Catharsis on a Page

        On the evening of Saturday 16th September 2023, a commemoration service, organised by De Geschiedkundige Vereniging van Markebeke, was held at the graveside of Private James H. Birtwell DCM. Birtwell’s is the only Commonwealth War Grave in the village cemetery of Marke, in Flanders, Belgium. He was killed on October 20, 1918, as the result of a boobytrap left behind by the Germans as they fled before the advance of the 17th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers.  

        Standing in front of Birtwell’s headstone, I allow myself a smile. It seems odd to have fond memories of a cemetery. This place is so familiar to me. It’s the only constant in my life.  
 
*** 
 
        I moved to Belgium in September 1972 as my father was to set up the Benelux division of Pickford's International. Within a month, I was learning a new language, settling into a class, and making new friends. I was five years old.

        I only vaguely remember coming back from school that October day. My mother has told the story to so many people that I am no longer sure what is my memory or her tale. It seems that I was excited to share the news that soon there was to be a day off school. There was to be a public holiday. On 2nd November, people would be going to the cemetery to place flowers on family graves. Of course, having newly arrived, and being the only Brits in the village, we had no relatives buried there. My father carried out some research and discovered there was actually one British First World War soldier buried there. This was strange, as most of the war dead are remembered in large Commonwealth War Grave Commission (CWGC) cemeteries. So, although my family was from Yorkshire, we decided to adopt the Lancashire Fusilier and honour his memory.  

         On that first 2nd November, I went along with my own bouquet of chrysanthemums clutched tightly in my hands. I remember it being a sunny day. But then, aren’t all childhood days? 

        We continued to visit Birtwell’s grave regularly. My father had always had an interest in the First World War. Ieper is only twenty-four miles away from Marke and so he would often take us on trips to visit local WWI sites. It seemed perfectly normal to me for two little girls to grow up, crawling in and out of the trenches of Flanders. Doesn’t everyone? 

        On 4th August 1976, our lives changed forever. My father was killed in a car crash. He was 34 years old. The grief I felt then is still crushing. How can a nine-year-old process the loss of her rock? It is only now, as a parent myself, that I can begin to appreciate what my mother must have gone through that summer’s day nearly fifty years ago as well. We'd just moved to the other side of Belgium four days earlier. How my mother managed in a foreign country and in Flemish and French, I still really have no idea. When I asked her, she said she just went through the necessary motions, knowing she had to take care of my sister and me. One of the first things she did, was to move back to Marke where at least she knew people and had the support of friends. In a brief time, my little sister and I were back in our old familiar school, and my father had been reburied in the local cemetery too. 

        So now there were two graves to visit in November. 

        Because the family were such regular visitors to Birtwell’s grave, we had become known to the CWGC people who tended his grave. When the organisation learnt that my father was be buried in the same cemetery as Birtwell, they kindly offered an offcut of Portland stone which could not be used for military graves. My father’s stone, unlike the military ones, is smaller, thinner, and not rounded at the top. But now James Birtwell and Peter Baskill are bound together for all eternity.  

        In 1979 we moved back to UK and now aged eleven, I started research on ‘my’ soldier. At this stage, the only information I had was that which my father had discovered. Birtwell had died at the castle in Marke after his battalion had liberated the village the previous day. The retreating Germans had placed live ammunition in the stove used to warm the offices of the battalion. Birtwell had gone to the temporary HQ, to ask for leave as he wanted to tell his parents that he intended becoming a professional soldier rather than just being part of Kitchener’s Army. The stove was lit. Birtwell was killed outright. No one else was injured. 

        As I had absolutely no idea how to set about researching a long dead soldier, I wrote to the Ministry of Defence and received a vast collection of forms to complete, specifying my relationship to Birtwell, his family details etc. All so that they might give me the details for which they asked in the forms. Pointless. 

        My first real breakthrough came when, aged fifteen, I wrote to The Fusiliers Museum in Bury. They sent me copies of Birtwell’s Distinguished Conduct Medal citation which was in the official regimental diary. He had earned his medal for being a runner on The Somme. In the days of fractured communications, it was the runner’s job to take messages back and forth from the front line often under heavy fire. Due to the constant bombardments, information often could not be transmitted over the broken telephone wires. 

        With the advent of the internet and my return from many years living overseas, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, I once more devoted time to my search for Birtwell.  

        James Howarth Birtwell, one of six brothers, had volunteered in January 1915, aged eighteen. As he was less than five foot two inches tall, he joined a Bantam Unit, and was assigned to the 17th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers. I was interested to note that J.R.R. Tolkien, one of my father’s favourite authors, had been a Signals Officer in the 11th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers. I like to create links, however tenuous. I wonder if he and Birtwell ever met. Unlikely, but fun to imagine. 

        In 2016, I visited the Somme on a bitterly cold weekend in February. My destination was the Sunken Lane. I’d seen Geoffrey Malins’ 1916 footage of The Battle of the Somme many times. Malins’ reels are some of the only pieces of contemporary film that exist. I knew My Boy was not among those on the film - it’s the wrong battalion. Birtwell’s battalion was further to the East. However, I still search for faces he might have known. 

        The whole area of the Somme is gripping. There is something inexplicable that happens when one stands in that terrain. Even when all around is quiet, it’s as if you can hear the guns, feel the mud grabbing at your boots and smell the long-evaporated stench of bloated corpses and gas in the mist all around you. On this particular day, after leaving Sunken Road, I headed to Serre Road Cemetery No. 2, where the tranquillity returned. The only sound I heard was a cockerel sounding off in the distance. There were no other visitors there that weekend. Just me and a bird to remember the dead. 
 
*** 
 
        2018 was an important year for World War One, as it marked the centenary of the armistice. But for me, it was also Birtwell’s centenary. By this stage, I’d learnt a fair bit about his actions on the battlefield, but still felt no closer to knowing Birtwell the man. Or boy. I had celebrated my fiftieth birthday the year before, and My Boy now, seems ever a lad to me. 

        I’m still surprised at how it was in that auspicious year that the pieces of Birtwell’s puzzle truly began to fit together. I’d contacted the Clitheroe Town Hall as this was the town from which Birtwell came. After just one email to their Civic Society Archivist, information started to flow. Next came one of the most remarkable phone calls in my search. 

        “Hello. My name is Sarah Snow and for the past forty-six years I have been visiting the grave of your great-uncle.” Well, that was one way to start a conversation. 

        “Oh. That’s amazing. My grandfather was Jimmy’s eldest brother, William.” said Janet. “I actually still live in his family’s home.”  

        Our first conversation went on for over an hour. It was at this point that we hatched a plan to go to Belgium to visit the grave together. We’d never met. We didn’t know each other and yet we both knew that this bond over a long dead soldier was enough to make this work. 

        We arrived at the cemetery in the morning of 20 October 2018. As I went through the entrance gates, the first thing I noticed was the grassed over empty space on the left. ‘How odd. Surely this was where the oldest, most established graves were?’ Then I remembered. Graves in Belgium only have a fifty-year tenancy, after which, if the tenancy is not renewed, the graves are removed, the bodies are reburied in an ossuary and the spaces are re-let to others. Grave space, in this small country, is at a premium. 

        I crunched my way past the silent who line the central gravel path. Row on row they lie. This is a community cemetery, without the uniformity of markers that can be found in a military burial site. The highly decorative rub shoulder with the plain. The marble creations nestle snuggly next to the granite. 

        When I came here at the beginning, I knew only the living. This time, there were too many familiar names in this place. Still, as always, I visited him first. On the right, I finally came to the row of crosses. I walked past the “Gesneuvelde” and the “Mort pour la Patrie” the local dead of The Second World War, until I arrived at his solitary Portland stone marker. I reached down and re-arranged the flowers I had ordered to be delivered. ‘When was the last time I had come here on a day the local florist was actually open?’ 

        I lifted my head, and my eyes automatically went to the stone just two rows further back. My father. I am now also so much older than he will ever be. 

        I stood with my small poppy cross, poised to set it at the head of Birtwell’s grave. A tear slid down my cheek. I hoped no one saw it, or that if they did, they would attribute it to my ‘leaky eye’ - damned stroke. ‘Reveille.’ Time to place my cross. I looked down at the stone. So familiar. I’ve been coming here since I was five years old. By then, Birtwell had already been dead for over half a century. He remains forever twenty-two. 

        This is one soldier who will not be forgotten. Now that I am more than twice the age of Birtwell, I know that he will always be ‘my soldier, My Boy.’ Although I’m aware that CWGC look after him, still I swept away the green from the headstone with the brush I’d brought along, as I do every visit. 

        Standing at the grave, I thought of the piles of notes, papers and photographs crammed into the file in my study. It has taken me over forty years to get this far and I still have more to learn about Private James Howarth Birtwell, DCM. It’s a shame his brothers never knew he was cared for. At least now, his great niece does. 
 
*** 
 
        Five years further on and here we both are, once more. I’ve returned to Marke with Janet. This time we will follow in Birtwell’s footsteps as we journey by minibus from The Somme to his final resting place. Looking at our fellow travellers more closely, they all seem over the age of seventy. I feel strangely young but am saddened that no one my age is interested in these events. Too long ago. It is always so. 

        As we are driven across the flat open countryside of Flanders and into Northern France, the scars of a conflict which took place over one hundred years ago, are still plain to see. Shell holes and old trench systems are clearly visible and the closer we get to our destination, the more numerous they become. “What would the soldiers think of the brown signs marking the places where they spilled their blood. And for what?” I think as I stare out of the minibus window. “Within thirty years these same fields were once more the scene of vicious fighting. What a waste.” The concrete bunkers of the Second World War vie with the trenches of the first for the visitors’ attention. 

        The drive from Marke to our first stop, Martinsart, takes less than two hours. It took Birtwell two years to get from this French village to Belgium. Our route is smooth on the newly paved motorway. “How much did he have to struggle through mud and desolation? What awful scenes must have repeated themselves as wave after wave of attack and retreat changed so little in the actual battle?” They must surely have left an impact on this young Lancashire lad from Clitheroe. Although none of his letters survive, Janet has photocopied a printed Christmas card Birtwell sent back to the family. In the few words he wrote, only love of family shines through. 

        I know, of course, that not every day was horror. I have done enough research by now to be fully informed of the battalion’s movements, having read numerous war diaries multiple times. With each reading, I’m desperate to find any mention of Birtwell; a small aside, a brief line or quip. Just something to make him more of a person to me. 

        Janet can only tell me so much. From the photographs is it clear that My Boy, Jimmy, greatly resembled his older brother. But still, I want to know more; His favourite colour, his likes and dislikes, the usual trivia which makes up a personality. 

        My musings are brought up short when the minibus stops at Martinsart CWGC Cemetery, where many Lancashire Fusiliers lie buried. I help Janet get off the bus and we start exploring the cemetery together. 

        “I’ve never seen red gravestones in a CWGC cemetery before,” says Janet. And in truth neither have I. 
        “The red sandstone was used as an alternative in an experiment in the 1980s as there was a shortage of Portland stone at that time.” I’m pleased that I’d done some research before our trip. 

        This area was close to the Allied front line in September 1916 and after hearing about several of Birtwell’s companions, we are driven to Guillemont Road Cemetery where Private F. Starkie, Birtwell’s friend is buried. He died during a night patrol ambush in the area. Of the 2,263 burials here, Starkie lies in one of only 744 identified graves. The remainder are unknown. What must it have been like for a young man, used to life in Clitheroe, to witness the dreadful hell that was this now peaceful part of France? Everywhere I look, memories of a past I have not lived, are evident. 

         Next on our itinerary is the place where Birtwell saw the action for which he was awarded his Distinguished Conduct Medal. Because of his small stature, Birtwell was an ideal runner. He would cross over the many craters and obstacles lying between the French and British armies and convey messages securely between his battalion and the troops fighting by their side. I find the reason for his medal a bit overwhelming, as I’m fully aware that the average life expectancy for a runner on The Somme was only six months. Standing in this peaceful field, with the thicket and wood to the left, it is hard to imagine the horrific conditions which he not only had to endure, but also survive. The irony of his death, in a place where he should have been safe, seems even more wasteful when he managed to survive some of the worst battles of the war.   

        Lochnagar is the final stop of the day before we are driven back across the border, towards Marke and the evening’s ceremony. My fellow travellers are quieter now. Is this due to tiredness or have they also been impacted by all they have seen and heard today? 

        Although Marke is a small village of about 8,000, they do My Boy proud. The Baron de Béthune, at whose château Birtwell met his end, lays a wreath of white flowers as do the representatives of the city of Kortrijk. The local equivalent of the Royal Legion is also represented and the last wreaths to be laid are by Janet and me. A bagpiper, not something you usually see in Marke, plays a lament before the Last Post is sounded on a bugle. The notes are still echoing as people bow their heads in remembrance. 

        I always find WWI commemorations emotional, and this one is no exception. As I glance over to where my father lies buried, I wonder how many more times I’ll be visiting this area, a place so entwined with my past. The future seems more uncertain as the fifty years of my father’s grave ownership will soon end. What to do? Mum is now 83 and living in Cornwall. She wants my father buried with her. Do we take him there or bring her here? There may well be a corner of some foreign field that is forever England, but, for my father, perhaps, it will no longer be in Marke. 

.

Sarah-Helen Snow has always had a fascination with World War I. She wishes to remember the lives of those who sacrificed all. As well as remembering the soldiers' lives, she also researches the lives of women who also served as VADs, medics and other personnel of all nations. Lest we forget.