You may recall my sharing the story of my grandfather’s capture during WW1. My father and mother traveled to France approx 15 years ago so my father could retrace his father’s journey post capture with the help of a guide to Normandy, Colonel Warman (no kidding) that dad found on the Internet. Col Warman was very helpful indeed.

My parents decided to settle for a bit in Amiens. They found a small hotel and through my father’s inquiries discovered that in the area remnants of WW1 trenches remained. Dad met a young man who had served as a consultant for a British TV series about the trenches so he left mom with a book and a cuppa and toured with this young man. There he found that the trenches are not complete any longer but certainly conveyed the damp, sloughing sides that would have been the only safety available to those during combat. The young man took my father to the Canadian Memorial commemorating Vimy Ridge, the graceful, white statue of Mother Canada, weeping at the senselessness and tragedy of such profound loss to all. That was very poignant for my father; he cannot speak of it now without tears.


There were several places dad wanted to visit: Lille, Bethune, Lens and Tramacourt from which my grandfather had taken off the morning he was shot down. Dad has a photo of himself standing near the little station from which my grandfather disembarked by train under guard to Lille. In Bethune, there was a church tower that survived all sorts of battering and served as a reference point for Canadian and British patrols that went up and down from Belgium through Arras and on down to the battle site outside Paris where the French and Germans fought using shells the size of VW’s.
 
When my father arrived at the Citadel he employed his finest high school French to explain to the sergeant that his father had been a prisoner here and had carved his initials into a windowsill. The sergeant led my father, diary in hand, up steps and through the guard gate, down a long dark, cool corridor and through a doorway into the courtyard where dad saw 12 identical stone 3 storey buildings with many hallways lined with row upon row of windows on both sides. The sergeant was truly sympathetic but with a wave of his arm indicated that there was no real hope of finding my grandfather’s initials.
 
Down but not out, dad then went to a tiny nearby airfield to see if he could charter a small plane to see the site over Estevelles where his father had crash-landed. It was dusk on a warm summer’s evening and the airport was closed. My father wished to fly in the same column of air that his father had flown in from Bethune to Lens. A caretaker who spoke English explained that the pilots had gone home for the evening but that down the road there was a photographer who was a pilot. The Taxi driver rushed to the photographer’s house and explained dad’s story and the photographer said, “Bien sur!” So up the three of them excitedly floated in the photographer’s Cessna 180 to fulfill this dream of my father’s. The photographer asked my father if he had ever flown and my father replied that he had had a pilot’s license years before so with a glance at the chart, a suggestion to roughly follow the canal that runs along under my grandfather’s route, the coordinates were sited and my father took the controls and flew, just as his father had done, over the green fields into the softening blue sky on a very different mission, one of love this time, doing 760 degrees up there with his father.
 
The photographer asked for my father’s address and sent him an aerial photo of the Citadel and surrounds, which he treasures, as he does his poppy. Thank you all so very much for bringing the Tower of London tribute to my attention, it has made my father very happy indeed. When I showed him this photo he said, “who is that old man trying to sell you a poppy?” He’s my old man. And I love him.