The war was as stagnant as the French mud when the Canadians were called to the grinding task of pushing the Germans out of the rolling farmland of the Somme, metre by bloody metre.

In their time away from the front lines, in that cold, rainy autumn of 1916, at least 20 Canadian soldiers walked into the woods outside Lanches-Saint-Hilaire, a small French village northwest of the Somme battlefields. There, past the ferns and bushes, they crawled through a small hole, to a place where the bullets and rain could not go.

Inside an old chalk quarry, they wrote their names on the wall, and then returned to the war. Eventually, time healed the battle-scarred fields and gravestones rose like picket fences to count the fallen; the cave in the woods was largely forgotten as the trees outside grew tall.

This spring, a lumberjack would chance upon a curious discovery, setting in motion a transatlantic quest to deliver the messages of another time: Remember me. I was here.

More at thestar.com

Eerie chalk caves are custodians of Canadian soldiers’ artistry

Walking the Western Front











































The lumberjack and the archeologist

Gilles Prilaux is an archeologist with France’s National Institute for Preventive Archeological Research. He is friendly and patient, willing to send clip art to a Canadian reporter to help bridge language gaps. (The man who discovered the cave? “He cuts the trees,” Prilaux explains. A “bûcheron,” he emails later, helpfully including a small cartoon of a bearded redhead with an axe.)

Romain Beausseaux, 24, the lumberjack in question, came upon the quarry by accident this spring. It looked like a foxhole. He crawled inside, and saw “D. Watson” written on the wall. “October 4 1916.”

“In his mind he thinks it’s Dr. Watson, the friend of Sherlock Holmes,” Prilaux says.

The archeologist followed him into the woods on a sunny afternoon a few weeks later. They moved the branches and stones that guarded the entrance, and Prilaux put his hand inside and felt around.

It was dangerous — “because the chalk in our country is sometimes very unstable and can in any moment collapse,” he says.

Prilaux crawled through and scanned the walls of the chalk cave. It is one of many that lie beneath the French fields, a result of quarrying in the 16th and 17th centuries, when chalk was spread on the fields to reduce acidity, and also used as a construction material. This cave was not deep; it was built into a small hill.

Prilaux knew right away that D. Watson was not of a literary bent. As it turned out, he was a soldier of the First World War, a granite cutter from Quebec, with blue eyes, brown hair and a heart tattoo on his left bicep.

“I don’t understand what the Canadians are doing here, at this moment, because the carrière is very difficult to access,” he says, using the French word for quarry.

Lanches-Saint-Hilaire is now home to 135 people. A few years ago, a former mayor put some large stones in front of it to make it difficult to access. Its existence has not been a secret, but it had been mostly forgotten, the names on the wall waiting in a lost-and-found bin for a century.

Prilaux has been with the national archeological service for 27 years. He started with the Roman period, but in the 1990s began to study the First World War. He liked the work because it was novel, and there was something he hadn’t been able to do with the Romans: connect the past with the present. Through their family members, he could learn of the hopes, tragedies and lives of the men who fought.

The feeling, he says, is “incroyable.”

His work on the war has led him into these dark spaces — the hulled-out chambers of centuries-old industry that then became havens in France’s tumultuous modern history. Places to hide one’s livestock, possessions, troops. During the war, some holes were used for protection; others, like this one, seemed to serve as a day trip for soldiers away from the lines.

There were 30 names in the cave — about 20 of them Canadian, a handful of those legible. Through their service records and obituaries, and with the help of a volunteer genealogist in Alberta, the Star was able to trace the families of two of these men and pass along a message lost for a century.

The man who lived

“Oh my gosh, look at that,” Randy Molho says, voice filled with wonder as he looks at his grandfather’s handwriting. “These guys didn’t know if they were going to live through this. They probably wanted to leave a mark.”

He saves the file to his computer and continues to tell his grandfather’s story from his flower ranch in the scrubby San Diego countryside, where the climate is warm, but not hot. He grows protea flowers — brilliant, bursting blooms that are popular set dressing for talk shows, hotel lobbies and Las Vegas casinos. They look like fireworks, pine cones, cacti; named for the Greek god Proteus, who could change his form to evade enemies, they defy uniform description.

Molho’s grandfather didn’t have that kind of power — but he wasn’t scared of reinventing himself in search of the next great opportunity. And after the war, it was sunny California.

Allan Augustus Chafe had grown up in Newfoundland, worked in Boston as a machinist after his parents died, and when he heard there was free land out west, tried his luck at homesteading on a barren plot outside Lethbridge, Alta.

Brown-haired, blue-eyed and short, he was 22 when he put his prairie plan on hold for the war. He signed up with the local 31st Battalion (Alberta) in 1914. They headed overseas in spring 1915 and were soon in the trenches of the Western Front. The year 1916 rolled in “amid shot and shell,” he wrote in a letter home to the Lethbridge paper. “Some of us even called a Happy New Year to Fritz over the parapets, but the only reply was a shell or two.”

That fall, Chafe’s battalion was involved in the heavy fighting in the Somme. It was hellish weather. Every morning, a dozen men would report sick, as the wind blasted the rain through the valleys. “Roads in a vile condition,” the battalion notekeeper wrote in early October. “Miserable.”

The 23-year-old Chafe found the quarry, wrote his name twice, and survived the war. He was wounded twice: First, he was testing a bomb thrower in a training course in 1917 when it exploded, tearing through his thumb and forefinger. When the Allies made their final, desperate push the following year, he was shot through the foot in the opening day of the Battle of Amiens. He was sent to hospital in England and, while in London, he fell in love with Doris Hodges and persuaded her to return to Canada with him.

Doris was not a fan of the homesteading lifestyle, and the couple moved to British Columbia, later relocating to California, where Chafe worked in carpentry. They had two daughters. Chafe’s foot recovered from the bullet wound, but the war lingered in other ways. Having eaten nothing but canned meat for four years, he refused to eat it for the rest of his life.

He wasn’t tall, but he was strong — the type who’d help you build a house, and pose for a commemorative photo flexing his muscles. His wife was the more talkative one, but Chafe always made time for his grandsons, and would sometimes tell them lighter stories about the trenches. Like the time they had a huge cheese wheel and rolled it down the planks inside the trenches so each soldier could tear off a hunk to eat.

Molho has a treasure trove of his grandfather’s things, but wishes he knew more about his war experience. “I didn’t pry hard enough,” he says. “After he passed away, I was so sad I didn’t have more of the story.”

Chafe had always loved to tell the tale of the silver bell in the old Belgian town of Ypres. A church had been destroyed in the blasts, and three of its bells were lying in the rubble. Two were too heavy to move, but Chafe and his chums buried the smaller one, hoping to dig it up for the parishioners after the war. He wanted to return, but never did, dying in the late 1970s.

“He always said to me, you have to go back there one day,” Molho says. “I said hell, I don’t know where to start looking.”

The man who died

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Mark LaVigne is making polite conversation when the email finally arrives in his inbox. “Oh, here we go,” he says clicking on the attachment that will show him his great-uncle’s signature in a French cave.

“So, are you still liking — wow, look at this” he says, drawing in his breath and forgetting the small talk in his Aurora home. “Lorne J. Hunter … It’s just so extraordinary. I feel like I could touch it.”

More than a century ago, Lorne Hunter was young, vital and keen — a poster boy for the Canadian war effort. He was the “best all around man” at the Montreal Athletic Association, amateur boxing champion, winner of a silver cup for boating. Hunter was a bank clerk in Montreal, with fair skin, hazel eyes and two noticeable moles — one on the back of his neck, and one above his right kidney — when he signed up for war just as soon as he could, in September 1914.

By summer 1916 Hunter was serving with the 49th battalion, where his brother Walter was a sergeant in the bombing section. LaVigne says the family story is that Walter thought his younger brother would be safer with him.

When they left the front lines of the Somme battlefield for a short rest on Oct. 3, the weather was cold and wet, and the men were very tired, but Lorne was drawn to this spot in the woods, some 45 kilometres away from their billets.

Maybe it was a day trip to shake off the war; perhaps it was a need to leave a trace of his existence. It must have felt safe in the dark cavern, away from the bombs, the bullets, the cold, the driving rain. He signed his name with the carbon pencil and returned to the war on Oct. 7, lying in wait, preparing to attack the German-held Regina Trench at dawn the next day.

In the dark morning of Oct. 8, a cold rain fell, and the artillery pounded the enemy for eight minutes, trying to wipe out their machine-gun posts and tear through the barbed wire in no man’s land. When the artillery stopped, Hunter climbed out of the trenches and walked into a blizzard of machine-gun fire alongside his friends.

Official records paint a bleak picture of what came next, when the battalion was “severely handled by the enemy.” Those who made it to the German trenches were “seen no more.” Some men tucked their bodies into shell craters to survive until darkness. No advance was made. When the battalion was relieved, nearly half the men in the charge had been killed or wounded. Lorne Hunter — champion boxer, best all-around athlete, “not a better-liked man in France,” according to his brother — was dead.

In all the chaos of the failed attack, the officials had no information on how he was killed, only “trenches north of Courcelette” noted on his official death card. His name is inscribed on Canada’s Vimy Ridge monument, where all of the lost soldiers killed in France are honoured.

“You no doubt know by this time all about poor Lorne being killed. I can not begin to tell you how bad I feel,” Walter wrote his parents. “Well mother dear and dad I suppose this will just about break your heart but please remember he was killed in a charge. He had gone right up to the German parapet when a bullet hit him the throat. He never knew anything about it. He was just hit and fell. Never suffered one bit.” Lorne’s death devastated his family, who had moved to Edmonton before the war.

Hunter’s younger sister Edna, only 13, “never really fully recovered from his death,” her granddaughter Shannon O’Byrne says from Edmonton.

In practised script, Edna wrote a poem about her brother soon after his death:

“Those poor and innocent creatures, / Must all be taken away. / O when will this terrible battle end? / O heavens won’t somebody say? / Lorne was one of our gallant lads / Who was trying hard for fame / He was what we call a soldier / But O God, he had to be slain!”

Her words, written a lifetime ago, are scanned into a PDF file and sent across the ocean, to France, to Prilaux’s inbox.

“The poem is a pure moment of emotion,” he writes back. “Thank you for sharing.”

Message in a bottle

Prilaux says that in the past 10 years in France, as interest in the centenary of the First World War grows, people have taken a second look at the graffiti on the walls of their town, and underground in caves.

When ER doctor Jeff Gusky has time off, he travels from his home in Texas to the lonely fields and caves of the Western Front, documenting the hidden side of the war. “I feel this sense of mission, of bringing to life these guys who just wanted to be known,” he says. “They were writing messages to the future.”

This past winter, he took photographs of close to 2,000 names, the majority Australian, in the “Underground City” of Naours, an extensive network of chalk quarries near Lanches-Saint-Hilaire.

On Friday, he had just returned from photographing the names of 829 soldiers, including an estimated 500 Canadians, in a cave in Bouzincourt, a village in the Somme was very close to the front line in 1916. Gusky says it is the largest collection of Canadian graffiti he has seen on the front.

“It changes everything when you realize that this was the last record of them ever being alive,” he says of the men who died in battle. “For me, it’s like a responsibility when I’m down there to capture every name, even if it’s in a part of the (cave) system that’s a bit treacherous to go into.”

Prilaux, who was also involved in the Naours discovery, spotting the graffiti as he worked to determine the age of the site, has tracked down a great-grandson of one of the Australian soldiers. He and the relative are working with two Australian middle schools to research the names of the other soldiers, and Prilaux would like to team up with a Canadian school as well.

In Lanches-Saint-Hilaire, Prilaux plans to photograph all the names, and then access to the cave must be closed because it is too dangerous. He says he would gladly show the inscriptions to the descendants of the soldiers, should they make the journey to France.

“Thank him personally for me,” LaVigne says from his home in Aurora, where Great-Uncle Lorne is framed on the wall, frozen in his 20s while his relatives age in the photos around him. “That kind of stuff, it means a lot. These archeologists are the unsung heroes.”

When LaVigne was a teenager, he used to think he was adopted — typical teenage angst. Then he saw Lorne Hunter’s photo and recognized himself. He has kept the photo with him — but as he grew older, the likeness became blurrier.

It’s noon, and LaVigne’s youngest son, Keegan, is still sleeping, having worked late last night.

“Wait till you see him — he looks just like him,” LaVigne says.

And sure enough, when the 16-year-old comes downstairs to say nice to meet you, he smiles with the same square jawline and the same eyes as the soldier who wrote his name in a cave before he was killed.

Other stories

Among the other Canadian names found in the cave:

David Watson

Signed his name on Oct. 4, 1916. Born in Scotland, he immigrated to Canada with his parents, who settled in Quebec. He was a 26-year-old granite cutter and was single, when he enlisted on Nov. 3, 1914. He survived the war and died in 1940 in Montreal — by this time married. No other? information is listed about the cause of his death.

Peter St. Don

St. Don was an older soldier, 38 when he signed up. Born in Quebec, St. Don was not married, and earned his living as a shoemaker. He signed up in Regina on July 28, 1915. He had a dark complexion, with black hair and hazel eyes, and tattoos on both forearms. He died in Vancouver in 1954 and is buried in a soldier’s plot in the city’s only cemetery, Mountain View.

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