大象传媒

Tuesday 11 November 2008 is the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War.听 Millions of people were injured, millions died.听One of them was my great uncle, Private William Binnie.听Like many families ours has never been good at talking about itself.听In the early 1980s we visited Edinburgh Castle on holiday and by chance, the book of remembrance was turned to the page on which his death was recorded.

It was the first time I realised that the slaughter of World War I had touched our lives.听 My mum told me how her mother (William's younger sister) had been horrified by tales of men fighting in the trenches with kilts frozen to their legs.听Then, this year, talking one morning on 大象传媒 Radio Leeds, I mentioned that I had a relative who I thought had died in the trenches of Flanders, a teenager who - like so many others - had lied about his age to sign up.听On Remembrance weekend (8/9 November 2008) I travelled from West Yorkshire to try and find out what happened to him: where he served and where he died.听This is the story of "Wee Willie".

The journey began at 5.05am on a train south from Leeds to Kings Cross, then to the international terminal at St Pancras and a Eurostar service to Lille in Northern France, the gateway to Flanders.听We drove to Ypres in Belgium (known as "Wipers" to the British Tommies who fought there, Ieper to the locals).听The city symbolises the destruction of the war - medieval buildings like the imposing Cloth Hall were reduced to rubble and had to be rebuilt, brick by brick.听In the flat, wet fields around Ypres, from October 1914 right through until October 1918, the battlefield was never more than a few miles distant. Five of the war's bloodiest battles were fought there.

Andrew stands on the battlefield site

On Saturday afternoon, as the light faded, I discovered more about the grim reality of trench warfare. In 1997, during construction work for a new industrial estate, many remnants of the Great War surfaced, including the Yorkshire Trench.听Now restored, you can walk through the narrow, zig-zag dug outs of 1917.听It was in trenches like this that my great uncle spent the early years of the war.听Many soldiers from the West Riding fought and died there, and many of their graves are just across the nearby Ypres-Iser canal in the Essex Farm cemetery.听It includes a towering memorial to the men of the West Riding regiment and the individual, white Portland stone gravestones of hundreds of men from this area that died there.

I know that my great uncle's regiment, the Black Watch, were involved in action across Flanders through the first part of the war.听Although I do not yet have detailed information about his movements from the time he volunteered (almost certainly pretending to be older than he was, by as much as two years), there is no doubt that he experienced the horrors of life in the trenches.听Even in 2008, with peacetime life all around me, it was easy to imagine the stench, the damp, the noise, the squalor and the death of those seven foot dug-outs in No Man's Land.

My guide and companion throughout the weekend was Mark Saville, a family historian from Horsforth in Leeds.听His hard work uncovered the story of Willie's war, using information from military records, censuses, websites, books and photographs.听With the final part of my journey to come the following day, we went together on Saturday evening to the Menin Gate.听This huge memorial, shaped like a Roman triumphal arch, displays the names of 54,896 soldiers of the then British Empire who went missing in action and have no, known grave from the start of the war to 15 August 1917.

Mark guides Andrew round Essex Farm military cemetery:

Every night since 1928 the Last Post has been sounded here, even during the Second World War when German snipers - in what was then-occupied Belgium - were trying to pick off the trumpeters! It was a profoundly moving experience, surrounded by hundreds of other people from around the world, including two people I interviewed for 大象传媒 Radio Leeds, Robert Wright, a former soldier from Seacroft in Leeds and Fiona Cockerham, who lives in Wetherby.

The entrance to Fampoux Cemetery

The scale of the sacrifice is almost overwhelming. I stood underneath the lists of the fallen from the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, name after name after name engraved in stone. It brought home, like nothing else, that this was war on massive scale, but carried out by individuals like my Great Uncle William.
And so, on Remembrance Sunday, after a fitful, troubled sleep, I finally found out what happened to Private Binnie.听Before the final stage of my journey, I returned again to a now-deserted Menin Gate at dawn and checked the lists of names from the Black Watch. His was NOT among them, he had a tombstone. In a few hours time I would find it.

I expected that my uncle's final days would have been spent in Flanders Fields, probably around Ypres where the fighting continued fiercely in 1917, the year he died.听 However Mark told me to head back towards Lille.听We travelled by motorway across the flat, almost featureless landscape dotted at first with distinctive Commonwealth cemeteries. Soon we reached France (no need for passports in northern Europe where, thankfully, fighting over borders is a thing of the past). Our destination was Arras, scene I was soon to find out of one of the bloodiest but least-well-reported battles of World War I.听We followed signs for Roeux and Fampoux: the first, I was soon to find out, was where Willie fell, the second where he is buried.

War memorial in Fampoux Cemetery

Throughout the weekend I tried to imagine what Wee Willie would have been thinking about when he joined up. He came from the Falkirk area, an industrial town near听 Stirling where his father, William Binnie Senior (hence "Wee" Willie) worked at an iron foundry.听The thought of travelling overseas to fight for King and Country must have seemed glorious in those early days of the war but in the end, weary and filthy after months in the trenches, the Black Watch found themselves in the Pas de Calais region of Northern France.

On 23 April 1917, Private Binnie and his comrades were ordered to attack a chemical works occupied by German snipers in the village of Roeux.听In peacetime, this factory had been used to manufacture fertiliser for this largely rural community, but in war it could produce explosives, hence its strategic importance.听It was just alongside the railway line to Arras - which is still there today, straight as an arrow.听The Black Watch were so depleted that - on that very day - reinforcements had been called up from a different regiment, given rifle instruction (they had no infantry training), handed their kilts and then, at 2pm, ordered into action - with no shelter they were sitting ducks.听 Private William Binnie was one of ninety from that same regiment who died in that failed assault.听The factory was captured from the Germans, but just two days later it was taken back with more loss of life.

This was no glorious death.听The location today is, in many ways, little altered.听The railway line is still there, the station destroyed in 1917 was replaced in 1920 by a new building, now boarded up.听A small glass shelter now serves as Roeux station.听As I stood looking at the site, at 11am on Remembrance Sunday, trains thundered past.听 The chemical factory is now long gone.听The three acre site is now just a mass of bushes and stunted trees.

Private Binnie's headstone

The final stage of the journey took us a few miles out of Roeux, to the village of Fampoux. As the crow flies it is just five-eighths of a mile from the chemical works to William's final resting place. Brown's Copse Cemetery is one of the immaculately-maintained Commonweath War Graves sites.听It is surrounded by fields and by the time we left, my shoes were caked with the thick, clinging mud which came to define trench warfare.听The cemetery itself is pristine - trimmed grass, beautifully white tombstones, a sense of peace.听Two thousand men lie here in land donated by the French people.听Two rows from the back, on Row 40, I found the grave of Private William Binnie.听The plot, unusually - but not for this particular military cemetery - is shared.听His name is at the bottom, it simply says "29508 Private W Binnie, The Black Watch, 23rd April 1917". The records say he was 19, however it is likely that he was, in fact, just 17.

I stood in tears at his graveside, crying for a man I never knew, whose picture I have never seen, whose life and death - until this Remembrance weekend - I knew nothing about.听Young men are still losing their lives today, in Iraq and Afghanistan.听As I write this there are just four survivors of the millions of British men who fought in the First World War.听I had reached the end of Wee Willie鈥檚 story, but for me it seems like a beginning: a chance to find out more about who I am and where I have come from, a chance to talk to my own parents before it is too late, a chance to make sense of Great Uncle William's sacrifice.

Take a look at more images from Andrew's search for his great uncle's final resting place:

Listen to Andrew as he describes his experiences for the listeners of the 大象传媒 Radio Leeds Breakfast Show: