Beaumont Hamel

What does July 1 mean to you? Canada Day? To the people of Newfoundland and Labrador, July 1st is a day or remembrance and collective mourning.

In support of the Somme offensive on July 1, 1916, the Newfoundland Regiment climbed out of their support trench near the French village of Beaumont Hamel, 778 strong. At day’s end they could muster 68 men.

Although Newfoundland was a colony during WW1 and WW2, the site we visited was Canadian, with the typical Parks Canada signage. The parking lot was bare as we continued to be in front of the daily tourists. A warm welcome from the two guides at the gate, inviting us into the site.

The iconic Caribou statue on top of a winding path was eye catching (more on this later). A handy guide map was provided, and we started our walk, heading in a roundabout way down the pathway.

Later as we became experts on battle sites, we came to know the different ways a battle site could be left in.

Verdun, for example, was left as is, and nature has recovered the area with trees and a number of villages have never been rebuilt. At the other end of the spectrum on the Somme, the battle site was recovered, the towns rebuilt, the craters filled in, war debris removed, and bodies recovered and reinterned in local cemeteries.

Beaumont Hamel is in between. The site has never been turned back over to cultivation, but trees have also been kept off the site.

The ground is green with spring grass. The pathway delineated from the grass with fences, not just for neatness, but because the green grass continues to hold unexploded ordnance. You stick to the path and leave the risky business of grass maintenance to the herd of sheep currently with their heads down, doing their duty.

We head for the old front line, passing iron toothpicks of old barb wire twisted supports, the barb wire gone but the frontline delineated by the steel rods.

The pathway passes through the old reserve line, gently grassed now and filling in with the debris of 100 plus years of dead grass accumulating in the bottom. Another 50 years and there will not be a trench to see.

The trench on both sides' zigzags, mitigation to protect soldiers in case an artillery shell exploded in the trench, damage would be localized.

Now we are at the Y Ravine, the frontlines on July 1st, a natural drainage course about 20 meters deep and 50 meters across.

Y Ravine Cemetery is nearby. We read the headstones and try to piece together the story from its tragic history. ?

Continuing our walk we enter the Hunters Cemetery. The headstones here touch each other, reflecting that many men share the same hole, and the words “known to be buried nearby” are on some headstones. This is a frontline cemetery, and it was worked over many times as the armies fought back and forth across the ground, meaning ground markers were lost and records spotty at best.

Now we head back to the entrance. On the way back you can pop down into a trench, giving you an impression of what it was like to move along in that strange world of 1916.

Now in front of us is the Caribou statue, emblematic of Newfoundland and prominent on the colony’s soldiers' cap badges, fully antlered and head up, facing the enemy. You circle the statue as you climb upwards. From an elevated point of view, you understand the challenges those soldiers faced 108 years ago. The first wave had faltered, the frontline and communications trenches chock full of wounded and dead, the Newfoundlanders ordered to climb out of the support trench in the face of machine guns, the second wave rises and advances.

The frontline around Beaumont Hamel didn’t substantially change for the remainder of the Somme offensive.

Now back in the car, others start to arrive at this popular site.

I need to go back to Courcelette for a goodbye. Like the pilgrims off a hundred years ago, who knows when we’ll be back.

We bomb along the road, and soon we stop at the Tank Memorial near Pozieres. The first tanks in the history of warfare advanced on September 15, 1916. Four were assigned to the Canadians. Their memorial features four models, the Mark 4, an early version of a troop/artillery carrier, a Whippet, and Mark 4 machine gun variant. I try to visualize that moment, and another in 1940 when enemy tanks rolled back down this same road, heading for Dunkirk. The wayward damage caused by someone at that time taking a pot shot is evident by the bullet hole in the monument. ?History on top of history.

We briefly stop at the Courcelette Monument, one of many erected by the Canadian Government to mark significant locations, but I just don’t get the feeling I got standing in the cemetery or the farmers’ fields.

A historian once said “if you want the truth, go to the cemetery”. True words.

We head for a late lunch in Albert, parking near the school where my grandfather would have been treated before an almost miraculous evacuation back to England. Some of his mates who signed up the same week in Edmonton weren’t so lucky. We’ll be heading to visit them in the coming days, near an ancient town in Belgium called Ypres, but known to most as Flanders’ Fields.