There was a moment, last year in France, that I imagined my Grandpa standing near me, not as a young soldier, but as the man I knew, a man revisiting a place filled with ghosts from his youth.
Forty years ago he returned to Vimy, fifty-one years after the battle that must have been a definitive moment in his life. In 1968, one of the first places he visited was the German War Cemetery near Neuville Ste. Vaast. For over an hour in the rain he wandered amongst, not the graves of comrades, the graves of men who had been his enemy. His best friend, and other comrades, lay buried less than a kilometre away and yet he chose to visit this place first.
As I stood there, listening to my Uncle describing the scene, I imagined him standing next to me and then moving off amongst the crosses. I wondered what brought him here first and although I’ll never know for sure I think I understand.
It is difficult to reconcile the man I know as my grandfather with someone who had killed, but he undoubtedly had. His citation for his Military Medal that he earned at Hill 70 recounted that he had killed at least 9 of the enemy. There were many other battles. No doubt, among the 44,000 dead buried in that cemetery were men that he caused to be there. Stewart and his other friends had been mourned long before that trip, but there in the rain far from home he probably had to confront the other ghosts that haunted him. Not his friends, but strangers from another land. Strangers just as bent on putting him in the ground, as he was them, but standing there it would have been impossible not to face them. Perhaps, there in the spring rain, he had to do some mourning yet undone. Mourning men he had killed, and perhaps his youth.
Nearby in the soil of Vimy Ridge,
Graves by the thousand lay,
Covering dust & bones of German youth,
That war had brought that way.
Fifty thousand, they said, lay there
All silent now and still,
Slain in a war that settled naught;
As now, war never will.
– A.T. Kines (from Vimy Revisited 1968)
Comments
8 responses
Clare,
Your posts about Vimy are very powerful. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks John, my pleasure.
Men are different at home and around family then when they are in a life and death situation. He went and did what his country had sent him to do and that’s to protect us over here. It’s a private matter that most men don’t like to talk or brag about.
This is a very powerful post. I am at a loss for words.
I am thankful I did not have to endure those hardships and thankful for the men who did.
I offer a prayer for those who went before.
Thanks for sharing this story.
Thanks John. I know my grandfather knew what he did was what had to be done. Even after going through what he had, perhaps because of it, he tried to volunteer for World War II and recruited most of the young men from home that went. I also know that he felt each of their deaths keenly.
Thank you Troy. I’m terribly proud of my Grandfather and he and the Great War make for some of the posts I’m most proud of here.
Clare
I found a link to you at Jochen’s Bell Tower Birding blog, and this is my first time here. Your post and Kline’s poem blew me away. Very moving and intense, and I felt transported to that cemetary. The last line of the poem is especially profound, and it brought to my mind a quote from General William Tecumseh Sherman: “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”
Thanks Elaine,
The poem is an excerpt from my Grandfather’s (It’s Kines by the way, not Kline) poem “Vimy Re-visted (1968)”. You can find the whole poem on this post – http://kiggavik.typepad.com/the_house_other_arctic_mu/2006/11/they_grow_not_o.html%5D . Like Sherman he also expresses that “War is Hell”
I include in my web a street view of Neuville-St Vaast German war cemetery: http://www.satelliteview.org/streetview/Neuville-St_Vaast_German_war_cemetery is a peace place