West of Arras: Behind The Lines

We travel to the area Behind the Lines of West of Arras, visiting cemeteries where Casualty Clearing Stations were moved back to in 1918, discuss a small village where WW1 meets WW2, discover some original Great War graffiti on a farm building wall and visit on the of the most important Arras cemeteries covering all four years of the fighting and seeing the grave of Canada's most decorated ordinary soldier.

Pte Claude Nunney VC DCM MM: Claude Nunney website.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Before we get to this week's episode, I wanted to mention some sad news about the passing of Canadian military historian Tim Cook. I never met Tim, and we only spoke on email, and I had hoped to speak with him on the podcast, but I knew that he was unwell, but didn't realise how unwell, and he tragically passed away this week, aged only fifty three. Tim's contribution to military history and especially the subject of the Great War was immense, and his book on Vimy, for example, is arguably one of the best, perhaps the best ever written on that subject. We've lost an important and significant voice in Tim, and his death would have left a void in his family's life, so this week's episode, which has a lot of Canadian content, is dedicated to the memory of Tim Cook. Do try and seek out one of his books and read it in his memory. So where are we this week? The landscape of the Great War is not just restricted to those fields of death where the fighting was at its peak. To truly understand that landscape where past and present sit side by side, we have to look beyond just the battlefields, to the sky as we've discussed here before, below to the troglodite war underground, and also to the areas behind the front, and not just behind the British front, but the German one too. The area behind the lines is different to the battlefields because much more of its original features from over a century ago survive. So when we travel that landscape in the villages and the towns and across the fields where that infrastructure behind the lines was once located, we see a landscape of the present that isn't that different to the landscape of the past, and we find perhaps far more reminders of that past, as I hope we'll see in this podcast. In many cases there are villages and towns in these areas where if you could take a veteran back, he would see little changed in them. They're like time capsules. So it's important, I think, to consider this area too, because it shines light on some layers of that war's history that we don't find on the front line areas. And in this podcast will be west of the city of Arras, that beacon on the front line, in a narrow area close to the main access, the old road between the town of Saint Paul and Arras itself. I visited this area on a day trip quite recently. It's so easy to do so via the Euro Tunnel or even the ferry, and it's less than a forty five minute drive down the motorway to the first stop close to that town of Saint Paul. So much to find here, so much to discover, and so much that's in easy reach for our journeys to that old front line. And what we're looking at in this episode is just the tip of the iceberg, so I'm sure we will return to this behind the lines area in future episodes. So we begin having just come off that motorway, down into this area west of Arras, behind the lines, and we start at a British cemetery from the First World War, Pern British Cemetery, near to the village of Pern. One of the things that I'd like to do when I make my own visits to the old front line is to see some places that I haven't been to before. Now I'm sure that you listening to this will believe that I've been everywhere, and I've been lucky over more than forty years now to explore this vast area of the Western Front and many other fronts of the Great War beyond France and Flanders. But I haven't been everywhere, and even within France and Flanders, there are still many cemeteries that I've yet to visit. I always keep some so that I've always got something new to find. I think that sense of discovery is really important, whether you're at the beginning of your journey or whether you're a long way into it. So all of the cemeteries that we go to in this podcast, it was my first visit to them. Now Pern is a small village about thirty miles northwest of Arras, so that kind of distance from the front line. And in the early phase of the war, this was a route for the British Army coming to and from the front. It was closer to the front that Lewes and Lenz than Arras itself, but it was an area where units were billeted, going to and from the line, and the roads and the railways in this region that passed close to Pern took men and material and supplies and everything else to and from the coastal area. The British, as we've said many times, invested in that infrastructure behind the lines which kept their vast engine of war moving. So the fact that there's a cemetery here is quite curious if this was essentially a billeting, training, logistics area. How come there are burials? Well, after the German offensives of March and April nineteen eighteen, that pushed the line back. And this area that we're going to travel through in the first part of our journey suddenly became important in a different way as it was an area that medical facilities needed to be moved back to. A casualty clearing station covers a square mile of ground and it needs to be quite some distance from the front line. And so the casualty clearing stations which had cared for the wounded from the Arras sector, Lenz and Luz, they'd been much nearer to that front, and following the German advance they needed to move back, and this saw the movement of these medical units to places like Pern in that late spring of 1918. So in Pern, the arrival of the medics happened in April nineteen eighteen when the first and the fourth Canadian casualty clearing stations came here. They were full of men from the Canadian Army Medical Corps, medical officers to look after the wounded, some of whom were surgeons because at a CCS surgery would take place, there would be x-ray facilities, blood transfusion, all kinds of quite modern medicine, but not just men, women too. So this was an area where Canadian nurses were active in those final months of the Great War. And then eventually with the movement of medical units around the Western Front, British casualty clearance stations used the area as well, and burials covering the kind of casualties that were being brought into this area begun here at Pern British Cemetery in April 1918 and continued until the end of the conflict. Post-war, when the cemetery was made permanent, it was one of many designed by Edwin Lutchen's, that principal architect of the then Imperial War Graves Commission, and the cemetery sits on sloping ground in a kind of valley. When I went there in October, there were the beautiful colours of autumn across that valley. The trees were changing colour, and I heard skylarks above me and Chifchaffs somewhere further down the valley. There's over a thousand burials here, in fact one thousand and eighty, with eighteen casualties from the Second World War, and that's quite common in this area because of the fighting at the two tail ends of that conflict in France in 1940 and 44, which we will mention a little bit further into the podcast. Of those casualties, 1,034 are British, 26 Canadian, 10 Indian, 5 South African, and 3 Australian. Now having mentioned that this was a site which was started by two Canadian casualty clearing stations, you might be surprised that there's only 26 burials from Canada here. Well, just because it was a Canadian casualty clearing station, that didn't mean that they just treated Canadians. They were located at the end of a line of medical evacuation decided by senior medical officers of divisions, of corps, even an army, and this was an army area during that last phase of the First World War, when casualties would be taken from a specific area and evacuated backwards. So although you might be a Canadian casualty clearing station with Canadian medics and Canadian nurses, you could be treating soldiers of any British and Commonwealth nationality that came through the doors having been wounded at the front line, and that was true of British casualty clearing stations as well. The cemetery, as you wander amongst the graves, very quickly you realise that it's in date order, and that's really common with medical cemeteries. Cemeteries started close to medical facilities like this, because essentially they would prepare a burial ground, knowing that some of the casualties would not survive their wounds. And very often some of the personnel from the casualty clearing station would be detailed off to prepare graves by digging a trench, and that when men died they would be brought in for burial, placed in rudimentary coffins, carried in with a firing party, and then laid to rest with a proper funeral service over their grave. This far back from the front, that kind of thing was possible, which of course was not possible on the very front line itself. And when we wander along those rows of graves and we see the units and we join up the dots and look at the orders of battle, we see that most of the casualties come from the Lens sector, so just north of Arras. The city of Lens, Lens, had been taken by British and then Canadian troops in 1917 during the fighting in that area. A new front line had been established. The Germans had pushed hard against that in the spring of 1918, and the front to the north had collapsed, so it sat in a kind of salient that was quite difficult for the units to hold there. And what we see reflected in the burials in here are casualties coming back from that. Not necessarily big battles or big actions, but men killed in the day-to-day activities of that part of the front where units are trying to hold the line to stop the Germans getting any further in terms of advancing over that ground. Now, when we look at the casualties in here, and when I come to a cemetery like this for the first time, I like to focus in on some of the casualties. I mean all kinds of things. You can really analyse that data and come up with some interesting results in terms of casualties during a particular period, or focus on some of the individuals that you find by looking through that list. And one of those that I came across was a chap called Robert Charles Manning, D S O M C of the Royal Engineers. He was a major in the 170th Tunnelling Company, Royal Engineers, and he died of wounds on the 6th of September 1918, age 29. Born in County Dublin, he was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He moved to Canada before the First World War and worked as a civil engineer there. Canada was a new nation. There was a discovery really of Canada in that Edwardian period. Men came from all over the world to work there, to build new villages and towns, to build railways and roads and bridges, to blast tunnels through mountains, and I guess that's the kind of work that he was doing. Robert Charles Manning was kind of a pioneer of Canada in many ways, and when the war came Canada responded, and men like him responded as well. He joined the first Canadian Divisional Cyclists in 1914, went to France with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in february nineteen fifteen, and then was commissioned from the Canadians into the Royal Engineers in May 1915. And quite a large number of that original Canadian Expeditionary Force that came over in the early phase of the Great War did end up getting commissions in British regiments, many of them with British backgrounds or connections to regiments or skills with direct relevance to the unit they wanted to join. In his case, as an engineer, he was going into the Royal Engineers. So having worked as a civil engineer in Canada, he could apply that knowledge to the task ahead of him, which was to join one of the early tunnelling companies, the 170th, and work with them beneath the Western Front at Givenchy, Gavinci, including the Brickstacks and the Hohenzollern Redoubts in the northern part of the Lewes area. He was responsible for blowing mines in that area in 1915-16. He'd been wounded in 1915, awarded the Military Cross for his bravery as a tunneller the same year, and later the Distinguished Service Order in 1917 for the same work, and by the French was decorated with the Legion d'honneur, France's highest honour, for saving the coal mines at Lens. Now that's an interesting phrase that appears in some of the online research about him, but I can't find the exact circumstances of that. I know that when Lens Lens was taken, some of the mines that the Germans had used to get coal from for their own war effort were then taken over, and French coal miners then came in and tried to restart them because coal was a precious resource and France needed that for their own war effort, and he seems to have been responsible for helping getting those coal mines that had been ramsacked and used by the Germans getting them back into operation for the French. But in that latter part of his service which brought him to Pern, he was up on the Labasse sector just as that front was collapsing, was wounded there, and died of his wounds in the casualty clearing station here at Pern and being buried in the cemetery overlooking that valley full of birds. It's an interesting war and he's typical of many of these tunnelling officers. Not one of the well known ones, but nevertheless so many stories in that underground war of the Great War on the Western Front. Buried not far away is another decorated officer, not from the war below the battlefield, but the war above it, connecting to our recent series on the air war. And here we're standing at the grave of Roderick Stan Dallas of the Royal Naval Air Service and the Royal Air Force. And there is a direct link to our RFC RAF series because in that we went to Wava in one of the episodes where Jimmy McCudden is buried and we visited the grave of Bob Little, also Royal Naval Air Service and RAF. And both of them, Bob Little and Stan Dallas, whose grave we're standing in front of now, were Australians who'd come to Britain to join the air services, both of them serving in the RNAS, and both of them being the top scoring pilots, air races, with Bob Little at the top and Stan Dallas close behind. He was the second highest number of aerial victories to an Australian airman of the Great War. So really important pilots, both of these men, and it's good to have mentioned their war and their part in that air war in these recent episodes. Stan Dallas, whose grave we're at now, was born in Queensland, and he travelled to England and joined the Royal Naval Air Service in August of nineteen fifteen. He flew Newports and later Sotwith triplanes. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, the Distinguished Service Cross and Bar, and he became the commanding officer of No. 1 Naval Squadron Royal Naval Air Service in June of 1917. When the RAF was formed by the combination of the Roll Flying Corps and the RNAS in April 1918, he became the commander of 40 Squadron RAF and he was shot down in No Man's Land near Liva, which is a suburb of Lons on the 1st of June 1918. He crashed in No Man's Land between the British and German trenches and was killed instantly, but the infantry who were holding the line there rescued his body from the wreck of the aircraft and then went back for his kit as well. Didn't want to leave it to be souvenired by the Germans. So his body was recovered and brought back here for burial. And a propeller from an SE5 once marked his grave here at Pern Cemetery. So one of those great combatants of the sky above the battlefields of the Western Front and part of that R and E S story, which we are going to tell properly a little bit further down the line. So Pern is an interesting cemetery to begin our journey in this behind the lines area because it has characteristics that it will share with quite a few of the other places that we're going to see on this journey. But for now, we're going to close the bronze gate outside the main entrance to Pern Cemetery and get on the road again and continue our journey. The town of Saint Paul is a bustling modern town today. We popped in there for a coffee on this journey. But it's a town forever connected to the Great War in all kinds of different ways, a conduit to and from the front with roads and railways, but it was also the place just after the Great War that the bodies of several unknown soldiers from those key battlefields were brought to to select the unknown warrior who would go on to be buried in Westminster Abbey. Now that's a story for another day, a story in its own right, and we're going to pass through Saint Paul and go out to one of the small villages just beyond the town. And we've come to a little tiny village called Quazette. Here in this small village, British soldiers have been billeted in the Great War, they're drunk in the local estaminaes. But it's also one of those places, and and we like this, I think, in the old frontline podcast, it's one of those places where the First World War meets the second world war. Not just because of that association in the Great War, but because as we come into the heart of the village, there's an isolated grave here. Now that's an interesting term, a bit of terminology that the War Graves Commission use for graves that are not in individual cemeteries, whether that's a military cemetery or a communal cemetery. And it's a phrase that goes back to the Great War, and this is really for me where those two wars overlap in this case, because in the Great War there were many, many examples of men being buried in isolated locations, and in most cases they were recovered and then reburied elsewhere. But if we jump to the 1920s, there were still quite a few isolated burials, isolated graves on that old front line, and two immediately come to mind for me Falformont Farm on the Somme, where three men of the London Regiment were in a shell hole during the fighting for Lousy Wood in September 1916 when a shell landed amongst them. They were killed instantly and they were buried in that shell hole and they are still buried there today. No Commonwealth headstones, it's a big stone plaque over the spot with their names on right out in the middle of a field. And another one that comes to mind is the Morris Grave at Metterin in northern France. He was a regular officer killed there in 1914, and he's still buried on the spot where he was laid to rest in 1914. Again, not with a Commonwealth headstone, but a very unusual, quite elaborate burial site with a structure like a small building with a clock on it, which for many years was in poor order and was renovated by the Western Front Association, and it stands there right out in the middle of the fields, right on the spot where the October 1914 fighting took place. So these kind of graves existed in the First World War because, in many respects, the nature of first world war fighting kind of encouraged this kind of burial. But for the Second World War, particularly the second world war in North West Europe, we would see that as a rapid war, a war of movement, and the isolated graves would be quite unusual. But actually, they're not. There are two that I know of in Normandy, and for many years I've been meaning to come to this one here at Croisette. And this is from the Liberation period. This part of France is characterised with, as I mentioned earlier, those two bookends of the French experience of the Second World War, the Battle of France in 1940 and the Liberation in September 1944. And you'll find many individual burials in communal cemeteries and churchyards in this region, but this is the only isolated grave where he's still buried on the spot where he was killed in 1944. So who is it? Well this is the grave of Lieutenant Donald Ashworth Creaton, MC, of the 11th Hussars. He'd served with C Squadron, and he was killed here on the 3rd of September 1944, age 23. He has connections to Kent. He was a vicar's son. He was educated at Queen's College, Cambridge, and he'd fought in the desert and in Sicily and Italy, and he'd been awarded a military cross for bravery in the advance at Montpinson in Normandy in August of 1944. And he commanded a Daimler-Dingo armoured car, which is the kind of kit that the 11th Hussars were using during what was called the Great Swan. This is where they were swanning their way across northern France, having crossed the Seine, having crossed the Somme, moving up towards Lille and the Belgian border, and although the Germans were not making concerted lines of defence or attempts at stopping the British with big formations, what they were doing, which was a typical German tactic as they withdrew across areas, they'd done it in the Great War with the withdrawal to the Hindenburg line, they left penny packets of men with the right weaponry to bump British forces and slow them down. And in this area it wasn't just British, but Canadians up on the coast and not far away General Machex Poles advancing with their tanks across this area as well. But here at Quazette, a Dame Ludingo, with Lieutenant Cretan inside, came round the bend and there was an anti-tank gun at the junction close to where his grave is today, which was not in action, and he was effectively taking the gun and the crew prisoner because the crew were actively surrendering, with their hands up, saying Camarad no doubt, and he was getting out of the turret of the Dame Ludingo with a sten gun in his hand about to take them prisoner. And this is what the war diary of the eleventh Sus says. At the west end of the village, Lieutenant Cretan, who was leading, suddenly found himself amongst a number of enemy with an anti tank gun. What occurred next is not fully known, but according to civilians, the Germans promptly put their hands up. Lieutenant Cretan covered them with his sten gun. The dingo was just behind the troop leader's car, but the third car, Lieutenant Esch's Daimler, had been stopped by some fusiliers to tell him, rather late in the day, that there was some enemy there. Firing suddenly broke out ahead of Lieutenant Esch and he went forward to investigate. As he came round the corner, he saw the crew of the dingo being marched away by the Germans, and also a vehicle on fire, which he believed to be Lieutenant Cretan's car, although later it was found to be a German lorry. At the same time the anti-tank gun was swung round towards his car, he reversed back around the corner. It took a long time to organise an attack on the enemy with the infantry, and by the time it went in the enemy had departed. Lieutenant Cretan had been shot in the head and died instantly. The armoured car and the dingo and the rest of the crews had gone. Lieutenant Cretan had a magnificent record of troop leading in this regiment, which had started before the fall of Tunis, carried on through Italy and since landing in France. He was exceptionally brave and thorough and very accurate in all of his reports. His loss was a great blow to all who knew him. He was a first class officer in every respect and most popular. It seems likely that his death was a typical act of German treachery. Either it was one of those who had surrendered who shot him, or else some unseen enemy on which those who had raised their hands promptly lowered them and attacked the remainder of the troop. The full story will not be known until those who were made prisoners are recaptured. Now that's a war diary written at the time with contemporary language and contemporary points of view. But there's no doubt it was a very confused period of fighting, that great swan as they swanned across that vast, vast area of northern France which had once been so important in the Great War. So Cretan was buried by the side of the road and a chaplain came along to officiate the burial, and when his mother was informed as to what had happened, as to where he was buried, she made arrangements to privately purchase the ground on which he was buried and make a permanent burial there for him, a permanent grave. Now initially this would have been a cross placed by the Graves Registration Unit on his battlefield burial. But eventually, as I'll put some pictures of this onto the podcast website so you can see it, eventually she added a proper stone memorial and a big cross with an inscription and even a photograph of him on there as well, set in its own ground with a fence and a hedge round it and a gate that you open to go inside. So I think you could pass this in a blink and not realise it's a war grave. There's no signage to it whatsoever. So it makes an interesting study. Now I've been to the other isolated burials that are in Northwest Europe that are down in Normandy, and one of those to Captain George Grey, who was a guards officer killed during Operation Bluecoat, he has a cross made from the stone of the House of Commons because he was a member of Parliament, one of several MPs killed in the Second World War. But at the back of his cross is the original Grey's Registration Unit cross. And when I was visiting Cretan's grave at Croiset, the isolated burial there, I remembered this, and there was quite a thick hedge at the back of his stone cross there, and in the hedge was his original Gray's registration cross. And these were not like the ones in the Great War that were mainly made out of wood, they were pre-made metal crosses that were normally painted white, and then with bitumen based paint, the name and details would be painted on. And if you type that phrase isolated grave into the Wargraves Commission database, you'll see that most of them do date from the First World War. So in this tiny little village in this vast area of northern France, this is definitely one of those places where the First World War meets the second. Leaving the village of Croisette, we're gonna skirt round the outskirts of Saint Paul, get onto the main road going east. And then drop down to another small village, Ligny Saint Flochelle. And here on the far side of that village, we find Ligny Saint Flochelle British Cemetery. It's right out in the fields, surrounded by farmland and woods. You can see for miles from here. And as I often say about these cemeteries of the First World War, they're not here by accident. This one is because it was close to yet another grouping of these casualty clearing stations. And as you go in up the quite large entrance with quite formidable steps that take you up past the cross of sacrifice into the level where the headstones are. The headstones are very close together here, not dissimilar to Pern, and immediately you can see that they too are also in date order. So this is another location where, in that spring of 1918, in April of that year, casualty clearing stations that have been much nearer to the front were moved back to here to deal with the wounded that was coming from that fighting. And although most of the casualties here come from the Arras area, there are a few from the north from Lenz and a few to the south from the Somme area as well. And in terms of the units, the medical units that operated here, the 7th and the 33rd and the first casualty clearing stations worked in this sector between April 1918 and the Armistice. And again, like Pern, it reflects fighting from a specific area, a specific period, and from where the wounded were brought back from, in this case mainly around Arras. Because of this, because it's really more connected to Arras than Pern was, in terms of a 1918 story, it connects us especially to the Canadian Corps, because the Canadians, in those 1918 battles, on the 8th of August 1918, had taken part in the Battle of Amier, when Canadian forces alongside Australians and British to the north had broken the German defences on the Somme, and this signalled the beginning of the end of the Great War. The Canadians continued to fight in that area, and then the Canadian Corps was moved up to the Arras sector to take on the ground close to the city of Arras that had been taken by the Germans in the spring of 1918, pushed them back, and then continue the fight into the main Hindenburg line. And that's what the 347 Canadian burials in this cemetery, which is more than 50% of the total burials here, this is what they represent that fighting, that key fighting to break the back of the German defences at Arras and push them through the Hindenburg line and beyond, hopefully, to victory. But aside from the Canadian soldiers that are buried here, there's also 282 British, one South African, and 46 Germans in a separate section of the cemetery. Now it's not uncommon in these behind the line cemeteries to have separate plots. And German plots to bury the German wounded coming back who died of their wounds in a separate area of the cemetery is again not unusual. Here it's actually on a different level to the rest of the graves, to one side of the cemetery at the back. And I don't think this was any disrespect to those German soldiers, it was just how those burials were arranged at the time. But when we wander through the cemetery, we very quickly see the Canadian nature of this burial ground. There are many cemeteries across the Western Front which you could describe as Canadian because their burials dominate those cemeteries, and we know a lot of those on the actual frontline area itself. Again, if we went east of Amiens, into that area where the Canadians broke out in August 1918, we would see a lot of examples of Canadian battlefield cemeteries there and came north to the Somme. We'd see Adenat, Canada spelt backwards, Regina Trench, Corselet, a lot of Canadian burials there, and many, many other places besides. But behind the front, that is true too, particularly if the cemeteries that you visit are on the line of Canadian evacuation of their wounded during those key periods. And here it covers late August into early September of 1918, when the Canadian Corps, fresh from its victory on the Somme, pushed the Germans back east of Arras, advanced, for example, over Orange Hill towards Monchy-le-Pru, and then beyond that was the quite substantial village of Vison Artois, and on the high ground beyond that was the DQ line, the Drocor Cuillon Switch line, a main part of the Hindenburg line defences. And the men who died of their wounds and were buried here are all part of that story. And when you wander around, when you look at a cemetery that has quite a substantial number of Canadians in it, there are a lot of inscriptions to look at because the Canadian government paid on behalf of Canadian families who wanted inscriptions. If they couldn't afford it, the Canadians would pay on their behalf. So proportionally, there's a much higher number of inscriptions on Canadian graves as a consequence of this. And there are some very touching inscriptions here. Private Lawrence Adams of the 26th Canadians, he died of wounds on the twenty ninth of August nineteen eighteen, age twenty nine, he was from Quebec. It says very touchingly here lies our beloved baby boy Lawrence. Not far away is the grave of Private George Halliday Simpson of the twenty fifth Canadians. He died on the twenty eighth of september nineteen eighteen, age twenty three, and he was from Amherst, Nova Scotia. His inscription is short but powerful Son dear Son dear What that must have meant to his parents we can only imagine. And these simple formations of letters into words, into phrases really tear at the heartstrings when you pause and you read them. And they tell us so much about what grief was and what the loss of a son, of a brother, of a husband, of a father, what it meant to families more than a century ago. And there are Canadian veterans buried here too, when you walk along the rows and you look at the regimental numbers and you see the decorations they've got for early battles. There are men who had fought at Eape in nineteen fifteen, Corselette on the Somme in nineteen sixteen, and right through that experience of the Canadian Corps, right up to the battles that cost them their lives around Arras in that late summer of nineteen eighteen. And among them is Sergeant Adelaard Bastian DCM of the eighty-seventh Canadian Infantry who died of wounds on the fourth of september nineteen eighteen, aged twenty-eight from Montreal. His distinguished conduct medal was for the fighting at Arras in that DQ line, clearing the German trenches there and bomb blocks, where the Canadians had got into the German positions and they'd put up a block across a trench with the Canadians one side and the Germans the other, and there were tiny little battles involving a handful of men clearing their way through those obstacles to capture the larger objective of that wider Hindenburg line. And when we look at the records for him, and Canadian records are particularly good, it gives us the stark truth of his death. In one record it states died of wounds, gunshot wound to the abdomen. While taking part in military operations on september second in the vicinity of Deury, and were near the jumping off trench, Sergeant Bastian was wounded. He was immediately attended to and taken to a dressing station and later evacuated to No. 7 Casualty Clearing Station, where he succumbed to his wounds two days later. That paper trial that once existed for all soldiers of the Great War is stark and honest in its language, and I guess portrays a greater truth of the cost of war and what sacrifice meant more than a century ago. But amongst the Canadians there are British dead too, as we've said, nearly three hundred of them, and these were often units attached to the Canadian Corps. The Canadian Corps had four Canadian divisions in it, but very often it would have British units attached to it, and Arthur Curry, who was the commander by this stage of the war, very much liked particular British formations. The Royal Naval Division was one of them, and the Fourth Infantry Division of the British Army was another, a regular army division that had been out since August of 1914. I mean not many of its old contemptibles left by this stage of the war, but from Curry's point of view it had a good fighting reputation. And amongst the casualties from that unit that are buried here is Major Geoffrey George Bellamy, who was of the Devonshire Regiment attached to the 4th Battalion Machine Gun Corps, who died of wounds on the 1st of September 1918. Now by this stage of the war the Machine Gun Corps had MGC battalions that were divisional units where all of the guns could be brought together to lay down machine gun barrages, to enable units to attack or protect a bit of ground. It was a much more sophisticated use of machine guns. Major Bellamy was from Plymouth. He was a student at Exeter College, Oxford University on the outbreak of war, and a member of the Inner Temple as well. He enlisted in the Devonshire Regiment in 1914, transferred to the Machine Gun Corps and was wounded with them at Messengs in June of 1917, and then after recovery returned, became part of this divisional machine gun battalion and was wounded in the attack on the Drocor Queont switch line and died here of his wounds. And it's important, I think, that when we visit these Canadian cemeteries in inverted commas and we see British graves amongst them, just like the cemetery itself, those graves are not here by accident. They tell us the wider story of how corps operated on the battlefield, that even a Canadian corps might not just be Canadian. It relied on British units to support it, to fight alongside it, and those men on both sides of that divide from Canada and Britain were proud to do that. It was all part of the camaraderie that existed, and that I think transcended national boundaries, something that I think sometimes is perhaps lost occasionally in the narrative of the First World War, and we mentioned Tim Cork in his writing at the beginning of this podcast, and he was very good at that, explaining the wider picture of Canada's role and its position within the wider British Expeditionary Force in the Great War. So for now we'll say goodbye to the lads buried here at Ligny Saint Flochelle. Again, a cemetery not frequently visited when I looked at the cemetery visitors book. There have not been many people there, even during the summer. But places like this, all part of our understanding, all part of those layers of Great War history. And now we're going to continue with our journey, cross over that Sandpole, Arras Road, move into some of the villages that get nearer to Arras itself. And our next stop is not a burial ground, it's a village behind the front, but nevertheless we can reach out and touch those men who walked there in that past of the Great War. We've come to a small village now west of Arras. We've moved nearer to that frontline area, probably about twenty miles from the front, and far enough back during the conflict to be untouched by war, really. The presence of war would have been everywhere. In the early phase, French soldiers in their uniforms, and then this vast sea of khaki as the British army moved into this area. So it would have been clearly to the villages of all these little settlements in this part of northern France, west of Arras, it would have been clear that there was a conflict going on, and in the distance would have been the rumble of the artillery and the guns up on that very front line. But the actual villages themselves largely were untouched by damage in terms of bombardments, because this far back it was only really super heavy artillery that could reach this kind of distance, or as happened in that last period of the Great War, German Gotha bombers would come over into these areas and bomb camps and ammunition depots, so some places could get damaged as a consequence of it. But largely in these villages, pretty much everything survives from that period of the Great War. It isn't actively preserved, but it wasn't damaged or destroyed, so it didn't need to be knocked down or rebuilt. And that means there's a lot of original buildings, and that's important in terms of what we're about to discover and look at now. Now I'm not going to say exactly where this is for reasons that will become apparent, but we're in a typical little street, a side street in one of these villages. There are some houses, some modern houses at one end of the street built in the last couple of decades, some older buildings, a couple of farm buildings ahead of us, and we're standing outside a long barn with a big wooden door and red bricks with a line of soft stone running through the lower part of it. That soft chalk stone called Pierre in French is very common in this region and was common in the houses that were on the battlefield, but of course all those were destroyed, and we see that kind of building style in these places behind the lines. So on this soft stone section of wall that forms part of this wider barn, we stop and we pause, and we note that something appears to be written to be carved on it, and it's British graffiti from the Great War. This is something that you will find in almost every village in this area, in any area behind the front, but it's particularly prolific here, and the owner has asked for their privacy to be respected, which is why I'm not saying where it is. I will put some pictures of some of the graffiti onto the podcast website so you can see it, and as I walk along this wall, one of the first ones that leap out is a name of a soldier and his regiment carved alongside a horse, a war horse, because this soldier is Private H. Y. White of the first first Northumberland Hussars Yeomanry. They were a territorial cavalry regiment that'd been in France since the very beginning of the war. They'd been in the trenches, as dismounted cavalry, as infantry, and when he came here with quite a few other members of his regiment and carved this war horse on this wall, they were about to be an active cavalry regiment again, being at the forefront of the British advance in those hundred days, doing reconnaissance work, which many cavalry regiments had done in that earlier phase of the Great War too. And working along this line of graffiti, we come across a very large ornately carved Canadian maple leaf with the year 1918 beneath it, so again reflecting the role of Canadian troops in the fighting around Arras during that vital period of the Great War. And a few bricks away we find the name A Nazard USA 1918. Now, this is not in a main American Expeditionary Force area, this is not an American sector, but there were quite a few American units detached from the main AEF and used with British troops on the northern part of the Western Front in 1918, and I would guess that he was from one of those formations, perhaps the 27th New York or the 30th Tennessee. I looked, he's got an unusual name, Nazard. He didn't serve in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, a lot of Americans did, but he's not from that, so this must be a doughboy, an American soldier, who stood in this street and carved his name on the wall alongside his British and Canadian buddies. And then a few more stones up is a very ornate carving of the badge of the Middlesex Regiment, the Diehards, with 1st 8th Battalion underneath it. They were a territorial battalion, part of the 56th London Division, who had taken part in the fighting just south of Arras in August of 1918, and almost certainly this dates from that period. Close by we see some support troops mentioned, the East Lanx Brigade of the Royal Field Artillery and some soldiers' names there. There's quite a few machine gun corps names on here, including James R. Hampson of the 9th Machine Gun Battalion, and men from the Royal Naval Division as well. So again, this reflects the British units attached to the Canadians, because as we mentioned earlier, the R and D, the Royal Naval Division, was attached to the Canadian Corps in those battles beyond the DQ line in that late summer, early autumn of 1918, and they would remain attached to the Canadians right up until the final battle at Mons in November of 1918. Now, when I looked up some of the names that are on here, pretty much all of them survived the war. Instantly, I guess the thought is that these guys may have died, but remember most men came home. But what we've got here, why it's so important and why all of this graffiti that we find in these areas behind the lines is so important, it's a snapshot in time, a moment in that great war, in between battles, and these men, like ghosts, they live on through these carvings. Their name, their stories have become part of this wider landscape of the old front line, and this is just some of many thousands of such names like this, carved on walls, carved in buildings, carved around the entrances to churches, all across this region, and something we would never find really on the actual front line areas themselves, because any building they could have put their name on was destroyed there. So that's why I think another reason why these places behind the lines are so important to our wider understanding of what we find on this landscape today. And we'll continue our journey out of this village, no doubt passing through other villages with as yet unseen, unknown graffiti on buildings. And if you found graffiti in your travels in these places, do let us know about it through the podcast website or on the Discord server, and there's links to both of those in the show notes. So we'll continue to our third and final casualty clearing station cemetery, but one very different to the others that we've visited so far. Every step of our journey takes us nearer and nearer to the front line, but never to it precisely. We're still about fifteen miles west of Arras, and we've come into the village of Obigny Onatois, Obigny, to the British troops, and we've gone to the southern area of that village, where the main civil cemetery is located in the open fields here. So this is a civilian burial ground for the people of Aubigny. When they pass away, this is where their family vaults will be located. But during the Great War, because of its position, its vital position west of Arras, close to the St. Paul Arras Road, and also close to the railway links from St. Paul to Arras, this meant it was at a vital point where wounded coming back from the front line could be brought to by road and then transferred onwards, either by road or railway, back to hospitals much further away from the front. So during the Great War, close to the station, sidings were built so that ambulance trains could be brought in here, and this became a hub for the reception of wounded. So it's similar to the other cemeteries that we've come to in that it came into existence because of the medical facilities that were here, but the difference with this one is that it covers a much bigger period. This cemetery is close to the site of casualty stations when it was being used by the British prior to that, the French equivalent of that, but it's not just in response, it doesn't exist just in response to the 1918 battles like the others did. In fact, its history covers all four years of the conflict. When the French army clashed with the Germans around Arras in 1914, they too invested in infrastructure behind the front, especially when that front went static in the autumn of 1914. So French medical units were the first to establish themselves at Albigny at this time, and there are two main French burial sites in this civil cemetery dating from the autumn of 1914 through to early 1916. Now this was my first visit to Albigny last month when I came here, and amongst the French burials as I walked along the rows of crosses and looked at the Muslim graves of the soldiers of French colonial units who fought in this area. I found those who'd been killed or died of wounds and were buried here had come from the front line around Arras itself. There were men here who had fallen in the fighting at Corinthsi, a massive infantry battle and mining offensive there in 1915, and there were also later casualties from the attack on Notre Dame de Lorette and Hill 145, Vimy Ridge, when the French were fighting there. So this cemetery very much reflected the units that were fighting in the French Tenth Army in that sector at that time. The British Army then began to take over the Arras front, the Arras sector, from about March 1916 onwards, as the British Expeditionary Force extended its lines south as the size of the British Army on the Western Front grew, and it was joined not just by Canadians, but then by Australians and New Zealanders and South Africans and many others besides. The front got longer and longer, and Arras became an essential part of it. And Albigny was then a place where the Royal Army Medical Corps moved into and established some of its first casualty clearing stations in the Arras sector in this village. The 42nd CCS opened up here first, and they used some old French huts near the railway station and then they expanded out into the fields close to where the cemetery is today and would spend the next two years in Albigny with their CCS operating here through the whole experience of the British Army and its Commonwealth, its Empire forces on the Arras Front. They were joined on and off by other CCS as well, but the 42nd CCS remained here throughout. So in this cemetery, Albigny Communal Cemetery Extension, there are 3,067 burials from the Great War. 2,049 of those are from Britain, 666 are from Canada, 50 from South Africa, 4 from Australia, 2 New Zealand, 222 from France, and 64 German. The Commonwealth plot is behind the main civil cemetery, and the headstones again are very close together, which is common in CCS cemeteries because again they would have dug trenches here, and when men died they were buried in coffins in the rows where those trenches were, and gradually those graves would be filled in by the burials. There's also, as you walk round, separate plots for officers that are quite discernible, and this again wasn't uncommon in cemeteries that were away from the front line. The kind of class structure, particularly of the British Army, was reflected in the way men were buried, and officers would be separated when they died from the men and be buried in their own plots. Up on the battlefield, officers and men shared the same privations, and in those cemeteries you'll see them buried side by side. But the further you get away from the front, it's not uncommon to see those old ideas of the separation of officers from men to see that continue. And here you'll see that very clearly in a row of officers' graves along one side of the cemetery, and then a separate plot from 1917-18, although in certain parts of the cemetery some officers are buried with the men too. When we look at the early burials that are in here, they're from the 46th North Midland Division who were holding the line around Lens, and also quite a lot from the 51st Highland Division, who were an early unit that took over parts of the Arras Front in 1916 before the time of the Battle of the Somme. And in the summer of 1916, as units were released from Arras to go down and fight on the Somme Front, the 60th London Division came across to France and took over this sector around Arras. And these were wartime recruited territorial battalions, often called second line territorial battalions. So, for example, there was the 20th Blackheath and Woolwich Battalion in this division. Its original battalion was in the 47th London Division, they were the 1st 20th, and the one that was in the 60th Div in this unit was the 2nd 20th, and you'll see that in the order of battle for this unit. They spent quite a time here leading up to the autumn of 1916, and then went off to Salonica, and from Salonica they went to Palestine and fought in the battles in the desert and were in the capture of Jerusalem there, and one of its brigades then returned to the Western Front, the 2nd 20th being one of the battalions that came back, and they ended up being attached to another division and fighting in the battles on the Hindenburg line. But their early casualties are very much represented amongst that summer of 1916 period here at Albigny Cemetery. The Battle of Arras is very well covered, and we see lots of units from that April and May 1917 period, as well as the long quiet period that followed the Battle of Arras and the German attack in that sector in March 1918, and then the final breakout battles led by the Canadian Corps in that late summer of the same year. Indeed, for that final period, this is very much a Canadian cemetery when we look at the dead from that August and September 1918 period. And one of the reasons I wanted to come here was to visit the grave of a very special, a unique Canadian soldier from the Great War. Now I've had a lifelong interest in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in terms of my wider interest in the Great War for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that I lived on a Canadian battlefield at Corsulette for so many years, and I've followed them around the Western Front and other places where they served for all of that time, for four decades. And I've got a great admiration and respect for the Canadian soldier in the Great War, and it's always good to pick up on news stories or to finally get to stand at the grave of someone that you'd read about a lot. And in this case, that's exactly what I did at Albigny Cemetery. Here I stood at the grave of Private Claude Nunny, VC DCM MM of the 38th Canadian Infantry. He died of wounds on the 18th of September 1918, aged 29. Claude Nunny was the most decorated, ordinary Canadian soldier of the Great War. He collected the full set, the Victoria Cross, the Distinguished Conduct Medal, and the Military Medal. Aside from his bravery and long war on the front line, for me another connection was that Nunny was a Sussex lad from Hastings on the Sussex coast. Although, for some reason, in his papers, he claimed he was from Dublin. His mother died when he was very young, and he and his siblings were sent to Canada as a home child, a project to rehome orphans, which today is seen as a very controversial one. They were all split up when they got to Canada, and Claude ended up with a family in North Lancaster, Ontario in 1905. A decade later the Great War came and He was an original member, an original soldier enlisted in the 38th Battalion Canadian Infantry, which was recruited in Ottawa, and after training, he found himself on garrison duty on Bermuda in 1915, eventually reaching England in June 1916 as part of the newly formed 4th Canadian Division. They then went to France and he fought at Corsolette in the final battles there on the 18th of November 1916 in the attack on Desire Trench, a tough battle in awful weather when snow completely blotted out the battlefield as the fighting there came to an end. And later in the attack at Vimy Ridge, he went into action there with Captain Thane McDowell helping him to capture some German strong points on the ridge and Germans in a tunnel system beneath Vimy Ridge, as by this time Claude Nunny was part of a Lewis gun team and he laid down supportive fire to McDowell and his men who were going for these objectives. McDowell was awarded the Victoria Cross for his bravery and Nunny the DCM. He was then promoted to sergeant and later awarded a military medal for a large trench raid at Avion near Lens in June of 1917 and was gassed the following month, which got him out of the line until the following year. In the spring of nineteen eighteen, however, he faced court martial for striking a superior officer and after being convicted was being sent by lorry to a military prison when a German aircraft crashed close by, and he and some of the other prisoners leapt out of the lorry, ran across the field and rescued the German air crew from the aircraft despite the flames. He was very badly burnt during that rescue mission, and for his bravery there, his sentence was suspended, but he lost his stripes and reverted to private, and after he'd recovered from his burns, rejoined the 38th Battalion in the field in August 1918, just after their action on the Somme. And at the same time he learned that his brother Alfred, who he possibly had not seen for many years since they had been sent to Canada, he'd been killed with the 44th Canadians on the Somme on the 10th of August 1918. Having been awarded the DCM and the MM, he was one of the most decorated men in the 38th Battalion, but his next action would result in the award of the Victoria Cross. This was part of the attack at Dury on the DQ line that was spoken about quite a lot in this podcast, the Drocor Cuillon Switch line, part of the main Hindenburg line, and his part of that took place on the 1st and 2nd of September 1918. His citation reads On 1st of September, when his battalion was in the vicinity of Visenartois, preparatory to the advance, the enemy laid down a heavy barrage and counter-attacked. Private Nunny, who was at this time at Company headquarters, immediately on his own initiative, proceeded through the barrage to the company outpost lines, going from post to post and encouraging the men by his own fearless example. The enemy were repulsed and a critical situation was saved. During the attack on September the second, his dash continually placed him in advance of his companions, and his fearless example undoubtedly helped greatly to carry the company forward to its objectives. He displayed throughout the highest degree of valour until severely wounded. The VC was recommended on the 9th of September, and by this time he'd been evacuated to the casualty clearing station here at Albigny, but he knew of the recommendation for this award. He knew that his name had been put forward for the Victoria Cross, but the wounds he'd sustained were so serious that he finally succumbed to them on the eighteenth of september nineteen eighteen. Claude Nunny was one of seven Canadian soldiers awarded the Victoria Cross for the DQ line battle at Jurocor Queen Switch Line Battle, and the only man from Hastings in Sussex to get the Victoria Cross in the Great War. Nunny was only five foot five and he'd been a house painter before the war, but in uniform, with a weapon in his hand and bravery in his heart, he'd stepped over that line from soldier to warrior, as his conduct and decorations clearly showed. Today he lies in this vast soldier's cemetery, surrounded by Canadian comrades who died in the same battle, and alongside men from many nations who fought at Arras like he did in the Great War. Albigny is not frequently visited. It was my first time here, but like so many places in this landscape beyond the battlefields themselves, there's so much to find here, and so many layers of First World War history. Nani and men like him often had long wars, and today they guard places beyond that zone of darkness where the vast engine of war once raged. But nevertheless, this is their part of that old frontline. You've been listening to an episode of the Old Frontline with me, military historian Paul Reed. You can follow me on Twitter at Somcor, you can follow the podcast at Old Frontline Pod. Check out the website at oldfrontline.co.uk where you'll find lots of podcast extras and photographs and links to books that are mentioned in the podcast. And if you feel like supporting us, you can go to our Patreon page, patreon.com slash oldfrontline, or support us on buymea coffee at buymeacoffee.com slash oldfrontline. Links to all of these are on our websites. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again soon.