Below is the scene at Riqueval Bridge, on the St. Quentin canal, north of Bellinglise in France, only a few days before the armistice.
My grandfather, a Captain in the 137th Brigade of the 5th North Staffordshire Regiment, had led a surprise attack to capture this bridge in thick fog in the morning of Sept. 29, 1918.
Earlier on the morning of the scene above, he had cut the leads to explosive charges meant to collapse the bridge and you can see those wires in the photo. He and his men assaulted some machine gun nests and bayoneted and shot the occupants. British forces surged across the bridge and it was a key component in the final advance of the British that forced the collapse of Germany in the following weeks. He was nominated for a Victoria Cross and awarded a Distinguised Service Order by the King at Buckingham Palace, as well as a Military Cross and a Croix de Guerre.
He was a lucky survivor of the war, which means I'm lucky to be here. An early enlistee, a Somme veteran, wounded severely by bullets and gas earlier in the war but returned to duty . . . . .
What I remember most though, is sitting with him as a young boy at his farm east of Red Deer, a peaceful scene, and asking him innocently and earnestly "How many Germans did you kill?" Fifty years after those events, I remember his eyes tearing up and my father leading me away.
So, I will be remembering him this morning.
A more peaceful moment of the same scene . . . .
Cowperson