Remembering Uncle Donald

This is another catch up sort of blog...one of those I’ve been intending to get around to.

After our 6 months ( with a break back in England for hospital visits and Le Tour’s Yorkshire depart ) in Caunes, we drove back via some WW1 war graves.

2nd Lieutenant Donald Barten, Royal Fusiliers.

We have often intended to but somehow flying south has seemed a better option than driving, or the motorway exit we needed was closed, or time was just running out. Anyway, this time, we made it.

Our main aim was to find Mark’s great uncle Donald’s memorial. We knew there was no grave for him. He was involved in the Battle of Cambrai, and his body was never recovered or never identified amongst the thousands who died there in  November and December 1917.

We found it easily, on the edge of the village of Louverval.

It was a grey droukit sort of day. The rain was fine, and drenching, the clouds loomed and we both felt fairly subdued as we parked the car just next to the Cambrai Memorial.

It is not one of the huge Lutyens designed memorials, and  is not surrounded by hundreds of rows of symmetrical graves which remind you of the outrageous number of dead young men lie beneath the ground in this part of France.

It was small, elegant, beautifully maintained, sombre and incredibly emotional.

We were the only people there. However, messages written in a book at the entrance indicated that people had visited that day, and the day before. When we finally drove away, we saw another car draw up, and clearly other people were visiting after us.

We found Uncle Donald’s name on the wall. We left his picture and an entry in the visitors’ book to mark our thoughts, and we wandered among the few surrounding graves in the , by now, pouring rain. 

Donald Barten was a Second Lieutenant in the 8th Royal Fusiliers when he was reported missing on 30th November 1917. He was 28. His body was never recovered and a year later his mother was informed that he had probably died on the day that he was reported missing.

An exert from the war diary, indicating that Donald Barten, among others, was missing.

He had served in France in 1914, in Egypt in 1915. and back to France in 1916.

Uncle Donald, on leave, back at home in August 1917.

From the memorial site, all you could see were miles of flat, agricultural land. It was easy to imagine what had happened in these fields, based on all the films we’ve all seen, books we’ve all read, and poetry we all know. However, the sombre dignity of the place still took us by surprise.

We drove through some of the villages nearby, hardly architecturally changed in the last 100 years. We stopped at a few other small cemeteries and memorials. We knew about the big cemeteries, and the Lutyen’s Somme Memorial, with over 70,000 names of unidentified dead honoured...but somehow, these small spaces, littering the farmers’ fields, clearly making turning tractors more difficult, and needing pathways and roads across fields for visitors like us, were just incredibly poignant.

I had just read “Empires of the Dead” by David Crane, which is about the man who is largely responsible for the building of the British and Commonwealth war cemeteries.

 Fabian Ware had been a volunteer ambulance commander in France in the early years of the Great War, and was horrified by the way the war dead were left on battlefields, or unceremoniously buried where they fell, in 1914. He began to record the identity and position of graves and was responsible for the establishment of a Graves registration Commission. His work, in getting politicians, the army, writers and architects together finally meant that people were able to honour and commemorate the war dead.

It is an interesting read, but really brought to life by our visit to Cambrai.

( Thanks to Julian Barnard's web site, commemorating Uncle Donald's life)  http://www.julianbarnard.co.uk/1Donald_Barten/Barten-Cambrai-.htm )