There are dozens of headstones in St. James’ Cemetery with no one resting in the ground below them.
They contain all the usual hallmarks of regular gravestones: the deceased’s name, date of birth and death, maybe a cross or a Bible verse.
But on a closer look, the faded etchings on the crumbling, lichen-spotted limestone will point to resting places thousands of kilometres away from the Cabbagetown graveyard.
“Somewhere in Belgium”
“The British Military Cemetery, St. Pierre, France”
“Killed in active duty. Lost at sea”
The names on these particular monuments are of Canadian soldiers and military nurses who were killed in the First World War. They were buried, if burial was possible, an ocean away from their families back home in Toronto.
The Cabbagetown Preservation Society ran a guided tour of the various veteran’s graves and cenotaphs scattered throughout the cemetery today, immediately following the Remembrance Day ceremony hosted on the cemetery grounds.
The ceremony itself took place at the Chapel of St. James-the-Less, situated at the entrance to the sprawling, tree covered property nestled between Parliament Street and Rosedale Valley Road.
The ceremony was attended by members of The Queen’s Own Rifles, former Toronto Mayor Barbara Hall, and diplomatic representatives from Lithuania, Indonesia, and Chile.
Elected officials from all three levels of government were also present, including local MP Evan Solomon, MPP Kristyn Wong-Tam, and outgoing city councillor Chris Moise, who said this was his last official appearance as councillor.
All three officials spoke during the ceremony, highlighting Indigenous veterans, the recent tragedy at CFB Wainwright, and the ongoing need to support Canadian veterans throughout their lives.
The ceremony concluded with a procession outside for a moment of silence and wreath-laying, where members of Toronto Police and Toronto Fire had gathered.
Not long after the final mournful notes of “The Last Post” rang out of Silas Friesen’s trumpet, a small crowd had gathered on the chapel steps, ready to learn the stories of some of the soldiers memorialized in the graveyard.
The tour was run by Virginia Van Vliet, a local historian and member of the Cabbagetown Preservation Society, who greeted the group after most of the crowd from the ceremony had spilled back onto Parliament Street.
Van Vliet said she runs the tour not only as a way to tell the human stories behind the names etched into the stones, but to situate the stories locally.
“It’s a very powerful way to highlight the members of our community who gave their lives for us more than one hundred years ago,” she said.
Van Vliet led the group from grave to grave, through the gently sloping hills and increasingly barren hardwood trees of the cemetery, pausing at each veteran’s monument to tell the group their stories.
One was a stone monument to Lt. Gavin Langmuir, who was killed in action at age 23 in Belgium during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. Langmuir lived with his parents, Archibald and Margaret, less than two kilometres from the cemetery, near Bay Street. He worked as an appraiser for the Toronto Trusts Corporation, and was a member of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club.
He was reported missing and later presumed to be killed in action.
Another was dedicated to Dorothy Mary Baldwin, a nurse in the Canadian Army Medical Corps who was killed after German planes bombed the hospital she was stationed at in Doullens, France, on May 30, 1918.
Baldwin grew up in Toronto, and at age 23 she was the youngest Canadian nurse to be killed during the First World War.
Tour participants placed poppies on some of the monuments, at times touching the crumbling stone and blinking back tears.
The tour concluded deep in the cemetery at the gravestone of Captain William Durie, a Canadian soldier who was killed and buried in France in 1917. His mother, Anna, was furious that he was buried overseas. She eventually managed to covertly retrieve his remains from the French cemetery and bring them back to Toronto, where he was subsequently buried in St James’.
After regaling the group with Anna Durie’s tale, Van Vliet thanked the attendees for keeping the stories of St James’ veterans alive, and invited everyone to make their way back to the entrance gate, now out of sight, at their own pace.
The group dispersed slowly, in different directions, down different paths. As they wove their way back through the same granite and marble headstones they did on their way in, many of them now looked different.
It wasn’t just the poppies placed on them, or the fact that their names were now familiar. Now they knew their stories.
