2005: A day 'On the Somme'.

Hot day. I’ve been in an air conditioned car and the heat knocks me over when I step out. Golden wheat shimmering as it undulates towards Thiepval. I’m on the Albert-Bapaume Road near Pozieres, France. It’s the road my grandfather Steel marched along in October and November, 1916. I imagine that he would have wished for this heat. Instead it was wet and cold.

I promised myself some thirty or so years ago that someday I would walk the Albert-Bapaume Rd. and stop at Pozieres where grandfather first entered the trenches when his battalion (46th South Saskatchewan Battalion) was moved to The Somme. Years ago Jim Broomhead, an old 46th vet who knew my grandfather, wrote me of is experience on entering that trench near Pozieres:

“I got my first glimpse of death and its stench at Poziers [sic]. The dead had not been removed, and they were piled three deep. What an awful site! At about Poziers we marched in single file about five yards apart. Now we came to the trench [Candy Trench]. God forbid anybody from seeing what I saw. Our barbed wire was fairly well intact, but it hung full of dead Canadians and Germans, like birds on telephone wires. The parapet had been built up, but you couldn’t avoid the arms and legs that were sticking out of it.”

Jim Broomhead had been twenty years old when he stepped into Candy Trench.

There are no dead along the Albert-Bapaume Road today. Periodically a car swishes by. Occupants totally void of any thoughts of those horrid scenes. Why shouldn’t they be. Time has marched on; like the ghosts of 1916.

I ask my friend to give me a few moments to myself. I wanted to walk with grandfather and Jim – just a few yards; just 89 years ago. . . .

Off in the distant on my right as I walk toward Albert is the Thiepval Memorial, a huge shrine to Ulster’s dead who have no known grave. To my left, several acres of turnips. I glance down. A chunk of steel catches my eye. “No turnip, that,” I say to grandfather and Jim.

I reach down; give it a tug. Another tug; a wriggle; out it comes -- a three pound chunk of a British 18 pounder artillery projectile. Judging from the area where I dug it up it had to be fired the week before, or the day of, July, 1st, 1916. It has been waiting for me, and only me, for 89 years.

I doubt the turnip patch was producing turnips when grandfather and Jim marched by. I have picked up one of the seeds they were sowing.

I slide back into the air conditioned car. “What’s that?” my friend asks, pointing to my chunk of steel. “Something grandfather left for me,” say I.

We head up the road to Bapaume.