The Last Post

This blog comes from Calais. The last few days have seen us travel from Hamburg to stay overnight in Nijmegen, thereby getting the bulk of our journey under our belt. Then on to the war grave cemetery at Bergen op Zoom, a visit to Antwerp and from there to Ypres. A short journey to Dunkirk and the 1940 Operation Dynamo museum took us back to Britain’s darkest hours of the war. We return home tomorrow on Le Shuttle so just a couple of highlights to end with:

The visit to the Bergen op Zoom Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery was once again a moving experience. I had been asked by a member of Highland Light Infantry Association web group if I could seek out the grave of a friend of his father who was killed on the first day of operations on the Scheldt estuary. Being about the 5th Battalion of the Glasgow Highlanders, I didn’t know much about the campaign to capture the port of Antwerp but it was as fierce a battle as any that my Dad’s 2nd Battalion had been involved in elsewhere. We found the grave, together with the last resting places of many other Scottish soldiers from the Glasgow, Seaforth and Cameronian Highlanders and many other regiments. There were also many RAF aircrew buried in the beautifully kept cemetery. I was pleased to be able to say a heartfelt thank you to a gardener who was responsible for their upkeep. So many short individual life stories which need to be told and which may never be. We will be for ever grateful for their sacrifice. We will never forget.

Lunch followed (the boy was getting famished) and a walk round Antwerp town centre, currently undergoing extensive renovation, but still looking impressive. We drove on towards Calais but had decided to take advantage of being in the Flanders region to go to Ypres. We arrive late afternoon, in time to see the Cloth Hall which was the backdrop to last year’s moving commemorations of the centenary of the end of WW1. We then join the many hundreds gathered at the Menin Gate to hear the ‘Last Post’ sounded as it has been every day since 1928. The names of the war dead of 1914-18 that ‘have no known grave’ are recorded on every wall of the Gate. The scale and the reach that the war had on the British Empire is enormous. Soldiers of Canadian, Australian, Indian and South African regiments are named alongside British soldiers, including Highland Light Infantry. It was an appropriate link between the sacrifice of Dad’s father’s generation with the sacrifice of the WW2 generation we have been retracing.

Postscript

The journey could not have happened without having first researched what Eric and the 2nd Battalion of the Glasgow Highlanders did. It led me to write up and self-publish his war story. Dad did not recount these events to me. Like so many of that war generation, he did not speak about what he did in wartime.

This journey has been very meaningful and is one I shall never forget. I have a far better understanding of the realities, landscapes and conditions of the campaign which Dad and the Glasgow Highlanders fought through Normandy, Belgium, Holland and Germany, 75 years ago.

It has been a great privilege and joy to share this also with Andrew, a grandson that Eric never knew but a grandfather that he certainly knows a lot more about now.

We hope that by reliving Eric’s journey with us, you too have paid tribute to the Glasgow Highlanders and all the soldiers whose wartime bravery brought us the freedom we enjoy today.

“At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them“