Remembering a lost uncle on the anniversary of Somme

Recently we commemorated the 100th anniversary of the death of my great uncle Ellis Eugene Harrison.

Private E.E. Harrison was killed in France on October 1, 1916.

It was his first day at the Western Front. He was only 22, the same age as my son Shaun.

From what we have been able to find, Ellis was born on the family farm in Kapuni, Taranaki in 1894 but somehow found his way down to Greymouth.

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He signed up with the Canterbury Regiment in 1916 , and was assigned to the second battalion. If he was anything like my grandfather Stanley Davis Harrison, he would have been a scrawny little sod, and cheeky to match.

Grandad never said much about his older brother. He did remember Ellis’ last home leave to the family farm: they had a rodeo, where all the boys got tossed off some old nag, and they laughed themselves sick.

Then they innocently said goodbye and Ellis went off to War.

Military records show that on October 1, 1916 the Canterbury regiment tried to take some strategically important position in the Somme, but were hit by rifle and machine gun fire.

All grandad ever said was that he was told he was hit by a mortar and “blown to smithereens”. There’s some confusion in the records: he was initially listed as ‘missing’, then ‘wounded”, before great grandma Lucy got the devastating telegraph of his death.

Grandad said she wailed for weeks. Great grandad Edwin seemed to handle the grief in his own silent, stoic way. Theirs was a grief felt by many. Somehow his memorial plaque or Dead Man’s Penny, the only memento of his death, found its way to Stanley, and to my brother Mark.

A couple of years ago my wife Alison, son James and I drove to the Somme to visit his memorial in Northern France. Unlike the rest of France, the landscape around the village of Longueval is benign and scant, still struggling to recover from the decimation a century ago. There are no quant buildings of note, no classic French architecture, nothing at all curious to the eye.

But amongst all this green desolation stands the Caterpillar Cemetery, named after the Caterpillar tanks first used a couple of weeks before Ellis arrived at the Front.

The gardens are respectful, pristine and manicured. And Ellis’ name stands engraved on the memorial wall: there is no marked headstone for him, perhaps supporting Stanley’s assertion that he was hit by a shell and there was no body to recover.

How do you acknowledge an ancestor killed on the other side of the world a hundred years ago? To linger in the Caterpillar Cemetery, and read the names of these young men, and their New Zealand origins, is easy.

But eternity has no scale here and you do not want to leave, for fearing of turning your back on them, here alone in this foreign wilderness. And then you realise the huge indiscriminate waste that happened here 100 years ago and feel sorry for young guys like Ellis, and all his mates, many of whom are not remembered.

So we recognised him the best way we could do at the time, ran our fingers through the engraved letters on the wall name and tied our All Blacks flag in the nearest tree, leaving it to flutter in the breeze.

I doubt that after a couple of years it is still there in the tree.

On the night of the anniversary of his death a few of the family went out for a meal, and had a toast for Ellis. Like most family gatherings we had a few good laughs at one anothers expense.

If Ellis had been anything like Stanley, he too should have grown old, enjoying the warmth of family, grandkids and gatherings like ours. Alas it wasn’t to be.

I just hope that in another 100 years another group of Harrisons get together and remember Ellis and his mates, and have a drink for him. It would be unthinkable to forget.

Paul Harrison is an Auckland food technologist.