On an average street in the city of Scarborough, one block west from the house where I grew up, is a lonely little cemetery. If you happen to pass by without expecting it to be there, then you’d probably be surprised. That’s because this cemetery, Washington United Church Cemetery, is sandwiched between a row of well-kept suburban homes. It’s an almost surreal sight, those proud headstones sitting quietly behind a padlocked gate, flanked by bungalows on either side as if they’re just the neighbours next door. You might even be tempted to dismiss my claim as nothing more than a flight of fancy. An imaginative writer exploring her creative whims.
While I admit that I am certainly an imaginative writer, prone to indulging in more than my fair share of fanciful flights, what I say is true. The cemetery does exist, and I know it well.
I was a child who had not yet reached double-digits the first time I walked through those wrought-iron gates and found the grave of Cecil Annis, soldier and hero of the Great War of 1914. In those days, there was no padlock, and one side of the dual gates stood permanently ajar.
I was odd even then. A curious child, introspective and in no short supply of compassion for all things living… dead… anthropomorphized… When it came to cemeteries, memorials, epitaphs and the like, I would take the time to read. To note dates, study grainy black-and-white faces, and to calculate ages. Then to observe, dutifully and solemnly, a moment of grief—for them, and for the loved ones who lost them.
I would often ride my bike to this little cemetery and sit amongst the stones, for I felt an inexplicable sense of peace here—especially when sitting next to the grave of Cecil Annis. I was deeply troubled, you see, that he should have died so young. Only twenty-one years old, in what should have been the prime of his life. Not a victim of infectious disease, like many of the children buried here and in cemeteries like it, but of wounds from a senseless war in which historians today still cannot find much purpose.
I wanted to be his friend. I was desperate to offer what little comfort I could, to be the one who visited him so that he knew he was remembered. That his sacrifice had not been forgotten.
Told you I was odd.
I didn’t understand, though, in my youthful ignorance of the true and long-term cost of war, how he could have made it home fatally injured. I struggled to imagine who he’d been in life. I longed to see his face, so that I could better picture who I was mourning when there was no one left who’d known him in life. No one to stand by his grave, where I stood. Grieving a boy I’d never met.
Decades later, we have the internet. We have access to online records and digital copies of newspaper clippings, and amateur historians who are keen to share information that it may live on. I don’t know what it was that made Cecil Annis pop into my head of a sudden, these many years later, but he did. And I went looking for him online. I found him.
Cecil Annis was a Scarborough boy who went to high school at Malvern Collegiate, a high school which is still in operation today. In April of 1915 he enlisted in the 35th battallion, and was with one of the first drafts sent overseas. He was wounded for the first time on June 13th, 1916 at Givenchy, in the forehead and back, and spent time recovering in England before being returned to the front. He was wounded a second time, on October 16th of that same year at Camblain-L’Abbe, and lost the sight in one eye. As a result, he returned home to Canada, where he received a rousing welcome from his friends, family and community.
Cecil was one of the most popular boys in Scarborough, one newspaper reported, and was a star player on the Malvern Collegiate rugby team before going off to war. The boys at my high school played rugby; it could have been them. He was buried in the family cemetery with full military honours, and it was the only time when guns went off in that sacred spot. He was given the rank of Lance Corporal before being discharged from the army, after being wounded the second time. He was the first cadet from Malvern to come home. He had hoped to return to school and finish his education once he was well enough.
He never did.
What I know now was that Cecil Annis died of heart disease attributed to his service. It is called Soldier’s Heart. As a child, I was unaware of this phenomenon because they never taught us that in school. We learned high-ranking names, geographical locations, dates, trench lore… we didn’t spend much time on what happened to the men and boys who came home.
Decades after his death I stood as a child in that very spot where the guns had gone off to mark his passing. Silence and birdsong, the rustle of leaves and the distant drone of urban traffic his only other companions besides the fanciful little girl. I remember so vividly, with a pain of grief for the dead, the so many dead, thinking that I could be the one to remember him now, to cherish his memory and his service when no one who knew him was left to do so. So I visited that graveyard fairly regularly, and I remembered Cecil. And I imagined that he was my friend, even if he didn’t know it.
I remembered him every November 11th. In the seventh grade when my school band played Ashokan Farewell at the Scarborough Civic Centre for the Remembrance Day services. In high school when they projected the photographs of our fellow R.H. King students who had died in a second war less than thirty years after the first (a photograph of my own great uncle, Sgt. Robert J. Jackson, amongst them). That lonely grave was probably my strongest memory of my early interest in the first world war, a tangible connection to it that even then I knew was both simple and profound.
As Canadians, we honour our fallen heroes. Our national memory remembers our war dead. Our young people are raised to continue the tradition of caring about those who laid down their lives, to never forget the sacrifice and to honour it as a gift given to future generations.
I was one of those Canadian youth. But I count myself fortunate because I have something the others don’t. I touched a grave. I made a friend of a soldier I never knew, and I remembered him.
I remember him still.
CECIL ANNIS
SON OF LEVI C. AND ANNIE ANNIS
DIED OF WAR WOUNDS SEPTEMBER 20 1918
IN HIS 22ND YEAR
HE SAVED OTHERS HIMSELF HE COULD NOT SAVE
