Sat. May 30th 2009

Canadian ground.

Sign posts are at every fork in thr road and all war memorials and cemetarys are well marked.

To-day was Beaumont-Hamel, the Newfoundland Memorial Site and Vimy Ridge. We have 7 people from Newfoundland on this trip with us. During WWI they were still a member of the commonwealth and not Canada. This entire site is dedicated to the sons of the rock.

It is a Canadian National Historic Park and considered Canadian soil in this country. Students from Newfoundland rotate through the park service on 4 month rotations. During WWI Newfoundland had a population of 250,000 and had 12,000 enlist. Most of them were between the ages of 18 and 24. This was considered a significant number from such a small population.

The Memorial we saw today commemorates the loss of 0ver 800 men in less than a 2 minuet battle. Like many of us the number 800 is not easily visualized but when I saw the brass plaques with name after name of the dead, I understood immediately.

The symbol for all memorials for Newfoundlanders is the caribou. It always faces the direction the men were going.

The site is about 82 acres of land with German and Canadian trenches and mortar holes. The guides describe the battle and the land and help us 'see' the trenches and the blast holes. There are 3 cemetery's on the site as well and we saw them all.

Even with the museum and the descriptions, our modern lifestyles prevent us from really understanding why there were over 300 men still under the earth of the site and never recovered. Or why so many soldiers were unidentified.

We also laid a wreath for remembrance of these men and the Queens Own Rifles had a bugler with them to play 'Last Post'. The Newfoundlanders with us were quite moved and so were we all.

Later in the day we saw the Vimy site. It commemorates the 60,000 Canadians lost in the Great War. The site itself is enormous. Both the Beaumont-Hamel site and Vimy had areas fenced off with electric fence because of the 'unexploded ordinance' that is still present. In the photo above you can see the sheep used to trim the grass at Beaumont-Hamel. It is considered too dangerous to send people in to trim the grass.

The trenches and tunnels have been restored at Vimy and again we had a Canadian student guide. Vimy is also a National Historic site and Canadian soil. Acres and acres of the place are filled with tunnels in some state of decay and trenches in the same condition. Huge blast holes were mixed in.

The group laid another wreath, we looked for family names on the memorial and looked over other memorials that had been laid before. Ken and I found one Sloat and two Finches on the Vimy memorial and took pictures of those names.

I'll write some more as I upload pics.