By T.W. Paterson
It came as a surprise and disappointment to me to read that at least 45,000 Canadian veterans’ graves are “in dire disrepair”.
The first time I set eyes on a real military cemetery, with its all alike headstones row upon row, was through a car window as a child. It was somewhere near Seattle where we were staying with friends and we were on our way back from the zoo.
Oh, I’d seen pictures of them, of course. But seeing the real thing, even from the back seat of a moving car on a dull Sunday afternoon was different. It was moving too, in a very different, more profound way and I can still see it in my mind’s eye.
Closer to home, I’ve visited God’s Half Acre, the Veterans’ Cemetery, in Esquimalt several times. Again, there’s something about those white headstones marching in line upon line that speaks to you as no civilian cemetery can or does. And when you visit or see photos or films of the military cemeteries from both world wars in Europe alone, you’d think the appalling multitude of headstones — hundreds of thousands of them, sometimes seeming to stretch to the horizon, each and every one of them the grave of a human being, most of them young men — would make anyone think about the futility and human cost of war.
But, obviously, they don’t work that way. At least not for all of us and certainly not for many of those in power who’ve set the political and international agendas since 1945…
This isn’t for want of care and respect by the various populaces of these countries who’ve gone to great lengths over the years to maintain both cemeteries and memorials, many of which fall under the domain of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
So it came as a surprise and disappointment to me to read a Canadian Press report last year that at least 45,000 Canadian veterans’ graves are “in dire disrepair”.
The culprit? I quote: “A lack of federal funding.”
It seems that Ottawa (specifically Veterans Affairs Canada) has two ways of maintaining the graves of 317,000 Canadians killed in war or who qualify as veterans. The easier of the two is just writing an annual cheque for $1.25 million (a paltry amount in the federal budget) to the CWGC to care for roughly 110,000 military graves overeas. (The CWGC also cares for the graves of British, Australians, New Zealand and Indian military personnel who were killed in both world wars.)
The remaining 207,000 graves are here in Canada and are the direct responsibility of Veterans Affairs. This is where the problem of funding arises, according to departmental auditors.
“More than 45,000 of these veteran grave markers require maintenance, with a total of 60,000 repairs required [this was written in July 2017]…”
In response to questions, unidentified VA officials cited a lack of adequate funding. VA had originally received $5 million for this purpose but the budget was slashed by four-fifths in 2003 by the Chretien government. In 2009 the budget was increased by a further quarter million dollars.
For years now, here in the Cowichan Valley, dedicated volunteers, beginning with the efforts of the late Jean and Len Phillips, have accessed modest federal funding to erect proper military-style headstones over veterans’ graves in local cemeteries. Many others have contributed to the location and identification of veterans’ graves for this purpose, a most worthwhile mission — and justifiable expense — to say the least.
But the paltry revised budget set in 2003, only slightly increased in 2009, remains static today. As of this report being made public last year, a VAC spokesman assured The Canadian Press that the department had accepted the auditors’ recommendations and officials were in the process of “developing a plan to address the issues”.
According to the current VA Canada website the CWGC cares for the graves of 110,355 Canadian men and women who died in the first and second world wars because “Those who died while serving the military of a Commonwealth nation during the periods listed below are considered war dead and are the responsibility of the CWGC. VAC is responsible for maintaining more than 200,000 graves of Canadian Armed Forces members who died outside of the dates listed above.
“If you know about a veteran’s military grave that requires maintenance or is unmarked, or you require additional information, contact Cemetery Maintenance at vac.cm-mc.acc@canada.ca or 902-626-2440.”
And wait for that the cheque in the mail?
To be fair, the VAF also administers the Last Post Fund, a non-profit organization that provides eligible veterans with “dignified funeral and burial services”.
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For a refreshing change of tone, here’s the story of a totally different approach to honouring a military cemetery which also comes to us courtesy of The Canadian Press. This past June, it was reported that, for 16 years now, succeeding classes of the Beatrix Potter School in South London have been maintaining the graves of 18 Newfoundland soldiers and a nurse. This touching tale began in November 2003 when several children from the elementary school were gathering chestnuts in Wandsworth Cemetery to play conkers. They noticed a cluster of graves that stood apart from the others, each bearing the image of a caribou’s head and the word, Newfoundland. Making them all the more noticeable was the fact that these were the only military headstones that didn’t have poppies attached.
Mystified, they asked their teacher Steph Neale who suggested they find out for themselves by researching the soldiers’ names. They accepted the challenge — and each succeeding class has done the same ever since.
The 17 soldiers and nurse served with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment during the First World War. They’re not buried with their comrades in military cemeteries in mainland Europe because they died of their wounds or of illness in hospital in London. So they’re interred in a section of a suburban cemetery.
Where, until 2003, sad to say, they seem to have been forgotten. Why? Because they had no family members in Britain and because, unlike the military cemeteries under the care of the CWGC, there was no established remembrance program, they were simply overlooked.
So, for 16 years now, the children of Beatrix Potter have been honouring and telling the stories of those forgotten 18 casualties who’ve come to be “Our Newfoundlanders.” Their research brought them closer to their subjects when they learned something of the men’s hometowns, their lives and jobs, even their personalities, heights and eye colours.
There was further bonding from the fact that many of the soldiers (the eldest interred in Wandsworth Cemetery was 26) weren’t that much older than the students themselves.
In June, six Beatrix Potter kids, aged 10-12, were brought to Newfoundland to meet the families of some of those whose graves they’ve tended. Student Alice Goldberger told reporters that meeting families of some of the soldiers “made us realize that people do respect us for doing this.”
“We didn’t realize how much they thank us for putting poppies on graves,” said fellow student Zoe Spenceley.
The news report, which didn’t explain who organized and/or paid for the students’ visit to Newfoundland, described their tour of St. John’s landmark Bowring Park, the archives at the Rooms museum and the provincial legislature as they learned more about “their” soldiers’ lives.
They also met descendants of some of the soldiers and visited the hometown of nurse Bertha Bartlett who died of the Spanish ‘flu epidemic that killed millions in the immediate aftermath of the (so-called) Great War. It’s fitting to think that Miss Bartlett is interred with some of the soldiers she might have nursed.
The students also got to march behind the Royal Newfoundland Regiment Association in the Memorial Day Parade in St. John’s. (Memorial Day and Canada Day share the stage in Newfoundland and Labrador, the former commemorating the approximately 700 soldiers of the Newfoundland Regiment who were killed or wounded at the Battle of the Somme; Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949.)
“Not everyone gets to learn their march,” said Spenceley, “so I think it’s a way of them showing the respect and gratitude, and that they really like the fact that we’ve come over all the way from England to see them.”
The emotional high point of their trip was a visit to St. Bonaventure’s College where, according to teacher Neale, “…These families were talking about their lost sons from previous generations [and] everybody was in tears.”
There was a sense of immediacy, he said, that was “more than personal, it [was] almost like it’s never gone away.
He, too, shared his students’ emotional ride. Even after 16 years of introducing successive classes to the memorial project, the fact that these young people died so far from their homes “occasionally gets to me when you’re talking about them”.
He noted, for example, that they’d unearthed several photos of Pte. Chelsea Mercer, one of which shows him “looking very proud in his uniform, and you know he’s dead. And he was 18, 19? And you think, how bloody unfair is that.”
Over the past decade and a half, the students of Beatrix Potter have kept the Newfoundland soldiers’ names “alive” in the U.K.’s memorial services and in 2014 they placed poppies in their memory around the Tower of London.
Teacher Neale has further plans for his school’s Newfoundland memorial project — a reciprocal visit to London by members of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment Association.
It would seem that some faceless numbers-crunching bureaucrats in Ottawa could learn something from these British school children.
