It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything. I’ve been busy and, for the past 5 weeks, was nowhere near my computer.

On October 2 Deb and I travelled to Europe to celebrate her retirement and visit our daughter who is on an exchange at a university in Austria. The trip was full of many unique and wonderful experiences but, because we are hours away from Remembrance Day and its 100th Anniversary, I would like to share the story of our visit to my uncle’s gravesite in Mers les Bains, France.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post (click here to see it) my Uncle Bert Doonan was a member of the ill-fated Royal Regiment of Canada. He was one of over 900 Canadians killed during the infamous Dieppe Raid on August 19, 1942. He, along with 3 other Canadians, are buried near the beach where their bodies were found in Mers les Bains, about 25 km from Dieppe.

I visited his grave in 1979 and Deb and I planned to visit it again on this trip. In early October, a couple days before we were to leave England and travel to Dieppe, we were contacted by my cousin, Gord. It turned out that he and Cathy were in Europe and also on their way to visit the graveyard in Mers les Bains. Gord, being extremely clever and organized, pointed out that October 10 would have been our Uncle Bert’s 100^th birthday. It made perfect sense to plan our visit to the gravesite on that day.

We met Gord and Cathy in Dieppe on October 7 after travelling across the English Channel on a ferry from Newhaven, UK. (I couldn’t help but think about how much different my channel crossing was from that of Uncle Bert.) The next day the four of us walked the Dieppe beach, visited the Canadian memorials and drove out to the Canadian cemetery along the “Avenue des Canadiens”. It was easy to see that Canada has a special place in the hearts of Dieppe’s citizens. We also drove five km east to Puys, the little beach town that had been the target of the Royal Regiment. Its code name in 1942 was “Blue Beach”. Seeing the steep cliffs and rocky, narrow beach made it easy to see why casualties were higher there than anywhere else that day.

On October 9, the day before our planned visit to Mers les Bains, we drove (actually, Gord drove!) the two and half hours from Dieppe to the amazing World War I memorial at Vimy Ridge. I had not realized how massive, impressive and moving the monument, built in 1936, would be. The memorial bears the inscribed names of 11,168 missing Canadians, killed in action in France but whose remains have not been found or identified. The original definition of the word “awesome” is “to be profoundly reverential”… Vimy Ridge is awesome in that sense.

That night we drove back to Mers les Bains and before checking in to our hotel we went to a grocery store to buy a six pack of French beer. The next morning, we made the short drive to the cemetery. The day was sunny but brisk. Unlike my first visit, this time I knew exactly where to look when we entered the walled church yard. The ten commonwealth war graves, including that of Uncle Bert and the three other Canadians killed on August 19, are located along the south wall of the large, old and well-kept community graveyard.

When we reached Uncle Bert’s headstone I felt much the same deep, but indescribable, feelings that I’d felt during my last visit thirty-seven years ago.

We placed a bottle of French beer beside our uncle’s headstone and then opened four more… one for each of us. We saluted Uncle Bert’s 100^th birthday with 6.5% beer at 10:00 am on a Wednesday morning. Based on what I’ve heard about the feisty red head, I think it would have put a smile on his face.

To get an idea of the reason we shared a French beer with Uncle Bert on his birthday, please take the five minutes it takes to watch the following video I made in 2005. It’s called “French Beer”… click here to watch