PHILIP EBENEZER PALMER:
The very first family Great War story to enter this archive was that of Stanley Hector Murrell, provided by Geoffrey Murrell who, in effect, set the tone for this site: the unique duality of the War in, the verbatim, transcribed words of the survivor; and the interpretation of that legacy in the eyes of the family’s future generations. If that particular dichotomy was of interest to you, be glad to know that Geoff’s lovely Canadian wife Kathy was equally kind enough to provide us with both a personal interview and transcript of her grandfather’s War in his own words.
.N.B: Philip E. Palmer’s account, detailed to a T in his charming, idiosyncratic, regional vernacular, and painstakingly transcribed by Kathy, is about as accurate a description of a life, time and place during Wartime as one is ever likely to stumble across, and for that we are truly grateful…
KATHY MURRELL on her GRANDFATHER:
“He’s from Dorchester in New Brunswick, a village. His family had been building sailing boats there that took food stuffs down the East coast of Canada to the United States, to Boston and so on, and then sailed back again. It was a very successful business but alas steam engines came in and that was the end of the boat building. His father was unemployed for the rest of his life or sometimes found work as a labourer and he grew up in a family which was very poor. His mother worked as a telegraph operator. He was born in 1888 so this was the 1890s and that was a new profession then. She was a great influence on his life. He didn’t really admire his father very much. He was an only child. Everybody went to the same school and there was one family in the village who were well off – the Haningtons. All the children from the Hanington family went to the same school as my grandfather and he was eventually to marry the eldest daughter of the Hanington family [Emily Wetmore Teed]. They were Hanington-Teeds. They had a magnificent stone mansion on one side of the village. I never found my grandfather’s house – I’ve looked for it. My grandfather’s poverty did not seem to hold him back. He didn’t lack self confidence.
“I remember as a child he was a very frightening person. He had a grumpy voice and grumpy manner and he didn’t show his feelings so he wasn’t good with children. I remember once when I went to visit my grandmother he drove me back (I was about 8) and he said not a word the whole way and when we got to my place he suddenly turned around, gave me a quarter (25 cents) and said goodbye. That was it. He was a difficult man.
“He was a surveyor so he spent the winters surveying Northern Manitoba and Northern Saskatchewan which were very sparsely populated at that stage although there were railway lines which they could use, and rivers. He loved the outdoors even in the winter. He was always keen on going out there and doing this surveying for month and months. But in 1914 he suddenly reappeared in Dorchester and married my grandmother. I think they’d been sweethearts for a little while. In the tapes he is telling us all about his early life, he loved living in Dorchester and doing surveying and doing his exams and he says “oh I forgot to mention the most important thing in my life, that was my marriage”.
“He was a great huntsman. When I was a child he had a little cabin somewhere near Ottawa in the woods. There was still lots of game around then and he would sometimes shoot deer so we were obliged to eat this venison which I must say I didn’t care for at all, especially when it was full of shot.
“My husband and I did a sentimental trip with one of my cousins and her husband. They drove us all over New Brunswick to meet the family and there turned out to be absolutely thousands of relatives. We couldn’t walk down the street without meeting a relative. Quite a lot of them are still living in Dorchester. I don’t think it’s much bigger now because it lost its industry.”
So, its 1914 and the First World War arrived, and Canada was to play a very large part in the First World War. How did it start for him?
“Well he was off as usual to the west having just married my grandmother. He immediately abandoned her to do his surveying when it occurred to him that two of his new brothers-in-law had gone off to fight in the war and he felt a bit ashamed so I think at the end of 1916 he joined up [to the Canadian Army, which did not have conscription, and served as a lieutenant with the Canadian Engineers]. He went off to England to train. Then in 1916 he was sent to France as an Engineer to build railways with other Canadian soldiers. They were placed under the Royal Engineers overall although they seemed to operate on their own. That was his War, building these railways from the main lines into the front.
“I went to Canada with Geoff and our first child in the 1965 to see my mother and my family. My grandfather was there and he started telling us stories especially about the War. We said you must write this down but we knew he never would so Geoff and I decided to give him a tape recorder. We didn’t have time to get one then so we asked my Uncle Court (who my grandfather didn’t like at all) to do so. My grandfather was furious. He sent me a letter saying “if I wanted a tape recorder I’d have bought one” so I thought that was that…….”
Not so:
“…….Then a few years later he died and all these tapes were found. He had done it after all but he never told anyone.”
We wondered if he ever mentioned, at least on these recordings, how his War ended:
“He doesn’t [mention it] on the tape but I think he must have told me because I remember. The Canadians went back to England and they were held in a camp for about a year after the war before they could find a ship to take them back to Canada. I remember him saying that in the camp there were some riots. One man was killed in a riot – He said it was all covered up.
Philip E. Palmer
“That would have been taken when he was still working. He became Head of the Surveyors of Canada”
II. MEMOIRS OF PHILIP E. PALMER IN WORLD WAR I
“My elder daughter, Peggy, was expected to be born that year (1914), around Christmas time, and I sneaked away and went down home while I waited for that arrival for a week or so and then I had to go back. I think Peggy was born (Jan 7, 1915) about the time I went through in Port Arthur. I damn near lost my job over that, I never took chances like that again.
“However, I don’t know what time I got out that year, pretty well toward spring when it started to thaw. Strangely enough south of The Pas (Manitoba) there was a great deal of game in that country and we had moose meat all winter. We didn’t shoot it ourselves but there were people around who would shoot then for us. Up north of there, 150 miles north there was no game at all, we never saw moose all winter or caribou, or anything. Lots of fish in the lakes. I had a short net and we had white fish, all we wanted. An odd big pike would get in the net, four feet long with a mouth like a shark. By the time I would get him out of the net I would be so greasy and smeared with the smell of pike that I have never been able to stomach a pike since. But the white fish were very good. I enjoyed that trip.
“There was another surveyor, name forgotten again, I never saw him after that. I had a party south of me towards The Pas on the railway and I was going up on the train one time from The Pas, we had to go in there now and then to see about grub and pay the bills and that sort of thing. And the war broke out on the 4th of August 1914 and I had papers for him and papers for my own camp and he was out watching the train go by and I yelled ‘there is a war on’ and threw off a bundle of papers and he yelled ‘are you crazy?’ Well, I wasn’t crazy unfortunately. By the way my friend Beatty, of whom I spoke so highly, was shot through the throat with a spent bullet. He carried it for about twenty years when it worked itself out under his tongue.
“I may say that in both these winters they moved our camp along the railways in a car. We pushed the thing along picking a day when there would be no train, ten miles or so down the line each time. In winter moving camp was quite a little job. We used to shovel the snow away down pretty well to the ground, put in a foot or two of brush, and drive six into the peg holes above the brush and put wet green logs underneath them so there wouldn’t catch fire, build up our beds on top of that and bank the snow around the tent up to the edge of the roof and so on, it made quite a job but we took a day or more to get a good, comfortable camp pitched and we had the bo-cook we called him, responsible for cutting the wood and starting the fires and so on and we were reasonably comfortable. Strangely enough the first couple of nights in the new camp were extremely cold. Gradually the brush and so on would warm up a bit when we lit some fires. It wasn’t too bad although I have had a trifle better up against the stove when the the ink froze in the pens so it wasn’t all gravy. However it didn’t do anyone any harm. We had a good time.
“In wintertime the grub was better and we could get a side of beef out to camp once in a while by train from The Pas. In the first year we didn’t need it – we had lots of moose meat – in the second year we got meat pretty regularly. We had the best cook I ever had, the second year. He was a dandy. And I had him for three years after that just until I went into the Army. He was a wonderful cook and a nice person to get along with. Goodness, I’ve forgotten his name. He had a homestead somewhere in Northern Manitoba where he lived with his brother. He was a dandy cook and a dandy person to get along with. He had a little brown Spaniel dog which was as smart as he was. He went into the lake one day, a little rocky islet, 100 feet across or less, and there was a mink on it. The dog took after the mink and the mink had to be chased all over the island, took to the water and the dog caught him in the water and killed him. I didn’t think a dog could do that but he did. There was a lot of mink in that country and we got a lot of nice black mink skins. Cook trapped them. He had lots of time in the daytime and he was smart. He got fox and a lot of mink several of which I bought to make a fur for Emmy which she wore for a very long while. I liked that country.
“I remember the name of the cook now, it was Alf Hall, a dandy chap. I don’t remember when I got home that year, early in March I should think. Among all this wandering and meandering I have forgotten to mention the most important thing in my life, the most important event in my life and that was my marriage, 31st March 1914. We didn’t then know that 1914 was going to be a bad year to do anything of that sort. The wedding was in the Trinity Church in St John, the usual. Lots of fuss and foo-ferah. The reception in those days was not the great hotel affairs that they are nowadays, very quiet and modest I guess it was. We went to New York on our honeymoon, stopped off for a few days in Boston on our way home, and when we got back we lived until I went away in some residential hotel on Water Street I think it was. I forget the names of the streets. At any rate it was the same street as the Customs House was. [St John]. When we married it was planned that Emmy would join me in the field for awhile Two circumstances made it inadvisable, the first was that she was pregnant, the second one was we had a general order from headquarters not to take any wives to the field. So she didn’t go.
“I am referring now to the second trip up the Hudson Bay line, the one I just concluded talking about. I think it was probably a good thing because later experiences showed me that she wouldn’t have reacted too well to life in camp where I would be out in the field all day long, come in dog tired and the only company would be the cook, and a lot of mosquitoes and so on. So perhaps its just as well that she didn’t go. I’m sure that had it been our daughter, Peggy, in the same position she would have just loved it but not Emmy, she didn’t like the bush too well.
“The following year I had a rather dull and tiresome job, a small party in central Saskatchewan doing surveys, mines out of order and a small lake to be surveyed and that sort of thing and I remember very, very little about the whole season, in fact there is nothing in my memory about it at all except a rather dull and boring job. I had the same cook, fortunately, so we ate well. It wasn’t a long season and I got home sometime in October, something like that. That would be the winter of 1915 and we moved up to Ottawa that winter. Emmy, me, Peggy and my mother had an apartment on Frank Street, I think it was, a rather nice place for the winter. In spring we rented a house over on Sandy Hill, in Marlborough. We were only there a short time. Myself, I went back to the field again that time on somewhat similar work but in more interesting country. In fact it was mostly as I remember west of the Saskatchewan River, ranch country, great big ranches, one had 150 square miles inside one fence, and that sort of thing. But it was much more interesting country and I had a more interesting summer. We had the same outfit, I think, two teams of horses, democrats for riding around with in the wagon. One of the horses doubled as a saddle horse when we needed them. I don’t remember very much detail of the work. A few things that stick in the memory: I got tossed off a horse one day, riding across a little valley and the wind and mosquitoes came up on the grass like a horde and the horse went into a canter to get out of the wind and the flies and stepped in a badger hole. I landed on my shoulder about 20 feet ahead of him -broke my collarbone. The good old horse, he didn’t run away he waited for me and I rode to camp I guess about 20 miles. I didn’t know what the hell was wrong. I had a book about first aid. Laid in my cot and looked through the reference and decided I broke my collarbone so I pulled the arm up into the proper position, tied it with a bandage. Didn’t have any adhesive tape, just a cloth bandage. I got into town – I don’t just remember – seems to me we drove the team about 15 or 20 miles, then I got a car which took me to a railway station where I got the train. There was an outfit at The Pas where there was a doctor. He set the arm, really didn’t do anything to it except put on adhesive tape where I had just ordinary cloth. Hung around the hotel for a couple of days, got pretty bored, went back to camp, hung around there, managed to do a little drafting with my left hand, using a couple of milk bottles held by my chin to hold the scale down, that sort of thing, something to do. My assistant kept doing it of course. We moved camp one day, going along a prairie trail that was kind of on the side hill of a little slough, water down below it a few feet. The river wheel of the wagon broke, pitched us all overboard. I was on the upper side; when the driver evacuated his seat, I sprang as best I could on my left side and thank God I landed on my feet in the water. Poor old cook, I can see him coming down now, all tied up in a knot, landed on his left shoulder, knocked every bit of the wind out of him. He didn’t come to for 15 minutes. We had to camp there of course, the boys had a little trouble finding us that night. Water in the slough, had to get the wagon fixed and so on.
“That was not the sum of the adventures I had. After that break another one came along shortly afterwards. John [second child] was about to be delivered into this world, it was August 1916, and it was a long way to town 25 or 50 miles, north of the Saskatchewan River and there was an odd ranch and settler in there and a post office and the mailman went in once a week. We were about 15 or 20 miles I guess from where the mailman was. Anyway, our own horses were worked pretty hard so I hired a homesteader to take me over in the early morning to catch the mail rig into town. And this fellow didn’t use any too much sense. He harnessed up a colt he was just breaking in to a seat and a half buggy, in other words two could squeeze their buts onto the seat and that was about all. The little horse did very well and it wasn’t until we got to the gate of the ranch or farm where the mailman lived. We got him to the gate and something or other affected him and he started kicking. Well I decided that was no place for a man with a bust collarbone so I went off to the other side behind. [chuckles] The damned horse kicked the rig all to pieces and broke the harness and created merry hell. I walked into the mailman’s place and got there before he left. The homesteader type wanted me to pay for the harness and the buggy but I didn’t go that far.
“We had a long drive in. I remember we stopped at a Mennonite settlement somewhere south of the river where they were having a wedding that day and a feast and they were extremely hospitable. They lived in – well they were very intimate with their livestock – the stables were all joined brick but up against each house and it was quite a village – they lived in communities rather than alone on the prairies as usually happened. Anyway the main dish for the wedding party was stew, meat, beef, stewed in milk, palatable too.
“We got into Herbert that night; Herbert is on the main line of the CPR. I went to the railway station and got a wire saying I had a son. He was the only one that did arrive promptly on the due date so I got back again next day to the camp. Then we finished our work there and along in the fall I had to make a survey on the South Saskatchewan River about the point of Saskatchewan Landing, 30 odd miles north of Swift Current, down to Outlook. I couldn’t tell you how far it is without looking at the map. That was the job and the valley there is two or three miles wide, gullies going back from it and three or four hundred feet deep. Moving back and forth as a team is the devil of a job because only an occasional road goes down into the valley whereas the rock is something like that. So I decided the best thing to do is to build a scow. Went into Swift Current got the lumber for a scull and a small boat. I had a canoe with me, a folding canoe, and the cook and I built the boat and the scow while the boys were doing some work around the camp. We went down the river and that was a wonderful trip, just a nice fall, a nice open fall, and there were ducks and there were geese and there were partridges and prairie chicken and they scrub along by the side of the river. The cook wasn’t very busy, the same cook mind you, and he kept us all supplied, we ate like lords all the way down. The scull was very satisfactory. The rowboat which I built – I had a very imperfect memory of seeing a man do the same job in New Brunswick – and it might have done a bit better as a submarine because when you rode the bow it always had a tendency to go down in the water. We had to load the stern with rocks and row them around. However we got through. A good time in the fall. We pulled the scull and the boat up on the shore and I told the farmer we would be leaving them there until spring when someone else would pick them up. However, I don’t think anyone ever did. I remember when I was overseas, been there a year, getting a letter from the department wanting to know what I had done with that scull and boat. I had reported of course the pay when there was war confirmation. I also remember that on those survey parties the chief was equipment; anything connected with horses, vehicles and the tools to maintain them were paid by the department. The department however would not buy any other tools so I built this scull and rowboat and I bought a plane and a saw and other tools, 4 or 5 or 6 dollars, which they deducted from my account when I was in the army! [chuckles] It’d been cheaper to walk.
“I really think my memory is failing because it seems to me we must have moved up to Ottawa in the fall of 1915 after the first year on the prairies. I am quite sure it was that time. Emmy came up in the – I don’t know, I got there first I remember. I don’t really remember. We had a flat on Frank Street that winter, her and my mother and Peggy and I think the following spring we moved to a house on Sandy Hill, before I went away. That would be 1916, the year I have just been talking about. And when I got home I had work in the office of course for most of the winter anyway and the war was getting kind of on my nerves at that time. I didn’t feel as though I was doing right by staying home. I had an opportunity to get a commission with the 7th Airway? Battalion. Matter-of-fact Emmy’s great-uncle was a major with whom I went over, old Charles Francis Hanington, at the ripe age of 68 starting off for war. A grand old guy he was. At any rate we got word that Hugh had been killed late that fall, that’s Emmy’s brother Hugh. Was killed in an accident training with bombs, one went off unexpectedly and killed the poor boy. Shortly after that I joined up I think it was just before Christmas, about that time, 1916. And I hung around Ottawa for a while after that doing some recruiting and then I was sent down to recruit in St John. Emmy and I went down. I was in uniform so we couldn’t go down CPR to the State of Maine, America being then highly neutral, so we went down by CNR and at that time there were no trains on Sunday in the Maritime Provinces so our train being in the middle of winter and terribly cold was six or seven hours late getting into Monkton and we lost our connection to St John and had to stay in Monkton until Monday. Anyway we went down and dumped ourselves on the Teed family and I opened a small recruiting office down in a little shop or something by the harbour. We had no commissary, no way of feeding our recruits or clothing them or anything else but there was a battalion there, I forgot the number of it but they were just ashore, I was a Dorchester boy, [i.e. local] and I was able to make a deal with them to board our men and get uniforms for them and so on and probably quarters. I didn’t know how to do anything at all, I had only been in the army a few weeks, and I never did learn the devil of a lot about it.
“However we got along and got quite a few men, some very good ones too. One that I remember quite well was an Indian from Dorchester. His name was Nocoat, Peter Nocoat. He had joined up before and he got cold feet; when it came time to go overseas his feet got chilly and he deserted and the police were after him and Doctor Teed called me up from Dorchester and wanted to know what to do with him so I said send him along. He joined up again under the name of Tallus, Peter Tallus, and served all the way through, a helluva good man. I couldn’t keep him in D Company where I was because he always called me by my first name regardless, parade or otherwise, so he went to B Company and I didn’t see too much of him. However we had a rather stinking job in St John, had a very poor orderly room sergeant, someone who had come down with me from Ottawa, with no accommodation for our men nowhere to get to know them or anything else. But the Battalion was only brought together on embarkation day and the staff officer there at the headquarters in St John who was supposed to be looking after them, he was a bit of a swine. Couldn’t get anything out of anything, except a bawling out once in a while. Anyway we sailed from St John, in a ship called the Missanabee. She was sunk a year or so later, a CPR boat. At Halifax we took on more troops and so across and I think we got into England sometime about the first of March, about that. We were in camp at a place down the river from London, about 15 or 20 miles down the Thames, perhaps more than that. The deuce I can’t remember the name of the place but it will come back to me. A big camp there a couple of battalions of railway troops in there already, and we got our equipment there, wagons and scrapers and tools, mules, and horses and so on and we didn’t have much time to get accustomed to the lie there because we were only there about a month. We were shipped to France. No one knew any drill, didn’t have to for the work but it was handy to know a little. Old Major Hanington and I were taken out behind the Mess one night or afternoon by the adjutant to coach us a bit. I think there were four of us there, all as dull as the devil, and the [chuckle] ‘form fours’. We formed two deep, and they called the old Major up to take the parade and he says ‘Form fours all three of you’ and that sort of finished the argument as far as that was concerned.
“I must say I was never very much as a soldier. I think I got along all right in the work but I never was very fancy as a soldier. We sailed from Southampton. Got away one evening, got down there in the night, loaded all day and away the next night and into not Boulogne, that port there down the river, Le Havre. Next day unloaded in the pouring rain. Went up and camped for several days, God knows why, on some barren hill north side of the Seine there at Le Havre, forgot the name of the place but up to the horses knees in mud and so on, the devil of a place. Mud was just about as deep in the tents too unless you got in headquarters and a place in an inn. I wasn’t in headquarters.
“However it was a funny battalion and a funny period. None of us knew very much about these things. But we had an engineering major who I liked a lot and he decided the biggest animals were standing and we got a fine day for a change and he decided these animals were standing long enough and we would have a route march. So every mule that day and every horse was harnessed up to the appropriate vehicle and I can’t tell you how many GS wagons, a lot of carts, the whole damn issue, all on a route march and the Major on his charger leading the party. I had a horse well in the rear keeping out of trouble. The Major didn’t have any good map I guess or something but at any rate he led us down one road and turned off to another and finally to a smaller one and ended up plumb up against a stone wall with a great big gate of some big shot there. The gate was firmly locked, no one had any intention of opening it and we to turn around all that bunch by cutting through a hedge, going across a man’s newly seeded field and him dancing and cursing us to hell and the wagons getting stuck, and putting fours up to get around them, the ground was soft. [chuckle] That was the last route march that the Major, I forget his name now, ever bothered us with.
“Anyway we were shipped from there up to Ypres. We had a camp about three miles, about halfway between Ypres and …and Oh gosh it will never come to me all these names, Poperain, Pop, 3 or 4 miles out of Pop. GLC? is the map reference to it if that means anything to anyone. And, we had casualties the first day we were there. We sent a wagon out to pick up some bricks from a shelled building to dry up some of the mud in camp and somebody dropped a bomb on them, oh well, that was the first one. However there were many others.
“I would like to say here that when we went down to St John from Ottawa – John was a baby and went down with us. Mother and Peggy stayed up in Ottawa. But before I left for overseas they both came down and when spring came they gave up the house in Ottawa and came to Dorchester where they rented a very cold house that first winter I guess and they nearly froze to death. In the second year they got into the Maplehurst next door to Rocklyn, the big old house built by the Chandlers, and much better but they didn’t have very much to get along on, I think the allowances were $40 a month and I was able to supply about another $30 or so, my pay was $2.60 a day. Nothing much did happen to me over there but I think that Emmy and my mother and the kids had a rougher time of it than I did. I think so. I think so because I had a certain amount of excitement and change all the time but they had the same dull all around, getting on with damn little and being damned uncomfortable. I don’t know if I ever told Emmy that, I probably should have done but as I think about things nowadays it seems to me that that is the truth. This thing is, I can’t seem to tell this thing consecutively as I work backwards and forwards as it were and now I’m at the camp again up at GLC between Poperinge and Ypres. We were once again put on right away building light railways. I had an awkward thing about with headquarters that begged me to do it but as I say I didn’t like that engineering major and I didn’t like the headquarters attitude so I stayed with the company and the work we were doing was a narrow gauge railway, 60 centimetres about 23 inch gauge,16 pound steel and there were some very sharp curves and that sort of thing. And the drill was they brought the ammunition up was standard gauge tracks and discharged, dumped it into a yard and the light railways picked it up, and took it to the head department for use in batteries and so on. So our work was mostly forward, towards the batteries even up to 18 pounders, and all the six inch howzers and the heavy stuff was supplied, all of it by the light railways and a great deal of the smaller ammunition as well. There was a wide network of them, they would run main lines up and branches off the batteries, picking three or four batteries out and supplying them.The little cars were very economical, in build and so on, they only weighed about two tons, perhaps I am forgetting, but, anyway they were very low tier. You put your shells over the wheels and there was a hollow in the middle where you piled up the ammunition boxes and so on. They were very well designed. They had tractors, one very fine little gasoline tractor, and a lousy one run by gas, petrol-electric they called it, which was, an awkward thing, we had a lot of trouble with them, and a few steam engines follow-ons. We operated the follow-ons ourselves, the little ones, but the larger ones were mostly operated by Royal Engineers. We had to keep the tracks open as much as possible, shell breaks all the time and one crew had a very nasty job of keeping them open at night. They couldn’t use a light very much, the only way they knew when a track was broken was when a tractor went into it [chuckle]. They had a car, one of those little engines, they were very useful. They did a wonderful job. Dandy job.
“Some places, some lines were broken day after day, all the time, we were working up right through Ypres. We put a big shell of caustic and alloy? I did that a lot. Nasty job, you had to leave camp with the mules, around supper time you couldn’t get them up there while daylight lasted or you’d get the hell shelled out of them so we got up there when it turned dark and we worked those mules until it became daylight again and we marched them back. I had to get there early and leave late, it was another 12 hour day all the time. They had men working there in the daytime with shovels and little cars to take the dirt out and we filled it up on top of the mules at night. Once in a while the team of mules would go in the canal and we had to fish them out in the dark. We had a white team of mules, fortunately, there weren’t very many of them and there would be 12 or 14 teams going by. I would sit and count them goiong by and the white ones would always show up. I just had to count them and knew if they sneaked off. If I went to sleep I would have to run around and catch them. [chuckle] It was a kind of a miserable job. We didn’t lose many men off it, not any I think but C-Company took it over for us and they fired a shell in there and killed two officers and 3 or 4 men. The first officer we lost, fellow name of Bill Higgin, a dandy chap but I don’t know where we were when that went on but we went along up to Ypres and laid lines up as far east as [Lingemarque?] and round to Steenbecque all through that big offensive there in July, August, September, October right through to November when finally the slaughter of Passchendale came along. That was the first time we saw the Canadians in action, it was up there.
“It was rather horrible country to work on there wasn’t a foot of it that hadn’t been turned with shellfire. Kitchener wood, nothing but a few stumps left of it. A few batteries in it here and there. Had a line right behind it and lines and trenches everywhere, digging up live shells every once in a while too. We put one line right up to Lingemarque and another one just to the crossing with Steenbecque just to Passchendale. When the Canadians came up the line on the second [?] the heat of the sun hit the battery, 36 I think, and there was a plank road, a road made out of planks like tyres laid down, they graded them up and laid them down, there was no metal, no rock there for surfacing or anything, broken every day by shellfire anyway. We used to work from as early as we could see in the morning until around noon when the second shift would take over and work until dark. Go out in the dark in the morning and come back in the dark at night. I was on the morning shift and I got through about 1 o’clock one day and I wandered up this plank road looking for this battery and I found Lionel [brother-in-law, Emmy’s brother], the only time I saw him over there and the last time. He asked me what in hell I was doing up there and we sat and talked for a while until Heinie started some very active shelling around there. Both Lionel and I concluded I had better get out since I didn’t have any particular business there. So a lorry came tearing down this plank road and I made a wild jump and got in over the tailgate. That was the only time I saw the poor fellow when I was there. He was killed just about a year later.
“We were never with the Canadian Corps. We were core troops attached to the British all the time, Second Army under Plumer, the Fifth Army under Gough and so on. We by no means did all the work ourselves. We very commonly had infantry hauled out of the line for what was called a rest in the Army and they had to go and work with a shovel to rest. We didn’t drive them too hard. And cavalry we had we didn’t mind working them hard if we could get them to work because they weren’t doing very much. And labour troops. In odd times we had a detachment of Royal Engineers attached to us. And another very fine battalion we had working under our direction were the Pioneers, good railway men. Dandy chaps too. But we usually had the direction of these people. We would send out a platoon, perhaps my own platoon, and I might have 40 or 50 men, or we might have 2-300. Labour sent out to work with us or under us you see and they had nobody else to work for them. So I went to the station, 100 feet, tried to get most of it done in a day, you know, a day’s task as it were, narrow grade. Everything was fill up there, you couldn’t make a cut because the country was so water-logged full of shell-holes and so on that you went underground to make a cut (chuckle) you’d be drowned out all the time, it was all fill.
“We had a lot of amusing experiences, particularly with the labour troops who were the culls of the ignorant, the ones who couldn’t qualify for anything else. And the officers were the culls of the officers who weren’t worth a hoot in hell for anything. And they would send 100 men out under a corporal, 200 men out with two corporals, not even a sergeant on parade. And we’d have our plans made, you know, and I remember getting two of these blocks one morning and one had 100 men and one about 80 and I wanted to split them up pretty evenly you see on account of the way we had the work laid out. I told one corporal to send so many of his men out to the other platoon. He did so and the other platoon corporal said ‘why do you send me all lame ones?’ ‘All right’ he says ‘I’ll give them a lame lamb check to pick them up’. And that was the style they were. And poor devils, they shouldn’t have been working under shell fire at all, they had no officers to look after them. Only once or twice we saw officers with them and then they didn’t do anything. And you had the responsibility of trying to keep your own men out of trouble and if anyone got hurt looking after them and all these poor devils as well. And they would flock like sheep. All run together instead of getting down into a shell hole and that sort of thing. I remember one day there were what we call an area shell, didn’t seem to have any particular target, just flapping down, must have been half a dozen batteries working in the area and there was an old support trench back there I knew about and they started to go and I ran as hard as I could to get them back and down this trench out of sight, so they wouldn’t get hurt. I had a shock to find the officer in charge who was out that day playing in the bottom of the trench with his men kicking dirt all over him. We had words. But they would scatter all over the country and that was the end of the day and we would never get them rounded up again. The infantry, of course, weren’t like that, they had their officers of course, as had the cavalry, as had the Pioneers. Those poor labour troops, it was rather terrible to watch them because they shouldn’t have been there at all.
“Socially, we were only three or four miles from Poperinge where there was a very fine restaurant, Skindles, famous all over the British Army. Skindles. Jam, jam, jam, every night for the officers. We would get in there once in a while for dinner. Paddy Gillis, my great friend in the battalion at that time had a rich uncle, in fact Paddy was pretty well off himself and so on. And the old fellow sent him a cheque for five hundred or a thousand dollars. Paddy would celebrate by taking us in there for dinner. And we were in there one night and things got quite lively. There was a bald-headed major sitting three or four tables over, very bald indeed, a shiny pate, and Paddy started doing target practice on him with ricochets off the ceiling, a low ceiling with champagne corks. Oh dear me. I don’t know how much we had that night. Finally Paddy scored a hit right on the bald head and he came over frothing but he saw the row of champagne bottles on the table and decided it was a good show and joined us. We had some good times in Skindles.
“There was a little fellow, an assistant adjutant, a shy little chap and he never got around very much. Two or three of us going in there one night for dinner and for some reason or other we didn’t go to Skindles, it was another restaurant on a side street. And we went in there, there must have been about four of us I guess, got a table in the back room, a courtyard behind us. This was rather unusual as Poperinge did not get shelled very much being 8 or 9 miles behind the line. But they put some long-range guns onus this time and they got one shell right in the courtyard behind the restaurant. Broke all the windows, a couple of lads sitting near the windows got cut a bit with the glass and one badly hit so we got out of there in a hurry. The lady running the place she didn’t leave her desk and let us pass without paying our shot so this poor little Blackie, Blackburn I think his name was, that was his introduction to Ypres. When we started out, there was a priest running down the street with his cassock tucked up to his knees, he had whiskers too, was he ever making great time. We didn’t do too badly ourselves although I walked home without much dinner. I don’t know whether Blackie ever started out again or not, it was the only time I ever took him that I remember.
“And another time we got in there we had Scotch working with us as labour troops. An awfully nice bunch of officers. Four or five of us went in there for dinner one night. We started back to camp in the moonlight, it was a lovely night, big broad pave road up toward Ypres, one of the Jock officers ahead, well he could walk but that was about all. He hiccupped loudly and he said ? – ‘I believe I have been wasting my time’. Those were good days.
“We weren’t tired usually, working about seven days a week. Guy Lindsay, my friend, who died just a few months ago here in Carleton Place. Guy said on one occasion when we worked a four-week stretch without a day off ‘the man who invented Sunday was no damn fool’. Guy was right about that. A grand bunch of fellows really, once you got to know them, our own men. One or two pretty tough characters. This happened later on but there was one type there named George White who had been a hobo and a bum all his life but he would work, he could work, always getting into trouble. One way or another they won’t court martial anyone but by way of punishment camp, dry ? they called it. I forget what he did that time but another time it came under my own observation, this was later on, it wasn’t in the Salient, I couldn’t tell you where it was and the company had just been evacuated. The Germans got through quite a few sets that time and lots of the villages had wine and so on if you went looking for it and Old George, he was off on a work party one day and found some wine and had a five-gallon jug or jar of wine and the Sergeant looking for him found him, a fellow named Nicholson, the Sergeant, a fellow from Nova Scotia, a grand chap. So Nick took the wine from him and Old George called him all the names. He had a fluent vocabulary. And Nick came to me that night and he said ‘I’m taking him to the Officer. I said ‘why’ and he said “I got three stripes up and I can’t hit a man.” He told me what George had done. So I said ‘well I think you know, Nick, George likes to wander around quite a lot. So’ I says ‘you get him alone and nobody around and’ I says ‘you give him a damn good licking. It would be good for him.’ So Nick did just that. And George, poor fellow, was for once on the right side of the law. He went in and laid a charge that Sergeant Nicholson had beaten him and had hit him. That was something you couldn’t do in the Army of course so it came up to the Company Orderly Room. Captain in the chair, George made his complaint. ‘Sergeant Nicholson, did you hit this man?’ ‘No, Sir’. Case dismissed. Poor old George but it did him a lot of good, a lot of good. He didn’t get a toe out of line ever since because Sergeant Nicholson would raise merry hell if he did. I came to like the old fellow later on. How I came to like him. There was a gaudy staff officer all over gold lace one day, gold ribbon, going along one of our light railways, kind of stupid as you are not supposed to walk on them. Old George was at work all right and I had left him behind to finish the job and George was walking into camp his gas mask on, his rifle on one shoulder and his shovel on another. He meets this gaudy staff officer and he says: ‘Don’t you know, my man, that you are not permitted to walk on light railways?’ George had a big chew of tobacco and spat it out very deliberately, not too far from the officer’s feet. He says ‘I built this bloody railway’ and went off. That was it. That story alone was enough to endear him.
“A lot of good types there. One chap, had been a locomotive engineer, a boomer engineer they called him, worked all over North America, a middle-aged man, fifties I should think, and he had the most ingratiating smile and he could get along with people better than anyone I have ever known. We were always short of material to work on so I gave this chap a couple of men, a car, one of those little gasoline motors, and there was a whole nest of light railways going for miles and miles and miles and he would snoop around and he’d find railway material with no-one around and he would help himself. And he kept us quite well supplied. He could go to an engineers’ dump, you know, and he’d grin at the fellow and get talking to him and the first thing you’d know is that he would come away with a whole lot of stores that we couldn’t get in the course of events at all. He was a dandy old chap. One Sunday morning, by gosh, he was out in his usual predatory trips and Heinie dropped a bomb on them and wrecked the car and killed the sergeant and two men so we lost that source of supply. He was a grand old chap. Hackett his name was. The Sergeant in the company, a Pioneer sergeant, built a lovely ornate wooden cross for him, and two or three sergeants got a car one day and went down and planted the cross on his grave in the military cemetery.
“And on the way back – I may say here that a lot of the NCOs had been railway men out of Moose Jaw. They sent over an operating company which was broken up and sent to us. For the most part the sergeants had more money than the officers. So these fellows had to get Hackett’s cross up. Afterwards they stopped and laid in a handsome supply of liquor which they brought back and they had a sort of wake for Hackett in the Sergeants’ Mess that night. And after that any big party like that in the Company, the name for it was ‘Putting up Hackett’s Cross – Again”. Hackett wouldn’t have minded – he would have enjoyed it. He was a grand fellow. A lot of them grand.
“None of these things seem to come in sequence but at one time or another, when it was I don’t know, I was working pretty well forward and one day they put an awful crew of men on me. I had a row, I think, with the transport sergeant and I couldn’t get a horse and I couldn’t walk to cover the ground I had to cover so I got a mule. They gave me the tallest damn mule there was in the company, slap sided beast about 11 feet high as near as I can remember it. Anyway we got the men scattered out to work and as far as I knew we would have the same gang on the next day. It was a good thing to know just how the line was staked, where you could put the men. Whether to take ten men to a station or a hundred, you know. And so along in the afternoon quite late I got hold of one of our lads to look after the damn mule and I went ahead with the staking, up toward the front line. We were ahead of the field guns there. It wasn’t no man’s land but a vacant spot between the support units and the guns. Going up following the light railway line I saw a bunch of gunners dismantling some?, used to make ducats? out of it from some place that had been shelle and they were salvaging some of it. I spoke to them as I went past and I went up a quarter of a mile further and I found a nice path going back towards the highway. I had gone as far as I wanted so I got back to the highway and started back along the highway to a little village called Brielen north of Ypres, I think it was. And my gosh! I meets the Sergeant with two or three men with rifles and they stick me up! Wandering around there alone without any visible means of support and so on. So they took me into the Officers’ Mess in this village of Brelen, the battery was just behind there somewhere. Three or four young English officers they offered me a drink very courteously and I accepted with equal courtesy and I told them who I was and where the camp was and everything like that and said I had this mule anchored down there and they got my lad in, looked at his pay book and they tried vainly to get through on the telephone to our camp. The British telephones are…well…they are a good deal the same now as a matter of fact. They were pretty damn bad in the army. Anyway they couldn’t get through and they were very hospitable indeed and I was feeling quite comfortable and I didn’t mind staying there. And finally one of the young chaps said ‘we can’t get through to your people now and we’re going to let you go.’ I said ‘don’t strain yourselves,’ I said, ‘think of all the three weeks leave you’d get in London for having caught a spy,’ I said, ‘you don’t want to be careless about that’ kidding him along. So eventually they turned me loose and I said I would come in to see them again when I passed. I had a little difficulty in getting on this damn mule. One of the younger officers said ‘you haven’t had any training in equitation’ and I hadn’t. Anyway I got across this damn thing and started riding back and cut across a field towards the camp. And one of the many traps that had been put across that country was a sort of wire had been put out. It wasn’t barbed wire it was a -hard to describe it – a net-like wire that was laid down in high grass to trip cavalry. Well, there was a bunch of this stuff across the road and my mule got his feet tangled up in it. So I had to decamp myself and get him untied, didn’t like the job too well but I did get him untied, and I walked the last mile or so into camp with the mule following beside me his ears going flip-flip up and down. Didn’t get in until about 9 o’clock at night I guess. Had a good audience when I came in too. And the funny part of it was I got shipped to another place the next day, I never went back to that area, and I bet those gunners if they survived the war still think they missed a good chance at catching a spy when they let me go. Never went back there again. You kept being shifted about from one place to the other.
“That summer I got flu. The summer with the real epidemic was the following year but I got cold and flu and they sent me to hospital. I went down in the hospital train which I remember very favourably. The captain in charge of the train, a medical officer, came along and he said ‘how are you feeling’ and I said ‘not too bad sir’. He said ‘what would you like to drink with your dinner, we have beer and we have whiskey. I would recommend the whiskey.’ So I took his advice, only one drink of course. I went down to a hospital near Bologne, an old casino there. I was in bed for a week or two, had some dental work done and so on. There was an Australian dentist who had trained, I think, in an electric shop. Made a hell of a mess of it. And then I was sent to a rest camp at Dieppe. Some philanthropist, a Jewish banker, had taken over two hotels at Dieppe right on the beach, the plage. And kept the original French staff on just turned them over to the Army for administration, and the French food. And it was a gorgeous place to stay. I was there for about ten days I should think and then they sent me back. I could have gone back long before that but you get into a hospital in the Army you have to go through the usual chain of events. They sent me back to a big base at Etapes, the Canadian base there. I had left without taking much kit with me, I just had a pair of slacks on and so on, I wasn’t feeling very good when I left. While hanging around this camp I got on duty two or three times and that was most improper, you weren’t supposed to wear slacks on duty. And a kind of a miserable place, I must have been there about ten days. and then I got ordered to go back to camp. Everyone was terribly surprised to see me because a certain Lt Philip E. Palmer, had come through on Headquarter’s orders, and had been sent back to Canada ill. It seems I had a double in another battalion. Philip E. Palmer. I don’t know what the E stood for but I bet it wasn’t Ebenezer anyway. I met the man later he was running an electrical business in Charlottetown, a hell of a nice fellow. But I got back quite late at night into camp. They had moved the camp in the meantime, I didn’t know the country at all.
“By the way, when we first went over we were camped at Headquarters and later on each company was sent out on his own, a detachment so called, and we moved quite frequently from one place to another. A very good show too when we did move. Anyway, that night I got orders to go out and meet a work party at 7 o’clock next morning at some map reference. I dug out the car driver who very reluctantly drove me out a mile or so to the place and I got in there in good time. All the signs of them having left work the day before. And I sat there hour after hour waiting for the work party which never showed up. Shortly after I got there, as a matter of fact, I was sitting on one of the little push cars they use for moving material on a newly built track. There was a small top on it. There were some gunners coming back, they were taking ammunition into the forward batteries there, they would load up a horse and so on. They were coming back in a hurry and Heinie started dropping some shrapnel and burst one right over my head. There were seven holes in the top of that little push car, I wasn’t missed by more than inches that time. I was all alone too. There wasn’t a soul around. I spent the next hour or so in the ditch until things quieted down but no one showed up so I went back to camp. Got down to the main line of the light railway line, an engine came along, I flagged him down to get a ride – I don’t know how far it was, six or seven miles I guess. And Heinie cut loose again and broke the lines before and behind the engines so I had to walk. Didn’t hurt me any but it hurt my feelings.
“In the first instance the companies were all at headquarters and later on the companies were all out on their own on detachment each one taking us a certain piece of work and working on their own more or less which had a certain great advantage in that if we didn’t see anyone from headquarters it was just too soon. Those camps on detachment I can’t remember all of them at all. Can’t remember at all. Sometimes we were close to work sometimes we’d take a light railway train to go up and we’d fight the Royal Engineers who were operating it to get through and I heard them say ‘look at that’ and I went down to the little cabin they had to see what it was about ‘Look at that Bloody Canadians, always in a hurry’. Yep. The first big show I saw was I think the Battle of Messignes, part of a ridge and they had a big mine under the ridge which they blew up. A thunderous bang in the morning, we went out to get the light railway ahead, a way up ahead of the field artillery and it was a lovely sight, along about noon I should think that day, or early afternoon the guns started going out ahead battery after battery to new positions and running all out the horses going all out over hedges and ditches and everything else. It was a beautiful sight to see oh gorgeous, to see half a dozen batteries on the move at the same time, oh gorgeous. It was bad luck that day. Heinie cut loose again and dropped a shell in the middle of our work party, got about 17, not many killed but a lot wounded and some stupid sergeant or other must have taken the dog tag off one of the men because we never heard of him again. He came from St John, his mother wrote to me again and again, personal letters and everything else and I couldn’t get track of him, I think he must have died on the way to the hospital or right in hospital and no one knew where he came from or anything about it. Lost a lot of men that time.
“We got pretty smart about these things you see. We were building as I said before nearly all the fill and a line would be staked out for us, centre six, two six and so on and I got the men, every man that started to dig and the first thing he did was to dig a hole for himself, lined up where the ditch should be, a hole deep enough so that he could get into it. He’d keep on digging and throw the stuff up on the dump. Well, in that way if a shell came over or anything there wouldn’t be a soul in sight for the second shell. The first shell might get somebody but everybody would be under cover except for a direct hit, except myself and the sergeant probably. We would probably make for a shell hole, find somebody had used it for a toilet just before, but that worked out very well. We’d fix these foxholes up as a ditch, we had the ditches ready made, a bit ragged and irregular but that didn’t matter a damn, kept the water down, saved a lot of casualties that way.
“One chap got a splinter in the backside, it hurt like hell, shouted ‘I’m hit, I’m hit’ another shell broke near him and he got up and ran like hell (chuckles) didn’t stop until he got to camp. Oh gosh we laughed over that. You get used to these things. He wasn’t badly hurt. No one could have done anything for him because they couldn’t cut him there there.
“We were in the salient from early in April until after Christmas, (1917) maybe pretty well through the winter. I don’t remember exactly when we got out of there. Whether we were there for Christmas, I don’t remember a great deal about it, that Christmas. The next one I remember very well. But as I say we were in tents in the first instance and then we got these nissen huts, those semi-circular huts with corrugated iron roofs, they were very comfortable. I know we were in one of those for Christmas that time when we had a lot of officers, strangely enough, some of them attached to us for some reason, must have been 7 or 8 of us in the tent[Nissen hut?]. There had been quite a lively evening the day before. First thing in the morning this old George Whitefellow, George, whom we all rather liked. He came in and somebody gave him a drink. An hour or two later he came again. Someone else was hospitable. Well, about the fourth or fifth trip you know, George’s welcome was beginning to wear rather thin and he wandered all around the tent [hut] he stopped beside each man and told him what a wonderful chap he was, how much the men thought of him and how much he, George, personally thought of him. Nobody offered him a drink so he got to the door, he says, ‘Well God bless you all, God forgive me you buggers’ and out he went. There was a roar of laughter and if he had come back in he would have got a drink but he didn’t have enough sense.
“I remember very little of that Christmas indeed except we were in huts, rather comfortable. I don’t remember when we left, at all. Seems to me, I have a vague memory, we went from there to a so-called rest camp. A rest in the Army is drill all the morning, compulsory sports in the afternoon. After a few days of that I found I had a sty in my eyelid, just an ordinary sty you know. I was on leave so I went to the Adjutant, he was a good fellow, and he says there is a good Canadian hospital over there in Doulens, I’ll give you a chit and you can go right on over. So I went over and saw the eye man there. It was Dr. Ells from Ottawa who later on fitted me with many glasses. And Ells cut the thing off and put on a little bandage on and says ‘now you’re all right’. I says ‘what goods that to me?’ He says ‘what do you mean’ and I says ‘we’re having a rest’ I says, ‘and you know what having a rest is in the army’. He started to laugh. So he put me in hospital and I had bandages all over my head. It was in an old French fort which had been a reform school for girls and had various other things in its history but a great big old fortress. And it was a rather good Canadian hospital and rather pleasant there. So I had a good week there. Finally a Captain came over in a car and says ‘you had better get back,’ he says ‘you’re loafing around here too long and’ he says ‘we’re going to move in a day or two’. So I recovered very rapidly. Dr Ells kept a card index of all the people he had ever served in France and anybody who came in who looked like they had ever been in the army he would look them up in his index. Grand old fellow.
“A few days before I got away I had the bandages off and no one bothered you going out in the afternoon and there was a pub a mile or so out of the town on an open piece at a crossroads in the country. It was run by an old lady who was reputed to have been a lady of pleasure in Paris and when the Germans first got through there she is alleged to have got some very good intelligence through to them [the British]and I think there must have been something in it because I have seen staff cars stop there time and time again. And they asked the old lady what she wanted and she said all she wanted was all the whiskey she could sell. And she was getting good British whiskey which you couldn’t buy anywhere else. And we would walk out there and have a drink or two in the afternoon. She was a grand old girl. Had a lot of fun in her. I’ve seen staff cars drive up there time and again, two or three in an afternoon, just a nice walk, have a drink or two, very reasonable too, then a walk back. Old girl wasn’t making a fortune out of it. The head matron was very strict about liquor and she would examine us pretty carefully to see if we had overindulged when we were out. No one ever got caught.
“However, they come back and took me back and I don’t remember just where we went from there. We went to this rest camp, just where and how I don’t remember. The next thing I remember distinctly is we were up in the Somme, beyond Peronne in the land that had been liberated the year before in the great Battle of the Somme in 1916. It was a part of the country terribly torn, beyond that were open fields, not damaged at all. Peronne was not damaged. And we were building the light railway lines to supply the forward troops from the existing standard gauge reconstructed there. It was grand country to work in, open country not torn with shells at all. We had very good quarters; as a matter of fact the American railway battalion had been in there ahead of us and they built the most elaborate quarters, shower baths and everything else and we enjoyed their absence very much. But like any other good job that is terminal in the army you don’t know what is going to happen. And along that spring came the great German offensive and break-through and we had quite a scramble to get our equipment out. We got back I remember a line half-way built and under construction. We had to scramble to get all this material out but we might as well have left it as we couldn’t get it out far enough to dodge the Germans anyway. We had A Company’s Major always thirsting for a DSO or some recognition anyway and so he got everything fixed, he got the grade built got the ties all laid out, he got the steel laid out and then he made a record by striking down three miles of steel in a day. The story was, of course, the report was he had built three miles of railway in a day which he had and he only spiked every other tie. So we had to go out over this damned half-built track and there was a car on every minute, we had trains, we worked all night long. Oh gosh. All night. When I got back to the railway yard at the end of the line in the morning, and headquarters had got back and the American Company whose quarters we’d occupied also got back. They were more forward than us but they got back ahead of us. They were scattered all over the country. They didn’t go back to the unit, they just beat it. And all their stuff was there piled up in this railway yard, which was much better than ours you see. So, after we found where our camp was we sent lawyers? back and looted their camp, they had cameras and everything else. I wasn’t in on it, dammit, I was tired out and I got out there and I was up all night all the day before and part of the previous night, I was pretty well all in and I went to sleep, I missed the loot. However I got a good mess tin out of it which I used for the rest of the war.
“We moved back with the crowd and it was a crowd, all line services that supply people, trucks and transport on the road and that sort of thing and a lot of fugitives. I remember seeing an Indian labour company in the middle of the road. Indians were cold people and they had more blankets than others and four men had a little two-wheel cart to carry their luggage in rather than packing it on their backs. And oh a parade of four or five hundred passed us on the road. It was the first day of the show as a matter of fact. German aircraft were machine-gunning the roads a bit, don’t think they got many in the fog. Anyway at the tail end, way behind the tail end of this Indian parade, were four fellows, one of the wire wheels on the little cart dished and they were taking a terrific heave and get it out and then stopped dead about four feet ahead and they kept on doing this and that in the extreme of terror and I suppose eventually they ran away to catch up with their friends and lose their kit. It was an amusing thing to watch.
“I remember not too much in detail about it. Sometimes the front line would be close and we’d go back and another line would catch us. One was put in by the French in the early days of the war and I was sent ahead with one man to sort of keep in touch with what was going on. I was very fortunate. I got up in what had been a prisoner of war camp with a tower surveying the whole camp. And just as I came up a few dandy loons? gig tore down from the front and started to occupy it. And from that point of advantage I could see the whole show. Not the men but the artillery bursting and so on. Two German prisoners unescorted went down the road. I could have made a record that day and probably taken the first and only two prisoners ever taken by the Southern Battalion and probably got an MM for it. However I didn’t do that. I have regretted it many times why I didn’t take the rifle from my man and go to hell and gone up and see what I could have done about it. However, that would have been desertion I guess. The field armaments had a very smart officer in command and they were certainly getting things set up. I spoke with him, I think he said the main trouble is we haven’t got any good meat for broth and soups and this was country that had been occupied a day or two ago and there was a nice plump steer over in the next field. So I take the chaps rifle and we drive the animals as close to the stockade as we could and we shoot them. And their cook butchered them and I had stews and meat and so did the other customers who were coming in all the time, poor fellows. Anyway I went back to the pad? And other things may have happened I don’t know.
“The next thing I remember is working on the last defence line in front of Amien. Just how far away Amien was I never knew because half the time we didn’t know where we were. Where we were it was a long open range with forests on both sides and we were putting our trench just a little bit below the summit of the ridge so it wouldn’t be exposed to direct fire every forty or fifty yards so there was a good chance anyone coming in we’d knock them off before they got too close to you. Part of the Royal Engineers putting in wire in front of us, we doing entrenching, we laid out tasks for the day, everyone had to finish though it took them until 8 o’clock. At that time a company of Indians was turned over to us. The little men from the hills near Burma who had been charcoal burners. I forget their names. And they weren’t much good with a shovel, they were too damned short, too damned light. But I got to know the Indian Sergeant-Major, a Ghurka, and the interpreter very well and they were fine people. The officers I never saw but once, they stayed in their tents in the camp playing bridge. Anyway I came to work one morning and these little lads, small and weak as they were, were pretty industrious workers. And I come there and they were standing around not doing a damned thing so I asked the Sergeant Major what the trouble was and he says ‘we have had nothing to eat since yesterday morning. Sir, and we have had no water’. So I sent a runner into camp to get our water cart and Iwalked up the half or three-quarters of a mile to the place where these people were camped and I picked the door of the biggest tent and got a Captain out and spoke to him in plain terms and he said ‘I’m a captain, you can’t talk to me like that’ and I said ‘like hell I can’t,’ I says ‘you get some food out to those people as quickly as you can and I’ve got a stopwatch on you’, I says ‘the whole thing is going to be reported to the director of labour for the Army’ That woke him up and we had water there right away and it wasn’t too long before they rustled up something to eat. They were Hindoos and didn’t take bully beef or anything like that, they ate biscuits. So I established a good relationship with the interpreter and the Sergeant Major who had been one of King George’s escorts at the great Durbar in Delhi a few years before the war and he told me that he was going to get leave to England. And I said ‘what are you going to do, you’ll have a great old time in London’ and he said ‘I hope I shall see the King-Emperor.’ I had heard a lot of people going to have leave in London but that was a new one on me. When we broke up a few days later the interpreter gave me a 5 rupee piece which was a small fortune for an Indian, a souvenir of his country. I carried it in my pocket for years and then I lost it somewhere or other. I gave him a Canadian 50 cent piece which I happened to have. It wasn’t worth as much as his but it was something of mine. They were lovely people.
“Other things followed that I can’t remember in sequence very well. One place to another a small job here, getting shelled off of that one. One job in particular I remember was in a very thick forest, quite a way north of there I think, Wasmeup? I think it was called, very thick forest with rides cut through it for shooting and lumbering. Swampy country and these rides were like a fill or dyke, open, we were trying to get a light railway through there to supply the artillery in the front. The Colonel came down to inspect the work, one of the few times I ever did see him in camp. A couple of shells dropped near, thank goodness, and he didn’t stay very long. He hadn’t been inoculated to shell fire. What did happen to us there, it was pretty ghastly. About half my platoon came down with gas. Turned them out in the morning and some could hardly work, the others looked pretty damn sick and we got the medical officer over, there was some British unit there, and there was no doubt in his mind. He just snapped gas! And the whole works to the hospital. Only a few of them ever came back. I don’t say they didn’t recover but they never came back to us.
“I am thinking now I had better perhaps give a general survey of where we were and what we did. We landed in France early in April, went up to the Ypres Salient, were there for I would say probably the first of February. Then we were out on rest as I said before how I wangled the week in hospital. And from there I think we went up to the Somme. After that the Germans in 1916 cut back for 20 miles or so from the old line and it was more or less vacant country. There was a line of British troops holding the Germans and there wasn’t too much communication or railways or anything like that behind them and we were supposed to fill that gap. We weren’t there very long until the great smash of the Germans in spring of 1918 came along and we went back with the herd as I’ve just said. And from there on after the trenching job I don’t remember just exactly what we did for quite a while. I remember that job at the Bois? and I remember two or three others. Some were not bad. I remember the battalion acting support on the line one night, the only time I was on the line and so on, no continuous picture until later in the spring when we went down to the coast, not too far from Etapes. I forget the name of the little village and they were starting a new railway, standard gauge to replace some of the lines the Germans had occupied, to fix up their links for transportation. So we had a job and a ballast bit and grading and that sort of thing for several months. I don’t remember for how long. It was a very nice place to stay, a good camp and so on. Labour was poor, we had prisoners of war and it was a devil of a job to get a good days work out of them. Of course that was quite understandable but equally annoying. We also had a large labour force of Chinamen who would work all right if you knew how to handle them. And as I say that went on for some months. I think really August when the Canadians got through at Amiens and the line started to move and we started to move with it patching up the damage left by the Germans behind as they retreated and that was our task until the 11th of November when the war was over.
“That was a rough summary of where we were and if I speak any more about this I will not try to put in any great continuity in the thing. I’ll try to relate it to where we might have been at that time.
“I had two or three very good friends in the army. Paddy Getsshoe? went over in the book as we say, went to headquarters later but we were always good friends, went on leave together in Paris and so on. And Guy Lindsay who came somewhat later and he died only last fall after he retired in Carleton Place, [near Ottawa] he was a wonderful chap. Other people I knew and liked but vaguely. Old Major Hanington lasted about a year. The set-up for officers was a major, a captain and four lieutenants. The captain we first had, a fellow named Bob Shore from Winnipeg, a very good man but he got knocked out in hors-de-combat close enough to an exploding shell. Strangely enough he didn’t have a scratch but it broke both his ear drums so he was sent home. And then we had a real good man, a real dandy as Captain, he couldn’t have been better. He was a contractor from Canada, now wait – what was his name, I’m going to stop until I get that name because he was such a dandy fellow. The name was F.C. Jackson. He had a nickname? But he was a contractor in his own right, a man brought up on the Northern Ontario Railway in the early days, had some stock in the Hollinger mine [gold] which he got for about 10 cents a share and he had an income of about 1,000 dollars a month out of that so he wasn’t doing too badly but he loved to drink and he drank heavily all the time. But he was always competent, he carried an awful load all the time but he was always competent. Out on the job with the men all the time and dirty work too which was more than you could say for some of the others. And I guess he got in touch with headquarters or something but anyway the senior Major in charge of staff came down one day, called two of us into his tent and said ‘We are going to put Captain Jackson up for court martial for drunkenness. We want a written statement from each of you about him.’ And we asked him with a cold and stony face that we had never seen Captain Jackson drunk or incapable of not able to operate or not able to take his troops up the line. And there was quite a little bit of a row over that with Headquarters. In fact I think we were all more or less in the doghouse after that little episode. So they couldn’t get him to court martial because there was no one in his own company that would bear witness against him. Headquarters didn’t know anything except rumours. Eventually he transferred to another battalion. He had a small contracting business in Montreal later and carried his office in his pocket. I went to see him once, he stayed in that hotel down by the CNR station, what the devil is the name of it, doesn’t matter and had a room there and the clerk looked at me kinda funny when I asked for Captain Jackson but finally sent me up and he was in his room there. His clothes had been taken away from him, he had no money, he was in pretty bad shape getting over a hell of a drunk I guess. So I went out and got him a bottle whiskey just to ease the pain. And I saw him in Montreal a number of times after that. If you wanted to find him you looked in the bar of that hotel or the bar of the Windsor or the bar of another hotel whose name I forget in another street but you could always find him in those few places. He was a dandy chap and an awfully good man and when headquarters talked about him it made me wonder how many of them had ever seen a shell burst and what they would have done in their pants if they had. A man you were proud to know.
“And George Jewitt in B-Company. He came from New Brunswick too up around Matraville. I saw a lot of him in France and a great deal of him in England and the way home and so on. We kicked around together on leave in Paris. He got his majority, a whale of a good man. There is a story I can tell. If anybody is too polite to listen to it they needn’t. He was wounded, got a tiny little splinter of shell in one testicle. And he started to walk into camp, a big man, 6 foot 7, the biggest man I have seen and strong as an ox. However he keeled over and they carried him in. They got him to hospital and the matron came around one morning bright and cheerful. How are you this morning Captain (or Major, Captain I think) ‘oh he says not too bad Ma’am,’ ‘And where were you wounded?’ ‘Ma’am,’ he says, ‘if you had been wounded where I was you wouldn’t have been hit.” I can hear him say it. [laughs] I saw him several times in Montreal where he had a small business, mostly in cement work. And there were others and others. I’m sure there must have been some other I was close to. The old Major went away and sent a fellow named Coade to take his place. And after Shore was knocked out with his ears a fellow named Hall for the captaincy. A very good man, a good engineer, a nice fellow, a profound poker player. He came down with the Board of Transport Commissioners one time and stayed for a couple of years. I saw a bit of him in Ottawa but not too much. He we go along with but his wife was kind of sticky. And there was quite a large turnover in subalterns, they came and went, some were good and some were not. I stayed on forever as a subaltern. Other people came in, I will introduce them perhaps. If I talk much more about this maybe I’m getting talked out in the war. I am also coming to the end of this tape that I’m using, this is the second side of it. When I used two sides before, why the whole thing became a race. Now I don’t know whether all this is going to be a race or not. I’ll have a report on it perhaps this afternoon if I don’t get bored with the job.
“I haven’t got any good map of Northern France now. I have a battalion history written by the padre who was an R.C. and didn’t have much use for a man who wasn’t and he gave me the distinction of being the only officer in the lot whose name he misspelled. Possibly purposely. His name was Father John O’Brennan? Irish priest from Cobalt [Ontario]. His brother was the M.O. He had a helluva row with the Colonel because the Colonel had a wet dinner and told him to shut up one night and he left his holy office and sent his cousin, another priest, to take over. They smoothed that one over. However, he never came out to the camps, had a mass every day at Headquarters for those who were taken in there but he wasn’t much of a padre for the rest of us. Anyone else if it comes to that.
* * *
“I think I’ve just about come to the end of that tape. I think it is just about the end of it coming now. Yes, its just at the end. Now I’ll take a running jump and see if I’ve preserved any of these sacred recollections for the benefit of posterity. I’ll talk along just as far as it goes. Shouldn’t be more than a couple of turns now. Maybe its twisted, I don’t know……”
THANK YOU
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