PEI Remembrance

Fair warning to readers disinterested in the Great War, and remembrance of it: proceed no further. My next post in Peregrinations addresses other PEI charms, this one deals with the excellent homage Spud Islanders pay to the Island’s Fallen.

We had other reasons to pay a return visit to PEI but my principal grail quest was to see three First World War monuments. One of the blessings I get to count is that Jan indulges this mild obsession of mine. Thanks to my essential memorial bible, Robert Shipley’s To Mark Our Place, I knew that cenotaphs in Charlottetown, Malpeque and Summerside all feature soldier statues. I knew the identity of two of the sculptors, both highly accomplished and justly famed. But Summerside was a mystery.

After landing at Wood Island we made a beeline for Charlottetown. There, right in front of historic Province House, where the nation was seeded in 1864, is George Hill’s impressive and imposing statue of three Canadian infantrymen marching purposefully toward the Front. The Canadian Tommies are a wonder: assured, resolute, dangerous, fearless. A German pickelhaube helmet lies gloriously trampled underfoot.

We drove on to tiny Malpeque, famed for its oysters. Ordinarily a hamlet as small as this would have a simple monument but Malpeque has something grand: Hamilton McCarthy’s rendering of a Canadian soldier brandishing a flag in his right hand, rifle in his left. As with Hill’s Charlottetown figures, McCarthy’s soldier conveys confidence, conviction, certainty, not a shred of doubt or temerity. How did it come to pass that the citizens of Malpeque have such a grand monument? Did a rich Malpequian lose a son at Vimy or Passchendaele? I look forward to fathoming the question.

Apart from the major targets, Jan puts up with me pulling over whenever I see a community memorial: Alberton, Tignish, Miscouche, Souris, Cardigan, Montague, Georgetown... I stop to look at them all. They all have stories to tell and I am keen to know a few.

Summerside proves a revelation. Without knowing, Jan intuits that Queen Elizabeth Park is the place to search. Indeed it is. There I find the highlight of the entire adventure: a figure of a soldier going into action by the finest of Canada’s Great War memorial sculptors, Emanuel Hahn. I am astonished to find it. Nowhere have I seen a reference to a Hahn sculpture at Summerside. To the best of my knowledge there is only one monument of this design in all Canada, at St. Lambert QE. Hahn is unique among memorial sculptors: his figures are invariably contemplative, pensive, vulnerable. Hahn is never one to glorify or strut. He is unafraid to reflect grief, thoughtfulness or empathy in his soldiers’ faces. For my money Hahn’s are the most powerful, most affecting of Great War memorial sculptures. As I admire the Summerside jewel people walk by and pay no attention. How many townspeople know they have a public masterpiece in their midst?

After five days we leave PEI but the quest is not over: in Moncton NB there is another Hahn to see, another masterwork, ‘Tommy in Greatcoat’ in the city’s Queen Victoria Park. Even on a cheerfully brilliant sunny day Hahn’s Tommy evokes a profound sense of loss. Not the glory but the pity of war. It is beautiful, perhaps the most understated of Hahn’s works, but powerful and very moving. Exactly what remembrance of the war to end all wars ought to be about.