The statue of Canada grieving for her lost sons at the Vimy memorial.Christopher White
Christopher White is a writer based in Hamilton.
“It was here,” our guide said, “across that field where he fell.”
I stared out over the green farm field, trying to imagine it as it would have been in 1918. A field in northern France filled with shell craters, the pounding roar of artillery and gunfire, Canadian soldiers advancing under heavy fire from the retreating German army.
“He” was my great-uncle, Private Cecil Mather Telfer, aged 27, who died on Aug. 30, 1918, during the massive Hundred Days Offensive that ended the First World War. He was not the only member of my family to be killed that month. His brother Eric, only 20, had died two days earlier, not far from where Cecil Mather fell in Arras, France. Their brother Andrew also did not survive the war, dying in Greece on Nov. 18, a week after the Armistice. My family’s casualties continued to mount after the guns went silent; their mother, Annie, died in January of 1919 from what can only have been a broken heart over the loss of three of her sons.
We had come to France and Belgium on a pilgrimage to find my great-uncles and discover what happened to them, and also for my wife to find where her grandfather, William Hedderwick, fought and was wounded. (A miracle story, he survived having a ball of shrapnel enter one cheek and exit the other during the horrific battle at Passchendaele.) With every graveyard, memorial and battlefield we visited, I was haunted by one question: “Did they suffer and die in vain?”
William Hedderwick, second row, seated, with a mustache and bandage wrapped around his head. At a hospital in England, after being wounded at Passchendaele. Photograph taken Christmas, 1917.courtesy Christopher White
The Vimy memorial.Christopher White
In order to find an answer we hired a private guide for four days: Vic Piuk, a British former print journalist who has lived in France for the past 25 years. He has written three books on the First World War and served as our own personal Wikipedia. His deep knowledge brought us face-to-face with the truth of the brothers’ fate.
The weather the day we went to the Vimy Memorial was as if it had been ordered for a documentary – misty with light rain and low clouds. Vimy looks from a distance like something from a Tolkien fantasy: A white marble base spreads out across the land, supporting two massive white marble plinths with statues on top and within it. The monument is absolutely huge and the grief in the eyes of the statues touches your very soul. It almost overwhelmed us. In every direction engraved upon the memorial were the names of 11,285 missing Canadian soldiers.
I started searching and there, on the base of the memorial, I found the names I was looking for: C. M. Telfer, E. Telfer. There are moments in life that affect you forever and this was one of mine. As the rain came down, I asked Vic and my spouse Wendy for a moment alone. I traced my great-uncles’ names with my fingers and thought about the stories they never got to tell and the lives they never got to lead and of the other names etched into the monument – name after name after name of unfinished stories. I promised Eric and Cecil Mather Telfer that I would not forget them – that I would keep their names alive for my grandchildren, so that what they endured will never be forgotten.
The names that writer Christopher White was searching for on the Vimy memorial: C. M. Telfer, E. Telfer.Christopher White
Eric and Cecil Mather emigrated to Canada in 1904 after my great-grandfather came to visit the country. Not long after arriving in Alberta, he sent a telegram to my great-grandmother in England: “Sell everything and come, this is the land for the boys.” Annie Telfer did just that, packing up and moving from a house in London to a log cabin near Westlock, Alta., where they homesteaded and my great-grandfather became a Methodist circuit preacher.
Cecil Mather's pocket-size New Testament. In 1917 it saved his life; a piece of shrapnel hit his breast pocket over his heart – right where he kept the Bible. You can see where the shrapnel tore into the book.Christopher White
In 1916, the two brothers, aged 19 and 25, joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force and were sent to France. Of the two, Eric seemed to have the most difficult time. His medical records show four instances of “debility” – a catch-all diagnosis that included shell shock, or what we now know as PTSD. The same month he was killed, he was also charged with being away from his billet without permission and not carrying his helmet or gas mask. To me it looks like a bewildered soldier in shock, simply walking around dazed and confused. It is clear from his records that his combat experience from 1916 to 1918 broke him, and that he should not have been anywhere near that battlefield in late August, 1918.
For Cecil Mather it was different. I have the pocket-size New Testament that was given to him in 1916 by Edmonton’s Central Methodist Church. It was inscribed: “May God bless you and keep you.” It certainly looked like God was watching out for him in 1917 when that book saved his life. A piece of shrapnel hit his breast pocket over his heart – right where he kept the Bible. You can see where the shrapnel tore into the book, and not into his chest. He was sent to a hospital in England to recover. It should have been a remarkable story that he told to his children and grandchildren, but it was not to be. For while the Bible was able to save him from a piece of shrapnel, it was not able to save him from what was most likely a German shell that found him on that late August afternoon after he’d returned to the front to fight.
The two graves of unidentified Canadian soldiers that Christopher White adopted as the graves of Eric and Cecil Mather Telfer, at Vis-En-Artois British Cemetery, in Haucourt, France.Christopher White
All of my life I’ve seen pictures of First World War graveyards, but to walk through them in person is a completely different experience. They contain row after row of well-tended graves, all identically landscaped to remind visitors of an English country garden. In every cemetery I went to, I spotted graves identified with a maple leaf that indicated an unidentified Canadian soldier.
Each gravestone bears the inscription “A Soldier of the Great War” and then, below it, “Known Unto God.” The British writer Rudyard Kipling penned those words and was instrumental in the creation of these graveyards. He lost a son whose eyesight was so bad he should never have been allowed to fight, but Kipling pulled all the strings he had to “help” enlist his son, who didn’t even survive his first battle.
What I didn’t understand, until I was there myself, was that 50 per cent of those killed were either never identified or never found. So instead, in every cemetery, there are memorial walls, with rows and rows of the names of the fallen. And those names included Cecil Mather and Eric, whose bodies are lost to history.
By examining the battlefield diaries of their units, Vic found the graveyard where Eric’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Alfred Thomas Bird, was buried, and so it’s the likeliest place that Eric and his older brother might have ended up.
The Vis-En-Artois British Cemetery sits in Haucourt, France. The entrance is marked by a large stone cross and the rows of graves are framed at the back by a Romanesque memorial wall with multiple columns. We found the cemetery directory and walked the rows until we found Bird’s grave stone. Close to him, side by side, were the two graves of unidentified Canadian soldiers. Shading them was a mountain ash tree full of berries, identical to the one in my own backyard, so we chose them as the graves of Eric and Cecil Mather. We put stones on top to signify that someone had been there, a tradition I learned from my Jewish sister-in-law, and two small bunches of mountain ash berries signifying our family connection. It was a beautiful sunny day and I felt the peace and connection that I was seeking.
My own two grandfathers fought and survived the war and lived long, rich lives, as did my wife Wendy’s grandfather, who recovered from his facial injuries. But, even after returning home from Europe, I am still left with that question: Did they suffer and die in vain? The answer for me is both no and yes. No, because had the war been lost, the Central Powers of Europe were planning on keeping northern France and all of Belgium, and the warlords who governed those nations would no doubt have demanded their own reparations and harsh conditions as they did in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Russia. The equivalent demanded of the Allies would surely have set the stage for another war, in exactly the same way that the Treaty of Versailles did in triggering the events that led to the Second World War. In that sense, the answer is also yes, because their deaths showed humanity’s inability to avoid a calamity that was so very preventable – a lesson that we need to recognize in our own chaotic time.
“In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row.”
I was standing in the front-line field hospital outside of Ypres in Belgium where John McCrae wrote those words. Originally the aid station was a series of wood-framed caves dug into a small hill; later in the war it was reinforced with cement and remains today as it did then.
The rooms are small, dark and dank. It is hard to imagine surgeries happening there and the immense suffering that took place within. I walked up to the spot where McCrae wrote the poem and saw a late summer field in front of me. That poem, which I have known since my childhood, spoke to me in a new way. In my mind’s eye I saw my great-uncles; young men caught in a massive conflagration unlike anything that had been experienced before in human history. As I remembered and treasured their all-too-short lives, one of the final lines of the poem came to me:
“To you from failing hands we throw/the torch; be yours to hold it high.”
I made them another promise then and there: that I would not drop the torch for which they gave their all.