ST. JOHN'S, N.L. — The remains of a soldier from Newfoundland killed in the battlefields of France during the First World War will be laid to rest in St. John's Monday, bringing an emotional end to a years-long effort in a place still shaken and forever changed by the bloodshed.
His grandfather, Pte. Stephen Lawrence, was among the 800 members of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment who charged over the top of the trenches, armed with only rifles and bayonets, toward the Germans' machine-gun fire at Beaumont-Hamel on the morning of July 1, 1916. More than 700 men were killed or wounded as the frontal assault became a slaughter that nearly wiped out the regiment.
Monday is Canada Day in the rest of the country, but in Newfoundland and Labrador, July 1 begins as Memorial Day. It's a time to remember the hundreds of young men from the Newfoundland Regiment who died during the disastrous battle in northern France, at a time when Newfoundland was not yet part of Canada. This year it also coincides with the 100th anniversary of the creation of the war memorial in St. John's.
Newfoundland's heavy debt ultimately influenced its leaders' decision to bring Newfoundland back under control of the British government in 1934, and to ultimately join Canada in 1949, Crummey said. They were able to argue that the Unknown Soldier brought from Vimy Ridge, in France, to the National War Memorial in Ottawa in 2000 didn't quite capture Newfoundland's First World War experience, since Newfoundland was not a part of Canada then.
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