Halifax-area photographer Len Wagg says he spent the past five years photographing Canada’s war graves and monuments for a new book that also spotlights the caretakers and families behind them.
The Story
Nova Scotia author and photographer Len Wagg says a story he wrote about a war cemetery more than 30 years ago still echoes with families who found the location of a loved one’s service and resting place through a headstone image.
Wagg said he was working for the Halifax Chronicle Herald in Italy when he accepted an invitation to visit the small Sicilian town of Agira. A few hours later, he was walking through the Agira Canadian War Cemetery, where headstones list Canadians who served during the Second World War, and he later wrote about what he saw for the paper.
According to Wagg, the response to that early story stayed with him for years. He said he received calls from Nova Scotia and the United States from people who knew their father died overseas but did not know where, and that the picture of the headstone was the first time they had seen where it was.
For the past five years, Wagg has travelled across Canada and Europe photographing war graves, monuments and other sites for his new book, At Home and Beyond: Honouring Canada’s War Dead. He said the book includes well-known locations such as Vimy Ridge and Juno Beach, as well as the grave of poet John McCrae, who wrote In Flanders Fields.
Wagg also described the broader scope of Canada’s wartime losses, saying more than 110,000 Canadians are buried overseas at more than 5,800 sites, while another 27,000 have no known graves after going into battle and disappearing. In the book, he profiles individuals connected to memorial work, including Canadian war nurses and organizers behind relatively new remembrance efforts such as the Last Steps memorial in Halifax.
One of the individual soldier stories in the book focuses on Pte. George Lawrence Price of Port Williams, N.S., whom Wagg said was killed by a German sniper at 10:58 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918—two minutes before the armistice went into effect. By coincidence, Wagg said Price’s grave in Belgium is metres away from that of Pte. John Parr, a 17-year-old British soldier described as the first Commonwealth serviceman killed during the First World War.
Wagg said he also profiles Sarah Lockyer and her team at the Department of National Defence’s casualty identification unit in Ottawa. He said the historians and anthropologists use tools including DNA analysis to identify Canadians whose unmarked graves are still being found in Europe, and that those service members receive full military funerals in France. Wagg cited Lockyer’s message that “They gave their lives for the country. It’s the least we can do to give them back their names.”
The book’s foreword is written by Warren (Whitey) Bernard, a 91-year-old Tofino, B.C., resident whose 1940 photo—known as “Wait for Me Daddy”—appeared on the front page of the Vancouver Province. Wagg said the picture, showing Bernard breaking away from his mother to reach for his father’s hand as he marched off to war in New Westminster, has inspired a bronze statue, souvenir coins and a stamp, and that the photo once hung in every school in British Columbia. Bernard said he was impressed by Wagg’s passion for the project, adding, “When guys like Len come along, they’re not trying to get the story for a five-minute or a two-minute shot.… They’re interested in the story. I was really impressed.”
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