Joan Goudie quietly traces the name Edward Morris, one of several uncles who had served in the Royal Newfoundland Regiment. She has long wanted to come here and her expression, wistful yet proud, speaks volumes.

Helen Storms thinks she’s the first family member to visit the grave of her great-uncle, Pte. George Caile, killed in 1916, aged 20. She has printed off information from the Canada Remembers section of the Veterans Affairs website and finds the marker in the Pozières British Cemetery. The graveyard is enclosed by the Pozières Memorial, which recalls 14,000 men of the United Kingdom and 300 South Africans who died at Somme between March and August 1918 and have no known resting place.

At the In Flanders Field Museum in Ypres, Belgium, visitors are given an identity and follow this adopted personality through the war experience. Memorable too, is a simple display where two poems are given voice – John McCrae’s beautifully rendered “In Flanders Fields” and the horror of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” a bitter description of death by gas.

Before the tour departs for the Normandy beaches, we lunch at the Café De Dreve at Zonnebeke near the Polygon Wood battle site and watch a startling video of the tunnels our host Johan Vanderwalle has been excavating for many years. Constructed during the Great War, these tunnels still run for kilometres beneath the Belgian countryside.

The second part of our journey explores Second World War sites. We discover even in April, French weekenders land sailing on Juno Beach at Courseulles-sur-mer. Their colourful sails scudding across the sand are a peaceful declaration that the Canadians who died there on D-Day, June 6, 1944, fought and won their freedom.

Tragically, only three years after the opening of the Vimy Memorial, the world was once again at war.

© Copyright November 2007 CARP magazine