Gosnay, France — Aleck James Ambler was a stonemason by trade and a Canadian by choice, leaving his native England at age 21 in 1905 to start over as a pioneer in Saskatchewan. Ambler’s first stop was Moose Jaw, a frontier town, where he worked with stone until he had scraped together enough money to buy a homestead near Foam Lake. He planted crops, married a Canadian girl named Mary and started a family.
Ambler was 30 when war broke out in Europe. He was quick to enlist and arrived in France in 1916, earning his place as a sniper and patrol leader. He was already battle-worn by the time of Vimy. An older presence, among mostly younger men who, about three weeks before the historic battle, and as the bombs crashed overhead, sought refuge 10-metres beneath the ground in an old chalk mine. The Canadians affectionately referred to the mine as the Maison Blanche — in honour of the chalk-white farmhouse nearby.
That old white farmhouse is now red brick, but the Maison Blanche cave remains. It is a wonder of the war years, an art gallery of sorts, that was effectively lost to history until a bunch of history buffs — many of them retired British soldiers — rediscovered the mine about 10 years ago. It was jammed with farm garbage that the resident farmer, a fellow by the name of Delabres, dumped there, presumably out of convenience. What the mess concealed was a multitude of cave drawings, etched into the chalk walls by the soldiers.
Some are elaborate, including a mailbox marked “Toronto,” that the men would drop farewell letters into on the eve of a battle, while others aren’t much more than a few squiggly lines. There is a horse, a pig and a chicken, a heart, a girl in profile, scores of initials and, somewhat remarkably, given the nature of young men, nothing pornographic.
Three of the finest works among the 1,000 pieces of graffiti that the Durand Group — the not-for-profit volunteer organization mostly staffed by those cave-discovering Brits — have documented, are by Aleck James Ambler, the former stonemason. (The Durand Group pays farmer Delabres’ son seven Euros per visitor to enjoy continued access to Maison Blanche).
To get to the cave art, you need a hardhat, good footwear and a working flashlight. And you need to hold onto a rope and go down, down, down, into a raw archaeological site, with rusty grenades and mess tins and bullets strewn about the floor. The air in the mine is surprisingly breathable. It is damp and cool, but not musty. The ceilings are high. The mine dates from the 1400s. There are long iron nails driven into the walls in several spots to hang beds from and enough room to accommodate about 200 dirty, smelly, war-weary Canadians.
Private Ambler was among them on March 10 1917. He is identified by the three carvings he signed and dated. Ambler served with the Royal Highland Regiment. His work depicts the regiment’s logo, noting all the battles the sniper and his comrades were involved in leading up to Vimy. “Neuve Chapelle. Ypres. Langemarck. Givenchy. The Bluff. Sanctuary Wood. Somme.”
“What I like to think is that, because of my grandfather’s skill, that he helped some of the other men as they carved into those walls,” says Mike Ambler, from his home in Calgary.
Mike Ambler is the carver’s grandson. He visited the caves a few years back with Karen Begg, an Alberta sculptor/artist. Begg took several castings of the Ambler carvings, and reproduced them for his descendants. Three bronze copies hang in Mike Ambler’s front hall.
“Maybe some of what he was doing was leaving his mark,” Ambler says. “But maybe some of it was about taking his and the other soldiers’ minds off the war. All those men in that cave would have had a pretty good understanding of what the world was like above ground.”
W. P. Beckett and T. Mason carved the mailbox on March 15, 1917. Beckett was later shot in the arm but survived the war, as did Mason, who had his pinky-finger blown off.
Bruce Simpson, one of the Durand volunteers, estimates that each carving would have taken about 40-hours to complete. “It is like a time warp, walking down here,” he says. “It is a labour of love, doing this work.”
Aleck Ambler took a bullet in the left leg, and had to wear a clunky shoe on his left foot thereafter. It did not stop him from returning to Canada after the war, until a death in the family led to a move back to England to run a family business. Ambler kept up with his carving, though, and was best known for executing elaborate wedding and anniversary cakes, that were auctioned off at church fundraisers. He was also an amateur sketch artist.
He died in 1974, but his carvings endure some 100 years on, transporting us to a time when Canadians huddled beneath the ground and the attack on Vimy drew near.
National Post
joconnor@nationalpost.com
Joe O’Connor travelled in France with the Vimy Foundation and Ancestry.
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