September 11, 2015

Finest Hour 165, Autumn 2014

Page 30

By ESTHER GILBERT

It was November. We were walking through a thick fog that seeped into our bones. Gunshots were heard…ah, of course, it was hunting season. We could not see anything but the narrow grass path in front of us that bisected a farmer’s field. We tried to walk without slipping off the edges into clods of mud. What lay ahead? Where were we going?

Martin knew.  He had been to the Somme before. In preparation for our journey, he had collected material: excerpts from official reports, regimental histories, poetry by those who had been there, trench maps and his own maps to be fine-tuned, descriptions of life—and death— on the battlefield, gathered over decades and gleaned from his archives.

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Each day we set forth with another fistful of papers to explore a different battle, a different vantage point, each poignantly marked by a memorial or cemetery.  Our “marching orders” were held together with a black clip, separated day by day of our journey. Each day’s cluster of papers was always in Martin’s hand, so he could read aloud and describe what had happened on that very spot, noting the mileage and directions, the inscriptions and impressions. Martin had just written The Somme; we were there just to make sure everything was right before it went to press, and also doing a “reccy” in advance of a trip Martin was to lead with a group of friends.

Slowly, through the fog, images became clear: a few trees, bare of leaves, a low stone wall with a gate, and then finally, the name engraved on the plaque of that particular Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery.

First task at hand: to take in whatever scenery we could make out through the fog and get our bearings. Second: to look in the cemetery register where the names of those buried were recorded. Third: to walk among the rows of gravestones, stopping to recognize the regimental insignia and read a name, an inscription, the ages, the sadness of the nameless—those “Known only to God”— and those whose gravestones are so close together, reflecting the way soldiers’ lives ended in the same shell hole. When we found a gravestone with a Star of David, we would look for a small rock to place on its top, which Jews use instead of flowers to mark a visit. The Commonwealth War Cemeteries are beautifully kept up, a mark of honour to those who gave their lives.

At each cemetery came a description of the battle: which regiment defended this particular bit of ground, in the case of the Somme, Canadians, English, Irish, Newfoundlanders, Scots, South Africans and Welsh. “Over there,” Martin pointed, describing how the Germans advanced, how this wood was held, how that hillside was taken, human life all round as shattered as the landscape. Now these fields produce food, swords beaten into ploughshares. The serenity belies the horror buried beneath the surface; the stillness masks the deafening sounds of battle and of death as described in the pages held by the black clip. The history is recalled in the words of those who were there: only the eyewitnesses are granted the privilege of adverbs and adjectives. The historian brings it all to life; armed with the facts on the ground, readers draw their own conclusions.

In every town we visited together in England, Scotland and Wales, and also many in Canada, Martin and I would stop at the war memorial, photograph or record the names of the local boys who did not come home, and linger a moment remembering the battlegrounds we had seen. Thus Martin’s archives and understanding grew, names with towns, connections to be made, human stories to be woven in and remembered.

Martin and I have visited Commonwealth War Graves Cemeteries wherever our travels have taken us: to Ramle and Be’er Sheva in Israel, New Delhi in India, Heverlee in Belgium, and those that pockmark the Somme. Our single day in Honolulu found us at Pearl Harbor and the nearby Punchbowl Cemetery; a visit to Washington took us to Arlington, and the Changing of the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. To Martin, the cemeteries and the battles that caused them are the intersection of history and geography, the very distillation of what must be remembered.

Lady Gilbert, the former Esther Goldberg, a Holocaust historian, has been Martin’s constant companion, counsellor, champion and friend since they married in 2005.