There is a pretty cemetery in northeastern France, located about 90 minutes from Paris and a 10-minute drive from Vimy Ridge.
My great-grandfather, Pte. Edward John Clement, will spend eternity there.
He was a working man living in Collingwood with a wife, two children and another one on the way when he enlisted. After training on Salisbury Plain in England, he was soon in France and survived a little less than a year.
His service record is short with little more than details of his wounds in a gas attack in May 1918 that tell of grim life in the trenches.
He died a few days later.
About a week after his death, the Collingwood Enterprise-Bulletin ran a short obituary/tribute piece that provided background on his time in the community where many of his descendants still reside.
Incredibly, that unborn child, my Auntie Marg, died exactly 100 years after him – plus one day.
I still recall visiting her shortly after her 100th birthday at a Collingwood seniors residence, where she matter-of-factly told my young son, while gesturing toward me, about how “my father was killed in the war. I didn’t know him.”
Pte. Clement, who was known by John to his family, left a single living memory with his children. It was twice told to me by my grandmother, Edna, his eldest child. He also had a son, John.
My grandmother was perhaps four or five years old and was at his side as he prepared food in the family kitchen. She attempted to grab a bit of cheese from the counter about her eye-height, but he playfully blocked her view. The second time she told me of that sole memory, she recalled he smiled at her as he did it.
Her mother, Elizabeth Clement-MacDonald, was my great-grandmother and Pte, Clement’s widow. Their three shared children produced 13 grandchildren and about 30 great-grandchildren. Of those of us who survive, we are scattered far and wide in all sorts of stations in life.
If there is one enduring mercy granted Pte. Clement in his all-too-short life it was that he was able to start a family. The descendants detailed here were given a chance at life because of it.
The one underlying feeling that takes hold on the three occasions I’ve visited his grave, it’s that the soldiers that lie with him tended to be about a decade younger. He was 31; most soldiers in that cemetery died much younger. Some were teenagers.
The human cost and carnage of the First World War has been counted within a reasonable degree. What it is impossible to know is the lives not born.
My great-grandmother was a living testament to John Clement for the generations that followed him. She not only raised three kids largely on her own, but she also overcame a childhood in London’s East End ravaged by tuberculosis. The disease killed her mother and 11 of her 12 siblings.
Losing her husband was one of many tragedies and hardships she endured before living a long and fruitful life in Canada that stretched almost a hundred years.
She died a few weeks before her 99th birthday in 1986; nine months earlier, she had gifted me a Christmas card with $10 tucked inside. I suspect it was her way of saying goodbye, though I did manage one more visit with her.
My aunt was fond of telling stories of how my great-grandmother would turn up at Collingwood’s legion on Saturday nights well into her 80s. The legion is still a lively place on Saturday nights. Hockey Night in Canada would be on the television and she would often stay until its conclusion, a drink in hand, soaking in the atmosphere.
“She loved to watch young people dance,” my aunt would say.
Having lost her own dance partner more than half-a-century before, watching others rejoice in surroundings created to honour his memory was fun and gave her comfort.
And to remember.
Peter Robinson is a Barrie resident and staff reporter at BarrieToday.
