THE ORIGINAL DANGER TREE
Standing on an empty strip of land in the Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial in Somme, France, is a petrified dead tree. Behind its wizened trunk lies the story that inspired The Danger Tree. As the last tree to survive battle on this stretch of No Man’s Land, the Danger Tree was rooted approximately halfway between the British and German frontlines. When the 800 men of the Newfoundland Regiment were ordered over the top at 7.30am on July 1st, 1916, it was used as a marker for men to pass through the wire and make an assault on the German line.
30 minutes later only 67 men had survived the onslaught. The bodies of the fallen lay uncollected in the summer heat until November 18th that year.
The repercussions for Newfoundland – at that time a British colony – were enormous. By the end of the war, the country had lost so many of its young men that it was unable to repopulate its industries and entered bankruptcy before becoming a province of Canada. After struggling to articulate the devastating loss caused by World War One, Scarlett and Marc felt that this story was a worthy title for the exhibition. Not only did it encapsulate the grief and violence of battle, but it also symbolised the intrinsic message of The Danger Tree : our soldiers’ stories will never be forgotten.
Aware of the impending attack, the Germans trained their machine guns on the location, and by the time the retreat was called
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker