Remembrance Day

Wednesday, November 11, 1998

Canadians return 80 years later to remember Flanders fields

MONS, Belgium (CP) -- George Price, a Canadian soldier killed two minutes before the armistice ended the First World War, was honoured Wednesday by Allied forces before veterans from Canada entered Mons again, 80 years after liberating the city.

Fred Evans, a frail yet alert 101-year-old Canadian veteran, was wheeled into Mons' ornate Grand Place and laid a wreath under a bronze plaque commemorating the day the Canadians arrived -- Nov. 11, 1918.

"Here was fired the last shot of the Great War," the plaque reads. And Pte. Price, 25, was one of the last victims of four years of unprecedented bloodshed.

"It made it even more tragic that Private Price was killed by a sniper at 10:58, two minutes before the armistice," said Fred Mifflin, Canada's minister of veterans affairs.

Now Price lies buried in the third row of an unassuming plot at the nearby Saint Symphorien cemetery.

Illuminated by a milky, early-morning light coming in through the trees, Price's headstone briefly became an international centre of attention when Belgian Prince Laurent, Mifflin and Allied military officials stood at attention.

The Last Post was played by a solitary bugle. The headstone was fully covered in wreaths, including one from Price's sister.

The small group of Canadian veterans, many past 100, were nearing the end of a week-long tour of the battlefields of northern France and Belgium where they fought.

Evans, who lives in Summerville, N.B., took part in the 1918 Pursuit to Mons, as the Germans withdrew with the allies in hot pursuit.

He recalls walking into Mons on the day the armistice was signed. "It was nice to hear the shelling stop," Evans said. "We didn't dare rejoice too far."

Then, as now at Price's grave, silence dominated.

Of the 620,000 soldiers Canada sent to Europe, more than 66,000 died and nearly 173,000 were wounded.

Later Wednesday, some Canadians were on hand as the Queen and Belgian King Albert attended a ceremony at Menin Gate, a stone monumental arch inscribed with the names of 55,000 soldiers who died in the trenches near Ypres.

The area has been made famous by a poem by John McCrae, a Canadian soldier, after a friend was killed during a 1915 battle here. It begins with the memorable lines: "In Flanders fields the poppies blow, Between the crosses, row on row..."

As those assembled observed a minute of silence, thousands of poppy petals rained down from the cavernous gateway. The sun bathed the site in the last light of day.

In nearby Mesen, the Queen and Irish President Mary McAleese dedicated a monument to 50,000 Irishmen who died in the Great War.

The ceremonies capped a day of grand, poignant events that began in Paris under a bright blue sky.

At the stroke of 11, the Queen arrived at the Arc de Triomphe where she was greeted by President Jacques Chirac. Under the arch she laid a wreath by the eternal flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Then she attended the inauguration of a bronze statue of Winston Churchill on tbe banks of the Seine.

"Today is a supremely symbolic day, marking in many ways the end of this century. You will not see ceremonies like this next century," a senior British diplomat commented.

It was the last major anniversary of the Great War likely to include actual veterans of the carnage.

While Mons was where the war ended, Sarajevo was where a 1914 assassination ignited the flames of war.

Lt.-Cmdr. Glenn Chamberlain of Halifax was in Sarajevo Wednesday.

"Earlier today I walked across the bridge where the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated ... that is quite significant on the 80th anniversary of the end of the conflict," he said in a telephone interview.

About 1,200 Canadians are in Bosnia with the NATO-led Stabilizing Force. Of the 60 Canadians in Sarajevo, 52 took part in the Remembrance Day parade, he said.

In London, a lone bugler sounded the Last Post from barracks near Buckingham Palace. Railway stations, shops, banks and politicians around the country paused to honour the 750,000 British and 200,000 Empire troops who died in the 1914-18 war.

A Bank of England news conference was halted and British Airways re-scheduled by 45 minutes the departure of its morning Concorde supersonic jet flight to New York so its engines would not disrupt the silence around Britain.