on June 23, 1945 and is buried in The War Cemetery in Taukkyan, Burma. Simon Eden was only 19.
How wonderful it must have felt in early November, 1918 to know the war was winding down and in only days, it would be over. Going home to his family in Saskatchewan may have been in the mind of Canadian Infantry private Gordon Price of the 28th Battalion fighting in Belgium. Sadly, he was one of the unlucky few among the last to die. He was killed on November 11th. He is buried in St. Symporien Cemetery in Belgium. Gordon was 25.
These are only a few of the men and women we never knew, except by their legacies of courage, who fought and died. Brave souls from the Empire and The Commonwealth who knew their lives were at great risk. Praying to stay alive but knowing that in death, they would forever lose their chance to leave someone behind.
Yes, the wars took more than their lives. For thousands upon thousands, there are no descendants. So many single men and married men without children are in graves on every continent from all our wars. No heir was left behind and in so many cases, no chance for the family name to continue.
So many brave men and women, Kiwis and Canucks, lie there still, buried under the poppies of Flanders, in graves covered in snow, under hot desert sand, in steamy jungles and under the seven seas. 1,700,000 men of all ages, all colours and all ranks. Both rich and poor, and some titled, in 128 countries in our increasingly small world.
Their common bond is that they all died for a cause they truly felt was noble and right. The 85 New Zealanders and the 79 Canadians lying side by side in the lonely Anneaux cemetery so far from home, deserve to be remembered and honoured with our thoughts and prayers on November 11th. The one day that is theirs.
For so many, there are no family members or relatives or friends left to remember them, to wear a "Flanders Fields" poppy and to grieve for them. Only us.
Men and women from another millennium whose only visible reminder that they were ever even here is a name carved in a piece of granite in a cemetery or a park or in a downtown square.
How little to ask – that we all visit them in spirit on November 11th and read their names and think of them. It is so little to ask of us who live, to honour those who died so long ago. And just maybe – they may somehow know that we have not forgotten
