But for a chance detour a couple of weeks ago, I might never have stumbled upon it. I was walking close to Salisbury Plain recently when the heavens opened.
Realising I was going to get soaked to the skin if I stuck to my planned route, I decided to abandon footpaths and bee-line back to the car. As I moved from dripping glade to dripping glade I passed numerous timber tattoos. The passage of time had rendered most of the inscriptions illegible but here and there recognisable words and numbers peeked out from under lichen rosettes and woody wrinkles. Scruting the scrutable, it eventually dawned on meβ¦. I was walking through an accidental memorial arboretum.
Eighty years ago, in this bosky spot, soldiers from at least two corners of the Commonwealth on their way to fight, and possibly die, in North Africa and Continental Europe, had carved their names, ranks, and nationalities into living wood.
As I squelched back to the car I resolved to return with a camera. Defoxers old and new, your challenge today is to help me confirm the names and unearth the histories of half a dozen beech tree brothers-in-arms. The first bark brand I encountered on entering the wood was one of the most intriguing. Five paces from a trunk emblazoned with all four playing card suitsβ¦. The date three lines down appears to indicate the tree was defaced in May, The Toronto Scottish was one of the regiments that participated in the fiasco at Dieppe in August, If he was, did he manage to get off that infamous shingle beach alive?
IDing Soldier 3 could be a tall order. Of the handful of letters on the last line, all but an adjacent L and H? Plump and branchy due to their relatively exposed positions, and sometimes disfigured by embedded barbed wire and shotgun pellets, the beeches on the western fringe of the wood, sport almost no legible inscriptions.
