It's a strange thing how seemingly unrelated places and events can go for years without being apparent and then suddenly coalesce to become a whole.
Several years ago, on a trip to Canada, in the wake of my wife's interminable quest to seek out bargains wherever they may be found { the economies of several small countries are still recovering } I absent-mindedly noticed a shop called Bowrings.  There was a logo of a sailing ship alongside the wording.  Having nothing better to do, and in a short intermezzo from signing cheques, I asked the shop assistant { who was exceedingly pretty, by the way } the reason for the sailing-ship logo and unlike some shop persons I have come across who are hard-pressed to tell me the price of a loaf, she was happy and proud to divulge her knowledge.  It seems that a certain Mr Bowring had sailed from Liverpool and set up as a merchant adventurer in Newfoundland in the 1800's and having become very successful formed a chain of shops.  As the conversation unfolded, I became more intrigued and one or two cogs began to turn ----- first of all Liverpool is my home town, secondly I once worked in a park named Bowring and lastly the name Bowring resonates throughout Liverpool in street names and so on.  Anyway, the shop assistant { who I had fallen deeply in love with by this time } said that Bowring had sold his chain of shops and the firm she worked for had bought the chain and retained the name.  I asked her if she would run away with me but she turned me down so I reluctantly went back to destroying the basal economic structure of Toronto { you have to start small in a big place like Canada }.

When I returned home I did some research and found the story of the Bowring dynasty far more epic and complex than can be recounted here but some of the facts are; the indefatigable Benjamin Bowring had indeed sailed for Newfoundland in 1811and set up a shipping, sealing and trading company which became extremely successful.  The company went in for ship owning as the years went by and one of their ships became world famous.  The Terra Nova was sold to the British Admiralty for the specific job of accompanying Scott to Antarctica in 1912 and she performed so admirably that Scott went on record to say that he grew very fond of the ship.

The Terra Nova in Antarctica 1912
764-ton whaler built in Dundee in 1884
 

By this time, the Bowrings had made Newfoundland their home and in keeping with many Victorian Colonials they sculpted their surroundings into something resembling their English homeland.  They purchased a farm and shaped and moulded the landscape into the nearest thing they could get to an English estate and today there is I believe { Although I haven't seen it } a Bowring Park in St. Johns bequeathed to Newfoundland in 1911.  Over the years, the Bowrings added to the park with gifts of bridges and lakes and not least, statues.  There is a statue of Peter Pan by Frampton which is a duplicate of one in Sefton Park, Liverpool which is in turn a copy of the famous original in Kensington Gardens, London.  Frampton liked the Newfoundland Peter Pan best of all  - he thought the woodland setting was most in keeping. 
Over the years, the Bowring's became a dynasty and Benjamin Bowring's family still retain an active interest in their family homes in Liverpool and in Newfoundland.  Benjamin's grandson, Sir Edgar Bowring added several features to the park in St. Johns but none more personal and poignant than the memorial to his granddaughter Betty Munn.  Betty sailed with her father on the S.S. Florizel in 1918 and both were drowned when the ship went down in a storm.  The memorial is in the form of fairy tracing the name of Betty Munn engraved in the bronze and is placed on the spot where the four year old spent happy hours playing.
Apart from other statues in the Park, namely The Fighting Newfoundlander and artillery pieces from the period, there is also a beautiful rendition of a caribou, the national symbol of Newfoundland. 
The Woodland Caribou was designed by Rudolph Cochius and sculpted by Basil Gotto. 

When the First World War broke out, Newfoundlanders would have had every reason to believe that it was an event as remote as something on Mars, but Canadians and Newfoundlanders volunteered in droves and perhaps an allegiance to Benjamin Bowring and those like him had an influence in those decisions.  Whatever it was, patriotism, loyalty, call it what you will  --- it is the reason why there is also a Woodland Caribou in a field in France, 3500 miles away from its homeland.

Many years ago I worked with a Welshman who was "on the Somme".  He knew about minnenwerfers{ moaning minnies he called them }and he detested barbed wire { it was underwater at Gallipoli } and he had thrown up the first time he had to bayonet a man, but according to him the worst things were the lice and the mud. Even after all these years the phrase " just like the Somme" is in common usage in the UK and everyone knows that it means a quagmire or a tortuous slog through mud.
On the face of it, the battle of the Somme should have been one of the greatest victories in the history of the British army but "the best laid plans of mice and men" might have been written specifically for this battle. The plan was simple enough ; for 5 days and nights Rawlinson's artillery sent a rain of shells down upon the German trenches from Serre in the north to Chaulnes in the south , a distance of 25 miles in length and 15 miles in depth. The rumble of the guns could be heard across the Channel. The idea was that the barbed wire would be torn to ribbons, the German trench system would be destroyed and most of the defending Germans with it ; any that survived would be so traumatised that they would be only too willing to surrender. The very reasonable assumption that nothing on earth could withstand such a bombardment was the fatal flaw in the plan and led to the battle dragging on for over 4 months and the worst casualties ever inflicted upon a British army. Even though many of the shells were duds, even though many exploded prematurely and even though the barbed wire was too flexible to be cut but instead ended up twisted into an even more thorny barrier; and even though the shelling had made the ground difficult to cross with any speed, the plan should still have worked.
But what nobody knew was that the Germans who had been digging in for two years had in that time devised a trench system so complex that the labyrinth of tunnels was impervious to most of the shelling. Some of the trenches were an incredible 40 feet deep and the German training centred upon hiding from the barrages and then manning their fire-walls with machine guns within 3 minutes of cessation. There were very few occasions in World War 1 when the British infantry advanced without facing a hail of machine gun bullets but the Somme was the one time when the whole front walked into No-Man's Land with the confidence that the enemy had been destroyed { some even kicked footballs as they advanced }. The result was a massacre unprecedented in British military history.

On July 1st, 1916, the Newfoundland Regiment, volunteers all, found themselves at the northern tip of the Somme front; only Serre divided them from the channel. The attackers at Serre had an even more impossible job than that of the 1st Newfoundland Regiment , attacking entrenched machine guns up a steep hill. Walking up it in the middle of summer with the birds singing is hard enough so it is difficult to imagine how anyone could have stormed through a hail of machine gun bullets toting a 30 lb pack. Most of the Serre attackers are still at the base of the hill in the enclosed cemetery next to their shallow trenches.

The Newfoundlanders were facing their first battle on French soil. They were well trained and fit and anxious to prove their worth. Their experience at Beaumont-Hamel was to be a devastating microcosm of what occurred along much of the Somme front that day. The massive Hawthorn mine had exploded on their left, the barrage had finally ceased and the whistle blew to advance into No-Man's Land at 9.16 am. The distance to the German trenches was about 300 m and within a half hour 710 Newfoundlanders were lying dead all over that field. The German machine gunners had emerged unscathed from their trenches and carried out their work with an ease and efficiency which made a mockery of all the British preparations.

In terms relative to the overall casualties the Newfoundland losses were small but given that the population of Newfoundland is about 300,000 souls then the loss was prodigious and keenly felt back home.  The Newfoundlanders have never forgotten those who fell at Beaumont-Hamel and in 1925 the battlefield was turned into a memorial park. Today it is quite a pleasant place with the Woodland Caribou overlooking the field surrounded by plants native to Newfoundland. The British trenches have been restored but they in no way resemble the muddy jumping off points of 90 years ago. No-Man's Land is a stroll across a pitted landscape where sheep keep the grass short but there is one particular shell hole which is so deep as to be difficult to climb out of on a warm day in Summer and the stories of soldiers drowning in trenches are not difficult to believe if this is typical of the depths they reached. The Newfoundlanders were particularly unfortunate when they were ordered to that particular place on that particular day because the German trenches were and still are 40 ft deep here. Not one soldier reached the German trenches then and even now they are barricaded off with warning signs everywhere.

" See that little stream".  We could walk it in two minutes.
It took the British a whole month to walk to it ----- a whole
Empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing
forward behind.  And another Empire walked very slowly
backwards a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million
bloody rugs."

Dick Diver's observations on visiting a trench at Beaumont-Hamel
in F. Scott. Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night.

" If you could hear at every jolt, the blood Come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs My friend you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory The old lie ; Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori. ."

Wilfred Owen after a gas attack on the Western Front .