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Paying Our Respects on Foreign Fields
Getting out of Paris in a hired car and onto the ring road last Friday was a bit hectic, even though my brother-in-law Terry is used to driving on the right. For two hours we drove north-east, five of us, up the A1, past the road to the Somme, turned off and passed through Arras, and out into the expanse of open countryside.
The roads were well sign-posted. We turned off for the village of Ligny-St Flochel, whose old church appears to have tilted from the plumb, its limestone spire pock-marked as if by shells or gunfire, leaving nooks in which bickering crows were nesting. We took a fork to the left and after a few kilometres came upon a small, neatly kept cemetery of almost seven hundred graves. The day was bright but the wind was cold and cutting, leaving us sniffling as we buttoned up our coats.
We had the number of the grave – Plot II, Row F, Number 22 - and it took only a few minutes to find.
Robert James Davidson Conklin was the eldest of five from Toronto and was 18 when he enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1916 - though it was to be early 1918 before he was shipped to France, and April before he was sent to the front. Such was the rate of attrition that within days he was wounded by an artillery shell and hospitalised with injuries that could have allowed him to see out the war in a relatively cosy station in the rear. Instead, he argued to return to battle.
“This may seem foolish,” he wrote to his mother, “with me having a ‘bomb proof’ here, but, you know, misery loves company, so we may as well face the music together.”
Bob returned to the Western Front on 17 August, a week after the 100,000 strong Canadian Corps attacked and drove the Germans back a distance of thirteen kilometres. On 26 August his unit took part in the battle of Arras. They moved rapidly through the enemy’s outpost zone and reached the outskirts of Guemappe where they came under heavy shelling.
At an unknown hour Bob was shot and seriously injured and removed to a casualty clearing station where on 29 August he died of his wound. On 6 September, the day on which he would have been 21, his family received the telegram informing them of his death. He was one of 6,000 Canadians who lost their lives in three days of fighting, just five weeks before Germany sent out her first peace note.
Eerily, because of the delay of mail, the Conklin family kept receiving letters from Bob: “Give my love to all and don’t worry on my account…”; “…some day I’ll be able to say what I would like to, I think, if all goes well, and then there won’t be any need to close as follows. Well, my news is finished, so I’ll ring off. I will write mother in a few days. Love to all. Bob.”
I have a photograph of Bob Conklin in uniform – a copy of the one his parents proudly and lovingly displayed at home and which his brother and sisters also kept in their homes in memory of him. But there may well be footage of him in some forgotten archive because whilst training in England his battalion took part in the making of a propaganda film by the leading filmmaker of the day, D.W. Griffiths.
Bob and his comrades were filmed in a mock attack. He described it thus: “The Scouts and Signallers made a raid and we nearly all died beautifully in all manner of fashions on the way to the French front line. It was my place to try and run back and get shot in doing so.”
His family had treasured his postcards, letters, and his diary with his vows of love to his sweetheart, Isobel Howes, whom he planned to marry. They were passed down and I had these documents in my possession for a year, carefully handling them, and read them over and over again, undoubtedly as his proud parents had valued each word. I came to feel as if I knew something of him. I also met his youngest sister Isabel before her death at the age of 96 and this offered a palpable flesh and blood tie to an older generation.
Two photographs were found on him when he was killed. One is of his mother and his sisters Dorothy and Isabel feeding some chicks, taken in June 1918 on holiday on the shores of Lake Ontario. The other is of Isobel Howes. On the back of the photo she had written: ‘How do you like my “wedding” clothes?’
In 1919, Isobel, broken-hearted since Bob’s death a few months earlier, died in the Spanish influenza epidemic that swept Europe after the war.
My wife Leslie’s sister, Wendy, bent down and sprinkled over the small plot some earth she had brought from the grave of Bob’s mother and father in Toronto and took a little from Bob’s grave to bring back to Canada. Leslie buried beneath the soil a copy of the photograph of Isobel Howes in her “wedding” clothes.
Sheila, Leslie’s mother, was unable to speak. Here she was at the grave of her own mother’s adored brother - the first members of Bob’s family ever to visit Ligny-St Flochel.
Wendy’s husband, Terry, noticed a metal casket in a nearby wall. It contained weather-proofed notebooks detailing the names, ages and regiments of all the soldiers buried there who had died in trenches or crossing no man’s land in 1918. Another was for comments from visitors.The last entry was written back in December.
On 26 March 2004 Wendy entered into the notebook the simple message: “Sorry it took us so long to get here…thanks.”
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© 2007 Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison