Poet - Robert Service (1874 – 1958)
He was born in Preston, Lancashire, to a bank cashier and an heiress. He moved to Scotland at the age of five, living with his grandfather and three aunts until his parents moved to Glasgow four years later and the family reunited. He wrote his first poem on his sixth birthday, and was educated at some of the best schools in Scotland, where his interest in poetry grew alongside a desire for travel and adventure.
In his early years he worked in a shipping office and a bank, and briefly studied literature at the University of Glasgow. He left Glasgow and went to western Canada in 1894 to become a cowboy in the Yukon Wilderness. He worked on a ranch and as a bank teller in Vancouver Island six years after the Gold Rush, gleaning material that would inform his poetry for years to come and earn him his reputation as ‘Bard of the Yukon’. He wrote two poems which were inspired by his travels in the Yukon ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ and ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ and these enjoyed immediate popularity and encouraged him to write more poetry on the same theme and these were published under the title ‘Songs of a Sourdough’, this was later retitled ‘The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses’ in the United States.
From the money made on his writings he was able to adopt a more independent life, basing himself in Paris and the French Riviera, and he travelled widely to Hollywood, Cuba, Alberta, and Louisiana. While living in Paris he met and married Germaine Bourgoin, the daughter of a distillery owner, they purchased a house in Lancieux in the Brittany region of France. They had twin girls born in January 1917 however, one died of scarlet fever in February 1918. The family wintered in Nice in the south of France.
He worked as a reporter for the Toronto Star, reporting on the 1912 – 1913 Balkan War. He was aged 40 when the war broke out and during the first two years of the war he worked as a war correspondent and then enlisted as a stretcher bearer and ambulance driver with the American Red Cross. His health broke down in 1916 and during his convalescing period he wrote a new book of mainly war poems ‘Rhymes of a Red Cross Man’. The Book was dedicated to the memory of his brother Lieutenant Albert Service who was killed in action in August 1916 while fighting with the Canadian Infantry.
After the war he mainly wrote thrillers, two of which featured in silent movies. In 1930, he returned to Kilwinning, Ayrshire to erect a memorial in the town cemetery to his family. He twice travelled to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. During the Second World War he left France and lived in California with his family. H visited US army camps with other celebrities to raise morale and he was asked to play himself in the Hollywood movie ‘The Spoilers’ and acted alongside Marlene Dietrich, Randolph Scott and John Wayne. After the war he returned to France with his wife and lived in Brittany and lived there until his death in 1958. His wife lived to 102 and died in 1989 in Monte Carlo.
Poem - Pilgrims
For oh, when the war will be over
We’ll go and we’ll look for our dead;
We’ll go when the bee’s on the clover,
And the plume of the poppy is red:
We’ll go when the year’s at its gayest,
When meadows are laughing with flow’rs;
And there where the crosses are greyest,
We’ll seek for the cross that is ours.
For they cry to us: Friends, we are lonely,
A-weary the night and the day;
But come in the blossom-time only,
Come when our graves will be gay:
When daffodils all are a-blowing,
And larks are a-thrilling the skies,
Oh, come with the hearts of you glowing,
And the joy of the Spring in your eyes.
But never, oh, never come sighing,
For ours was the Splendid Release;
And oh, but ’twas joy in the dying
To know we were winning you Peace!
So come when the valleys are sheening,
And fledged with the promise of grain;
And here where our graves will be greening,
Just smile and be happy again.
And so, when the war will be over,
We’ll seek for the Wonderful One;
And maiden will look for her lover,
And mother will look for her son;
And there will be end to our grieving,
And gladness will gleam over loss,
As glory beyond all believing!
We point. . . to a name on a cross.
Painting
Not a painting but a photograph of one of the many Commonwealth War Grave Cemeteries in the Ypres Salient, Perth Cemetery (China Wall). The cemetery was begun by French troops in November 1914 (the French graves were removed after the Armistice) and adopted by the 2nd Battalion, Cameronians (Scottish Rifles), 23rd Brigade, 8th Division in June 1917. It was called Perth (as the predecessors of the 2nd Scottish Rifles were raised in Perth), China Wall (from the communication trench known as the Great Wall of China), or Halfway House Cemetery. The cemetery was used for front line burials until October 1917 when it occupied about half of the present Plot I and contained 130 graves. It was not used again until after the Armistice, when graves were brought in from the battlefields around Ypres and from smaller cemeteries. There is one Falkirk and District man buried here. The cemetery was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. https://www.theypressalient.com/post/perth-cemetery-china-wall
The Cemeteries in the Ypres Salient
There are 172 CWGC cemeteries in the Ypres Salient. The Falkirk District dead can be found resting in seventy five of those cemeteries with the names of the missing listed on three memorials the Menin Gate Memorial, Tyne Cot, and Ploegsteert Berks Memorial.
The cemeteries were to be established upon the principles of individuality, equality and cultural sensitivity and the dead were to be buried without the distinction of rank, class and in accordance with their religion. The cemeteries were designed by architects that included Sir Herbert Baker, Sir Reginald Bloomfield and Sir Edmund Lutyens and Rudyard Kipling was appointed as the literary advisor for the inscriptions. For Kipling this was deeply personal work as his son John had been killed and listed as missing at the Battle of Loos in 1915, although his grave was identified by the Military Historian Norm Christie from the CWGC records in 1992, and he is buried in St Mary’s ADS Cemetery, Haisnes, France. Kipling’s work gave us poignant biblical phrases found on the ‘Stone of Remembrance’ in each cemetery ‘Their Name Liveth for Evermore’ and on the headstone of the unknown soldier ‘A Soldier of the Great War … Known unto God.’
The cemeteries are immaculate with the dead set out in neat rows of uniform headstones conveying equality and giving the appearance of a battalion on parade. Each headstone has the regimental badge, name , rank, regiment, date of death and a short inscription supplied by the next of kin. They are set in well-tended plants and lawns and each cemetery has a common feature of a ‘Stone of Remembrance’ and the ‘Cross of Sacrifice’ and they range in size from a handful of graves to thousands.
Pilgrimage
Tens of thousands visited the cemeteries in Flanders. These cemeteries and memorials are a powerful testament to the sacrifice of war and became important places of pilgrimage for the families who could afford to visit. In the inter-war years Thomas Cook offered cheap three day visits to the battlefields and there were also group visits organised by the Veterans Associations and the Royal British Legion.
Pilgrims to the Ypres Salient: What did they want to achieve?
In his blog post Professor Mark Connelly discusses the first generation of pilgrims to the Western Front. https://www.gatewaysfww.org.uk/blog/journeys-end
In his blog he asks: ‘What did they want the journey to achieve? Absence at the moment of death, not being able to offer comfort, love, peace as life flickered away, not knowing how those last moments passed must have gnawed countless numbers of bereaved people, and so perhaps going out to the sites was meant to achieve what we would now call ‘closure’. But how did that process of closure work in making a visit? Given the fact that many must have gone out in the knowledge that their loved one had no known grave and that precious little was known about precisely where, when and how he had met his end, there was equally little chance of finding an exact spot on which to focus emotion and go through any kind of cathartic experience. Did some come hoping against hope that somehow their particular case was the subject of an administrative error and by wandering the cemeteries they might just stumble upon his grave? Perhaps they were spurred on by the Pilgrim’s Guide to the Ypres Salient, published in 1920, which stated: ‘The work of arranging and recording graves and cemeteries is by no means finished’ and recorded the fact that graves were being found and gathered into cemeteries the whole time. Did some think that simply by visiting the general area where a loved one served his last days they would in some way gain insight and therefore comfort?’
In May 1922, as part of a State visit to Belgium King George V and Queen Mary undertook a three-day visit to the battlefield cemeteries. This visit became known as the ‘The Kings Pilgrimage’, On 11 May 1922, he recorded the visit to the cemeteries in the Ypres Salient in his diary:
‘I left at 9.0 in my train with Haig & Sir Fabien Ware (Permanent Vice Chairman of the Imperial War Graves Commission), Fritz, Wigram & Seymour for Zeebrugee where I arrived at 11.0. Went to see the German cemetery where some English are buried, visited the mole & left at 12.40. Luncheon in the train. Arrived at Zonnebeke at 2.30.
Left in motors & visited the British cemeteries at Tyne Cot, Ypres, Vlamertinghe, Hop Store, Brandhoek, Poperinghe & Lijssenthoek. Joined the train at Poperinghe & left at 6.10. At each I was received by the Mayor & a crowd of people. The cemeteries are very well arranged & looked after by ex service men under the Commission. Very interesting passing through all the battle area, nearly all the houses have been rebuilt…’
Notes
https://www.royal.uk/kings-pilgrimage Accessed 15 September 2024
Comments