TOM MORGAN'S SOMME DIARY
- PART 4
TOM MORGAN'S SOMME DIARY
- PART 4
My
third day on the Somme was a Friday - and I was woken at about 7 a.m. by
a single church bell pealing in the tower at Auchonvillers, about half-a-mile
away. Soon this was joined by another bell, until there was at last a full
peal going on, on this first Friday after Easter. I was glad of this
ecclesiastical early call, as I had a lot planned for this day. The farthest
I had been from "home" during this visit was about two miles, but on this
day, I was due to cover over 150 miles of the roads of Northern France. I
was to travel, comparatively speaking, some distance from the Somme
Battlefields.
To begin with, I travelled North to Bapaume, about 8 miles away - one of the early targets of the Somme battles. I had promised a friend that I would visit three villages out to the West of Bapaume and photograph them for him, together with the surrounding area. He was researching, at a very great distance, the possible position of a German Great War aerodrome. I found the villages and took the photographs. This area was, in battlefield terms, some distance from the Somme area, but it had, in its time, played a considerable part in the history of the war. On my way back to the main road, I passed a sign for two cemeteries and stopped to look at them. I'm glad I did. You can learn a lot from looking at cemeteries.
MORCHIES - AND A WORD ABOUT CEMETERIES
The Commonwealth War graves Commission is responsible for the marking and upkeep of all British war graves. Most graves are in the commission's cemeteries, but not all of them are. Some of the fallen were buried in local village cemeteries, the ones used before and after the war by the local communities. These are usually referred to as Communal Cemeteries. Just outside Morchies, I found Morchies Communal Cemetery with immediately next to it, Morchies British Cemetery, a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery. The military cemetery contains 160 graves, and there are 5 "British" graves in the Communal Cemetery, along with the local villagers' family graves. Only the British would leave these 5 graves in the Communal Cemetery where the burials were first made and care for them there, rather than move them into the Military Cemetery next door. These cemeteries do not receive many visitors, but I was glad to have found them, because taken together, they show a wide variety of units (and nationalities) whose paths of war brought them into this now-quiet place. They also show, in one small site, many of the different Commonwealth War graves Commission headstones.
In the Communal Cemetery are the graves of :
Sgt. Fraser, M.M. of the 1/5th Duke of Wellington's killed 8th September, 1916,
Private J. Holdsworth, of the 6th B. Yorkshire Regiment, a 23 year-old from Stockton-on-Tees, who died 3rd October, 1916,
415339 Private Howard Stanton, 5th Canadian Mounted Rifles (Quebec Regiment) killed on 5th October, 1916,
Private Capes of the Royal Fusiliers, a 19 year-old from Leeds, who died on 12th October, 1916,
139016 Private Charles Edward Barnes, 3rd. Bn. Canadian Infantry (First Central Ontario Regiment) who was killed on 19th October, 1916.
These graves, with their pristine headstones, form a curious contrast with the local family graves. There are flowers on the local graves, but the soldiers' graves, in their little part of the cemetery, have no signs of any such remembrance at all. No matter. The distinctive headstones mean that they are instantly recognisable for what they are. They have this immediate visual honour accorded to them.
A quick look at the Military Cemetery Register tells why these five soldiers are buried in the civilian cemetery - it was because they were buried, and their graves marked, by the Germans, before the British advanced and captured this area and, therefore, before the military cemetery next door had been started. Morchies fell to the British forces on 20th March, 1917 and the military cemetery was begun the following month. Morchies stayed in British hands until the German Advance of 21st March, 1918. The Germans then used the military cemetery to bury fifteen of their dead from the 21st March attack and the area remained quiet until the Germans lost the village again in September, 1918 and the British took possession of their cemetery once more. By the end of the war, the cemetery contained the graves of 128 soldiers and airmen from the UK, 17 Australian soldiers and the fifteen Germans. 74 of the UK graves are "unknown."
Because the cemetery changed hands often, and because the loss and re-taking of the immediate area involved actions which placed the cemetery in something of a front-line position from time to time, there were some disturbances, and this caused the CWGC something of a problem, not just in this cemetery, but in others in various parts of France, Belgium and the rest of the world. When the British re-took Morchies, in September, 1918, they found that the cemetery had received some shell-damage. Some of the grave-markers had been destroyed or lost. Maybe they found some displaced wooden crosses lying around. Either way, they found that there were some graves, previously known to be in the cemetery, but no longer capable of positive identification. The CWGC solved this problem neatly in this cemetery as they have done in others. Near the entrance are eight special gravestones. These record the names of eight men "Known to be buried in this Cemetery." In other words, their graves are among the 74 "unknown" graves. Their gravestones bear the words suggested by Rudyard Kipling - "Their Glory Shall Not Be Blotted Out."
Sometimes, it happened that part of a cemetery may have been so smashed that graves known to be there cannot be found at all. There are some of these "lost" graves in the Morchies cemetery, also. There are individual gravestones to the memory of 9 British soldiers, including one from the Royal Naval Division, indicating that these men were buried by the Germans, in this cemetery, but that their graves have been lost as a result of subsequent shelling. These graves are not included among the "unknowns." They have been lost, and cannot be marked, even anonymously, but they are there somewhere.
THE COMMONWEALTH WAR GRAVES COMMISSION
The care of British and Commonwealth war graves and memorials from the two World Wars is entrusted to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. (Originally, the Imperial War Graves Commission.) It is their proud boast that every British and Empire serviceman and woman who lost his or her life in either of the two world wars is commemorated by name, either by means of an individual gravestone, or by inclusion on one of the Memorials to the Missing. The vast majority of cemeteries and memorials are in Northern France and Belgium, of course, but there are also cemeteries and memorials in Iceland, The Faroe Islands, The United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the former USSR, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Luxembourg, Austria, Switzerland, Monaco, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, San Marino, Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, Bulgaria, Italy, Greece, Turkey, the Azores, the Falkland Islands, Syria, Cyprus, Madeira, Morocco, Tunisia, Malta, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Japan, the Canary Islands, Algeria, Lybia, Egypt, Israel, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Mauretania, Hong Kong, Burma, Oman, Senegal, Gambia, Mali, Chad, Sudan, Yemen, India, Thailand, the Phillipines, Guinea, Nigeria, Djibouti, Sierra Leone, Togo, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cameroon, Uganda, Somalia, Maldives, Malaysia, Singapore, Equatorial Guinea, Zaire, Kenya, Indonesia, the Solomon Islands, Ascension Island, Tanzania, the Seychelles, St. Helena, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mauritius, Namibia, Madagascar, Swaziland, Lesotho, South Africa, various Pacific Islands, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South America, the West Indies and the USA.
In many countries, the national governments gave the land on which cemeteries or memorials stand, to Great Britain, or the Commonwealth Countries which had a significant number of burials at a given site. Thus, the land on which the Canadian Memorial at Vimy stands belongs to Canada. Nearly all British Cemeteries in France and Belgium are on land which belongs to Great Britain. I can't speak with authority on the ownership of cemeteries on other parts of the world, such as the USA. The Commission's responsibilities extend from cemeteries like Tyne Cot, near Passchendaele in Belgium, where 12,000 are buried and a further 34,000 missing are commemorated by name, to individual island burials. Tyne Cot has a full-time complement of staff. The Royal Navy periodically visits the islands which have just one grave, but all are maintained. Sometimes, the National Governments of countries in which the cemeteries lie carry out this work on behalf of the Commission.
The work of the Commission goes on, even so long after the Great War. Even now, from time to time, the body of a "missing" British serviceman may be found. Whenever this happens, the Commission will make every effort to find and inform the next-of-kin. There will then be an appropriately solemn burial of the remains in a military cemetery and the soldier will have his own grave and headstone. Following this, his name will be removed from whichever Memorial to the Missing previously contained it.
I hope that readers of this "Somme Diary" will excuse this deviation from the events of July 1st, 1916. This is a diary of what I saw and learned on my visit and on this day I discovered and learned about Morchies and am grateful for it. The afternoon and evening of my third day in France was spent back on the Somme. (See the next part of my Diary.) The following day of my visit to the Somme was actually spent in Ypres!
Copyright © Tom Morgan, July,
1996
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