Lest We Forget 12th November 2008 Brittany, France
It was five years ago, on a cold wet winter's night when I was en route through northern France to collect a bent Cessna 172 aircraft that had crashed in the Alps. I was later hit by a truck that set off the satellite beacon in her fuselage calling in a low flying military helicopter and ‘the rest' but that is a lighter story for some other time!
Now I was nearing Lille city, on the Belgian border and with the aid of ‘cyber space' and the War Graves Commission had worked out just where father's brother's grave may be.
I finally found the cemetery in the dead of night locked up like a fortress so a bedded down in the old car for the night. Light never really came. When someone turned up and unlocked the huge wrought iron gates it was still howling a gale with sheets of rain making it still quite dark- even at eight am.
I decided to make a run for it, in all the wrong clothes and spent the next forty odd minutes getting drenched, dodging between the Yew trees, trying to locate the military section of this old town burial ground.
Then there it was before me. First a large area of French soldiers, laid out in immaculate rows with an enormous Tricolour flag towering overhead fluttering and rumbling, making all the sounds of a sailing ship in a storm.
Just to the left I recognised the British cemetery with their distinctive tomb stones boxed in by an immaculately kept low cut hedge with grass also cut to a standard fit for a billiard table.
I had been dashing between points of shelter until now but this sight pulled me up abruptly and I was now almost creeping in anticipation as to what may be before me.
I worked my way down the names carved in the stones and had almost given up when, tucked in the corner was Uncle Maurice's grave with nineteen year old Private P O Winsor of the Pioneer Corps, killed on the day I was born, on one side and Brigadier TG Newberry MC, Lincolnshire Regiment, on the other.
Even now I cannot start to put into words, now I have recovered, just what I felt when I first saw my own name carved on the tomb stone. I was now soaked through but stood there in the teaming rain clutching an equally wet camera with no intention what so ever of taking the photograph.
Charles Dickens's book, ‘Christmas Carol' and the appearance of the ‘ghost to come', showing old Scrooge his future grave stone, came to mind but not just then. That only went through my mind much later, whilst driving home, my heavily laden trailer behind me as I headed for Calais and the English Channel.
Dad was due to be there that same day as me with Celia, my little sister, en route from Holland to Brittany. Like me both father and Celia had not yet made this journey to Lille.
I regret to this day my having been ‘unable' to wait for them that day as I had urgent appointments and a time table to keep. All quite pathetic, now I think back.
Father had been with Maurice as veterinary students at the Royal Veterinary College, London graduating, eventually, in 1938.
Together they caused, apparently, much fun and some havoc if I believe some of their fellow class mates' stories!
Both Dame Olga and Mary Brancker had fond memories. The two boys had been in partnership running a country practice in Taunton, Somerset, when war broke out.
Father tried for the Royal Air Force but was told he was more important working where he was but Uncle Maurice managed, much later, to be commissioned as Captain with the Royal Veterinary Corps in charge of a large number of horses and especially mules, needed to move munitions up to the front line.
On the 3rd March Uncle Maurice died from poisoned food rations deliberately left behind by the retreating enemy and was buried in an open field with a few others struck down at the time.
Yesterday on the 11th November I decided to return to the cemetery with the hope I could overcome my emotions this time and linger a while.
I spent the evening before in town drinking with old war veterans and resistance fighters reminiscing the occupation, the sabourtage they had managed and the ridiculous price now of our drinks, Calva (Calvados, apple brandy)!
At the cemetery I managed better constructive thought this time and with the sun, occasionally breaking thought the fast moving cloud, I managed to record for the family their great uncle's last resting place.
I moved from tomb to tomb soon realising there had been death on French soil during specific periods of the war and every tomb stone had a story to tell about the human cost of war.
First there were a few buried from the First World War tucked in a corner on their own. Second were the mid to late May1940 re guard losses, due to the chaotic retreat to Dunkerque and the incredible rescue by the ‘Armada' of small boats taking our soldiers back to ‘Blighty' to fight another day.
Then I found a group of dead in their late teens and early twenties having died with Maurice in or around the spring of 1945 when both British and Commonweal servicemen and women returned to finish the business.
A few Polish soldiers rested there also with the British having died of their wounds after V E Day, 8th May 1945.
The next group really stirred me as if I was not already emotionally drained. I found small numbers, in twos and threes, Royal Air Force crew having clearly died together.
The dates appeared random from between May 1940 to late 1944. A pilot, an air gunner and navigator no doubt boys together, not one over twenty five, victims of some night raid out of somewhere, in an Avro Lancaster bomber, may be?
Then there was a Squadron Leader Kerry, just twenty one years old, on his own who perhaps, maybe, had been a Spitfire or Typhoon pilot also killed in that late summer of 1944.
I said goodbye and walked slowly through the cemetery gates only to be met by a sea of flowers. The locals with great bouquets of ever colour imaginable surged past me in order to honour their dead.
I motored south, very quiet. It was coming up to eleven o'clock and the two minutes silence so I sought out a British grave yard called La Kreule near St Omer and Ypres, both places of terrible carnage and waste in World War One.
This was, by description, a Commonwealth burial ground. I wandered through reading and thinking of their short lives, many from countries afar, ending in the deep mud of Flanders.
Then, just after the silence, I espied a small white cross on the end of one of the lines of tomb stones. A French one I guessed, yes it was, the grave of an aviator. It read, RENAUL Henri Adjudant 2a Groupe d'Aviation MORT POUR LA FRANCE le 08..05.1918 .
"There must be some special story behind this burial", I thought. "He had been flying an Hispano- Suiza Vee inline engined 235 h.p. Spad or maybe a Niewport biplane?"
My already fired up and fertile imagination was soon in overdrive. "Au Revoir, Mon Vieux.", I stammered, turned and left for England.