Belgium honours Indigenous First World War veterans

As Jeff Purdy retraced the steps of his great-great-grandfather, Sam Glode, in Belgium during the First World War, he marvelled at the depth of the tunnels dug by his own flesh and blood beneath German lines. 

“I’ve always wanted to come here to Belgium, and walk around, but I never dreamed that I’d be able to walk where Sam walked,” he said, standing at the edge of a crater in Sint-Elooi, Belgium, believed to be left behind after an explosive detonated in a tunnel his ancestor helped dig. 

Purdy is part of a Canadian delegation touring Flanders Fields as part of a week of commemorative events for Remembrance Day, on Monday, and Canada’s Indigenous Veterans Day on Friday. 

This year, for the first time, Belgium is holding a national ceremony on Friday, to honour the approximately 4,000 Indigenous soldiers who fought in the First World World.       

“Unfortunately they didn’t get the recognition they deserved during and after the war, so we want to give them now, that respect, and give them our eternal gratitude for what they did for our region,” said Veerle Viaene, co-ordinator of heritage for Visit Flanders, an organization that works to attract international visitors to the region.

Visit Flanders invited the Canadian delegation, comprised of Indigenous people from Eastern and Western Canada, to honour two veterans: Glode — a Mi’kmaw soldier from Nova Scotia’s Acadia First Nation — and Alex Decoteau of Saskatchewan’s Red Pheasant Cree Nation, an Olympian and Canada’s first Indigenous police officer.

“It’s important to make people aware that people from diverse backgrounds came to Flanders Fields to fight and strive for peace,” Viaene said in an interview at Tyne Cot cemetery, the largest cemetery for Commonwealth forces in the world. 

Corps Sgt. Major, Christa Laforce, a member of the Edmonton Police Service, with which Decoteau served, will on Wednesday unveil a plaque honouring him near the Passchendaele New British Cemetery, where he is buried. One of his descendents will be present. 

Later that night, there will be a ceremony at the Menin Gate, on which the names of 55,000 soldiers are written – soldiers whose bodies were never found on the battlefields of Flanders.  

Every night since 1928 – with the exception of the Second World War years – buglers have played the Last Post, the traditional salute to the fallen, at the Menin Gate, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

But on Wednesday night, for the first time, Canada’s Indigenous people will bring their culture to the Last Post ceremony, performing a smudging ceremony and the Mi’kmaq Honour Song, a spiritual anthem performed at gatherings and celebrations. 

Being in Belgium for the ceremonies “just gives you a deeper appreciation of reconciliation, respect, honouring,” said Andrea Paul, Nova Scotia Regional Chief for the Assembly of First Nations. 

50 hours of research

Paul was also part of the delegation retracing Glode’s steps. 

Their guide, Erwin Ureel, a former soldier with the Belgian army and a volunteer with the Passchendaele Society, hadn’t heard of Glode prior to learning about him from Canadian organizers about the tour.

He then spent upward of 50 hours researching his story. Using an interview Glode did in the 1940s and cross-referencing it with war diaries, kept by every unit detailing their actions during the war, he was able to pinpoint Glode’s steps with the Royal Canadian Engineers No. 1 Canadian Tunnelling Company. 

He took the group to where Glode fought in 1917’s Battle of Messines, one of the most successful British operations on the western front, before going on to Passchendaele and Vimy Ridge. 

Glode, who was in Belgium for about a year and a half, digging tunnels toward the enemy — deep under no man’s land, the perilous and unclaimed territory between the opposing forces — planting explosives and waiting for just the right moment to detonate them.

“My interest was in minority groups in the Great War who were often forgotten or whose stories were more or less wiped out,” said Ureel. 

‘Shook up bad’

He took the group to the aforementioned crater that Glode helped create. 

The soldiers knew when the mines were set to explode, and were watching from a nearby hill. 

“At 2:30 in the morning, there was a kind of a thud, then the ground shook to and fro like it was shivering, then we saw flames shoot up high in the dark over the ridge,” Sam Glode said in an 1944 interview in Cape Breton’s Magazine. 

Ureel also brought the group to a field where he believes Glode was caught in a tunnel collapse with 20 other men, while digging under no man’s land. 

In his 1944 interview, Glode described how he took a pick and began to tear a hole in the roof of the cave, trying to fight his way out for “hours and hours,” running out of air. 

“I had to force myself to work, but I was desperate and I was strong,” he said. 

He said they were “shook up bad,” but were eventually rescued, and all of them survived. 

He was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for bravery. 

Glode made it home to Nova Scotia, and lived to be 79. He died in 1957 at Camp Hill Veterans Memorial in Halifax. 

But many of his comrades are buried at Ridge Wood Military Cemetery in Ypres, Belgium. 

The Canadians who were on tour walked through the cemetery, stopping to place tobacco on the grave of an Ojibwe soldier, Pte. S. Comego. Some were moved to tears.   

Purdy acknowledges that, had Glode not been one of the lucky ones, he likely would be lying in that cemetery.  

“The friendships that he created, his spirt’s still here,” he said, grateful his great-great-grandfather’s story is being shared in Belgium. 

“It’s beautiful right, it’s emotional. But I’m one of one family, when you think nationally of the [Indigenous] communities that gave up so much to come here to fight. It’s very honouring.”