www.militarysupport.ca 123 By John Goheen For the last twenty-five years, I have led groups of Canadians on Pilgrimages of Remembrance for the Royal Canadian Legion. These tours are designed to show Canadians the sites of sacrifice, meaning, and remembrance in France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany. A key aspect of these pilgrimages are visits to the Commonwealth War Grave Commission Cemeteries and memorials to the missing. In France alone there are 2945 Commonwealth cemeteries with another 625 in Belgium, and 476 in Holland. Of course, there is no way we can visit all these places; when you consider the sheer number of headstones in all those cemeteries, the scale of loss is staggering. But then each cemetery is made up of individual headstones and each headstone has its own story of sadness, courage, and suffering. As I walk along any row of headstones in any cemetery, I am always mindful that each headstone represents an individual, someone who had friends and family, someone who was loved and grieved and missed. The least I can do is read the name etched on the stone. I wish I knew their stories. More than a few times I have seen this inscription on a headstone, “To the world he was one, to us he was the world.” That person beneath a single headstone amongst hundreds and sometimes thousands of others meant everything to someone. It reminds me of McCrae’s line, “loved and were loved, and now we lie in Flanders’ Fields.” Every Headstone has a story
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