Piecing together the Great War in Placentia

The First World War may have happened a century ago, but in a place like Placentia, you can still find traces of its impact... you just need to know where to look.

There are signs of the war throughout the town, many of them indicative of the powerful, devastating role that the war had on local families.

Central Morning20:11Evidence of War in a Newfoundland Town. - A Tale From Placentia By Leigh Anne Power

In the town of Placentia, you can still find the Great War. You just have to know where to look. Leigh Anne Power takes us there

The Angelus bell in Sacred Heart Church has been calling Placentia's Catholics to noon-time prayer for more than a hundred years.

The building opened in 1889, but the bell cost $500.The parish couldn't afford to install it until 1901.

When war broke out in August 1914, parishioners answered the toll of the church bell as they packed the building to pray for the boys who'd be signing up to go fight.

Seventeen-year-old John Francis King Jack to his family was likely there among them, wondering whether he'd have an opportunity to join the Royal NewfoundlandRegiment.

That original church bell is long gone now, replaced with a sophisticated electronic model, and the interior of the building looks a lot different today than it did a century ago.

Then, the light shone on the young soldiers-to-be through windows of plain glass.

Now double rows of stained-glass saints line the walls, their jewel tones spilling down on the carpet below.

The first of the windows went up in 1918.

They came from Lyon's Stained Glass in Toronto and cost $100 apiece.

Families sponsored them in memory of loved ones, including the boys who came to mass here before they shipped off to France.

First war memorial in Newfoundland

In March1916, just as the Newfoundland Regiment was fighting its fatal way to Beaumont-Hamel in France, John Francis King and his older brother William took the train to St.John's.

On July 19, as the news of the bloody battle on the Somme arrived in Newfoundland, the King brothers boarded the S.S.Sicilian and set sail for war.

It would be a short war for William.

He arrived in France in October.Three months later, he was killed in action.

Today, William King's name is inscribed in white marble, on a column outside the Placentia church where he was baptized.

The column is topped by a statue of a supplicant Jesus, ordered from Muir's Marble Works in St. John's and carved of the finest Carrera marble, the same stuff from which Michelangelo created his David.

It cost the people of Placentia $3,000, a princely sum in 1920.

"For an average salary back then middle class salaryyou're looking at $1,000a year. So that's three years of a middle-income salary. That's pretty significant," said Frank Gogos, the curator of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment Museum.

"I think what it shows in Placentia how much of an effect the Great War had on the community at the time."

War trophies

Sir Cavendish Boyle laid the cornerstone of the Placentia court house in 1902.The white wooden building, with its mansard roof and clock tower, is a throwback to an earlier time.

So is the big black gun sitting next to it.

There's no plaque or explanation for the gun's presence.

"It's literally a whiz bang,"said Alex Comber,a military archivist at Libraries and Archives Canada.

"That was British trench slang for these field guns. That's what the Tommy in the trenches called them. But it's German name was the Feld Kanone model 96 neur art. And it was a 7.7-cm field gun. That was the diameter of the barrel."

The gun came to Placentia in 1920, after it was captured by the Allies in the last hundred days of the war.

Towns with the biggest military contributions got the biggest trophies.

Casualty of war

The old Catholic Mount Carmel Cemetery overlooks Placentia, white stones visible on the hilltop like a flock of birds.

At the far end of a row, almost to the treeline, among those who perished in the early 1900s, John Francis King rests.

His grave is bordered by a concrete curb, constructed with military precision.

At its head, the caribou of the Newfoundland Regiment proclaims him one of the country's war dead.

Although he died of tuberculosiscontracted in the trenches in 1918, just after the war had ended, he was still considered a casualty of conflict.

"Great Britainand of course, we were still part of the Empire at the timethey decided through an act of Parliament that the technical end to World War I would be the August date in 1921, and that's the reason the Commission goes by those dates," saidDavid Kettle,the Canadian secretary general at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

"That covers getting everybody home, giving people who were wounded badly an opportunity to recover from the wounds. And if they did not, we would take care of providing them with a plot and a headstone, etcetera."

There are 73men of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment deemedofficial casualties of warburied in cemeteries all around the province.

John King is the only one in Placentia, although family stones over empty graves commemorate others who were buried overseas.

His grave is just one of the pieces of war you can still find in his hometown, along with so many other traces of the distant conflict that was all too real for the people of Newfoundland.