Abide with me, fast falls the eventide
The darkness deepens Lord, with me abide…
– hymn by Henry Lyte, 1847
The passage of time has distanced our thoughts and memories of the horrific and deadly conflict that engulfed the world more than a hundred years ago.
The Great War, as it was once called, now known as the First World War, began in 1914 with a fervour of patriotism to enlist and aid in defence of the British Empire. Young men left their families and loved ones behind, to heed the call of battle in far-off lands, to kill or be killed for King and Empire.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee
Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me…
Walter Livingstone Raynes was not a bright-eyed youth looking for glory when he enlisted, at age 34, with the Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force in December 1915. He had spent the previous two years as minister of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian church on Dewdney Trunk Road in newly incorporated Port Coquitlam. His congregation knew him as a kind and sensitive soul, strong in his conviction and duty as a man of the cloth, and were thus surprised when he left to enlist as a fighting soldier overseas.
Where is death’s sting, where grave, thy victory
I triumph still, if Thou abide with me…
Private Walter Raynes participated in several major battles during his 18 months on the Western Front, facing death with his fellow comrades as they charged forward from their trenches to face the enemy. In his last letter home, he told of feeling no high moral heroism in going “over the top” into the teeth of the enemy, than to do the thing that was right day after day back home in Port Coquitlam, where he hoped to return after the war, back to his parish.
Ironically, he was about to receive his commission as an army chaplain when he was killed by a sniper’s bullet while in the trenches at Passchendaele on Oct. 30, 1917.
Walter Raynes was one of more than 8,000 Canadians killed or wounded during three weeks of deadly fighting in the mud and horror of Passchendaele, part of a bitter and costly war that would drag on for another year and cost more than 60,000 Canadian lives.
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.
Your History is a column in which representatives of the Tri-Cities’ heritage groups write about local history. Bryan Ness is with the Port Coquitlam Heritage Society.
