In Remembrance - Glimpses of the Past with Karen Webster

Passchendaele, Belgium, October 26, 1917

 

Bob looked around him in the misty morning. It had rained hard again last night and the mud was unbelievable. This part of Belgium was so different from his home in Morris Township on Concession 8 South. There, he farmed with his widowed father, John. How Bob longed to be seeing the orderly fields of home rather than this quagmire formed by constant shelling, ruination of the drainage system and persistent rains. The British, Australians and New Zealanders had tried to wrest this place called Passchendaele from the Germans, but to no avail. Now, General Arthur Currie and his Canadians were here to do their best to capture this patch of hell. 

 

At the age of 37 and unmarried, Bob strove to do his part in the conflict and enlisted in Brussels in March of 1916. He became Private Robert Lawson, #654677 of the 161st Huron Battalion, receiving his training in Brussels, London and Camp Borden. 
After sailing to England on the Lapland, he received more training before being reassigned to the 58th Battalion to augment its strength after seeing much action in France.

 

Throughout his training, Bob made sure to write to friends and relatives weekly. He found comfort in the fact that two other Brussels-area lads, namely Nelson Agar and Scott Ament, along with George Inglis from up Clifford way, were part of his unit
That damp morning, Bob shook his head to dismiss thoughts of home and turned his attention back to the present day. There was little comfort from the food served for breakfast; everything smelled and tasted like the ever-present mud. The mud clogged up rifles and made movement very difficult. 

 

Bob was part of a group assigned to advance on Oct. 26. When the Germans started to attack, Bob, Agar and another man sought shelter in a shell hole, but there was no protection there, and, with the next shell incoming, Agar was the last person to see Bob Lawson alive.

 

Morris Township, November 1917 to January 1918.

 

Back at home in Huron County, 76-year-old John Lawson received the dreaded news that his son was missing in action. What an awful time for the family that included older brother James, and sisters Maggie and Nettie. 

 

The bleak late fall months dragged on with no news about Bob. It was a time of hope for good news, but a dread that Bob was gone. Then, in early January, 1918, from his hospital bed in Bath, England, George Inglis wrote to Nettie Lawson Kearney to give his perspective of what occurred on Oct. 26. We “got along fine but the Company to our left was held up and started to retire... we began to go back… Bob got back 100 yards… but I got hit and do not know where Bob went… I don’t think he could be taken prisoner as he got back quite a distance.”

 

Eventually, on Dec. 17, 1917, the war office changed the status of Pte. Robert Lawson from Missing in Action to Killed in Action, however, this news did not reach the Lawsons until late January, 1918. 

 

Because there was no information available on a gravesite, Lawson was memorialized on Menin Gate. The inscription on the gate states, “To the armies of the British Empire who stood here 1914-1918 and to those of their dead who have no known grave.” This is a monument erected in Ypres (Ieper) Belgium that is engraved with almost 55,000 names of the soldiers with no known gravesite and among them are almost 7,000 names of Canadians. Each evening, at 8 p.m. all traffic is blocked from passing through the gate and a ceremony, including the Last Post, takes place.

 

Belgium, 2000s

 

A century after the Great War, the Memorial Museum Passchendaele (MMP) teamed up with Library and Archives Canada to digitize records from World War I. Simon Augustyn is a historian and researcher at MMP and he reports that, in the process of sorting through the material, the team came upon records that show the wartime burial locations of almost 1,400 Canadian soldiers who were thought to have gone missing in Flanders. A project called “Names in the Landscape” seeks to identify the men buried in the Passchendaele area and to connect with family members in Canada. It is the hope that those who are buried there can be remembered with photos and other artifacts that would make these people more than a name.

 

The Royal Canadian Legion in Blyth received a letter asking for help in locating the whereabouts of relatives of Pte. Lawson. Ric McBurney turned the task over to the Blyth Repository of History and their next step was to contact Jo-Ann McDonald of the Brussels Legion, who, in turn, indicated that Leanne Armstrong might be of assistance. Leanne is the triple-great-niece of Robert Lawson and she has been able to forward some information and memorabilia to the Memorial Museum Passchendaele at Zonnebeke, Flanders, Belgium.

 

The people of Passchendaele seek to honour the fallen who gave their lives while saving their land, making the words of the poem “For the Fallen” by Laurence Binyon ring true.

 

“At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.”