“In the course of my pilgrimage I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the years to come than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war”
IV: “And there lay gentlemen from out of all the seas.”
On the evening of May 12 the King’s train left Longpré and went down to the coast. The night was spent at Etaples, a fishing port at the mouth of the River Canche, which has figured since many centuries back in the history of the British Empire, and now is the site of what has come to be known as our “Empire Cemetery” in France.
When the Romans were bringing in the path of their legions order and civilization into Europe—misfortunately thwarted by forest or bog or sea from reaching some countries, which have suffered from the fact since—they had their chief naval station for northern Gaul at the mouth of the Canche. This station, no doubt, Julius Cæsar used in his expedition against Britain. Later, when Carausius, a Roman Briton, revolted against the Roman Empire, he won the command of the English Channel with his fleet and maintained for some time an independent Britain, assuming the state of Cæsar and founding a Roman-British Empire. The Classis Britannica of the Roman Empire had had its chief station on the Canche. With the revolt of Carausius there was no longer a “British Fleet” of the Roman Empire, and the Classis Samarica (the Fleet of the Somme) took its place and had as its task to hold the coasts of Gaul for the Roman Power against the British Carausius. This Fleet of the Somme also had its base on the Canche. Doubtless in the very early years of the Christian era there was many a naval action between the British sea forces and those of the Romans stationed on the Canche. Etaples is thus linked with the memory of Carausius, the man who first taught England that her fate depended on the holding of the Narrow Seas.
Etaples during the Great War was for long our chief hospital centre. In the middle of the coast base line, having good railway communications with most points, within sight and smell of the sea, the sand dunes around Etaples were ideal for hospital hutments. To the Etaples hospitals there came wounded from every battle-field. To them there came also in 1918 the attacking air squadrons of the enemy, which accounts in part for the number of nurses and other medical personnel buried in Etaples Cemetery. One hospital at Etaples was set on fire and destroyed by the enemy. These aircraft attacks on the Etaples hospitals came in June, 1918, when the enemy concentrated his strategy on trying to cripple our means of supply. They inflicted grave embarrassment on our High Command, for, at a time when material was very scanty and lines of transport very congested, we had to construct new hospitals elsewhere and move patients and staff. That was probably the effect aimed at. The difference, from an enemy point of view, in bombing a camp and a hospital is this: If you bomb a camp, you kill a few men, but the camp does not move; if you bomb a hospital, you kill a few patients, nurses, and doctors, and you force the hospital to move (if it can move) to a safer place. But to the end of the war some hospitals remained because it was impossible to move them.
In 1917 the hospitals at Etaples (which included eleven general, one stationary, and four Red Cross hospitals and a convalescent depot) could deal with 22,000 wounded or sick. The earliest burial in the cemetery dates from May, 1915. The graves to-day number more than 11,000. Of these, 1,984 were from the Overseas Dominions, divided as follows: Canada, 1,122; Australia, 461; New Zealand, 261; South Africa, 67; West Indies, 29; India, 26; and Newfoundland, 18.
The site of Etaples Cemetery is very beautiful. It rises from the margin of the sea in three great terraces, in the middle one of which is the Stone of Remembrance and on the highest the Cross of Sacrifice, standing up stark against a grove of pine trees. From the cemetery the valley of the Canche flows up to the walls of Montreuil-sur-Mer, which was the General Headquarters of the British Army from 1916 until the close of the war.