The Forgotten Names Spring in Yarmouth, a breeze from the harbour crossed through Frost Park to the war memorial. The soldier stood before it, studying the rows of names etched into the stone, each one belonging to a son, a brother, a friend lost to war. He searched, eyes scanning carefully. He had expected to find his name here, among those who had fallen in the Great War. Surely, someone remembered him. Surely, his sacrifice had not faded into the quiet oblivion of history. But his name was not there. Did no one recall the fifteen-year-old boy who ran through these streets, who laughed with friends outside the schoolhouse, who sat in the pews of his church? Had time washed him away, as if he had never belonged? He thought of Halifax, where he had enlisted at nineteen, where the weight of duty pressed upon his shoulders. He thought of the SS Olympic, the vast ocean carrying him toward war. He thought of France, of the cold, of the fear, of the crest of Vimy Ridge where his life had ended in a hail of machine gun fire. At first, the absence of his own name had been a sharp pang, a quiet wound. But as his gaze traced the carved letters, that ache deepened into something heavier. It wasn’t just him. So many were missing, forty names perhaps more. Boys from this county, names that should have been etched here alongside the others. Boys who had marched into war with the same naive hope, the same quiet fear, the same unwavering resolve. Some had perished in battle, swallowed by the mud and chaos of the trenches. Others had survived only to succumb to the lingering injuries and illnesses of war long after the guns had quieted and the unveiling of the monument in 1923. And yet, when the town gathers each November to remember and lay wreaths at the base of the monument, their names remain unspoken, their sacrifice unmarked. Does anyone notice? Does anyone stand in the shadow of this monument, staring at the stone, feeling the same emptiness he did now? Does anyone press fingers against the cold rock, searching for names that were never there? He felt something close to sorrow. He had known war, felt its cold grip in the trenches of France. He had bled for the soil that bore this monument. And now, he felt the sting of erasure, not just his own, but all of theirs. They deserved remembrance. He stepped back, his gaze drifting beyond the stone, toward the town he had once known. It had changed, new buildings where old ones had stood, cars on the main street instead of carriages. Maybe the town had not meant to forget. Maybe the passing years had simply blurred the edges of history, sweeping away details in the quiet march of progress. Maybe they did not know his name or the names of others, but they remembered, just as they remembered all who had fallen. Still, perhaps he and the others remained. Not in stone, not in formal inscriptions, but in the hearts of those who still cared, in the hands that placed wreaths at the foot of the monument, in the slow steps of those who paused before it, in those that brushed against the names that had been recorded. And perhaps, in moments like this, in the quiet remembrance of the lost, he and the others were also remembered. The story “The Forgotten Names” is written in remembrance of Jack Merritt Wheaton, born in Yarmouth in 1898 and killed in action at Vimy Ridge on April 9, 1917 at the age of 20.