Thread by @TuThanhHa

For this year's Remembrance Day, which marks 100 years since the end of the First World War, I have written a story following the paths of a handful of Canadians during that conflict.
Allow me to share some of the things I've learned.

Among the first to volunteer was a lawyer, Alistair Fraser, who enlisted the day after the declaration of war, and his sister, Pearl Fraser. Their late father was Duncan Cameron Fraser, a Lt-Gov of Nova Scotia and confidant of Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

Pearl Fraser, who enlisted as a military nurse, kept a diary and her impressions as the first Canadian contingent sailed to England in Oct 1914 were pessimistic, not the enthusiasm one expects at the start of a war.

Oct. 5: “General impression seems to be that war will be long and hard.”
Oct. 13. “Everyone very depressed. Men all seem to feel they will never see home again.”
Oct. 14. “All onboard very restless and unsettled not knowing what is ahead.”

On Nov. 12, she sailed on a hospital ship to France. “Early a.m. wounded began coming on and all the heartbreaking sights.”
One German prisoner looked like he was 15.
One Tommy had been wounded 12 times. “He said the Germans were dirty cowards and sometimes yelled like pigs

Another volunteer was Alexina Dussault, a Montreal nurse who lied about her age because she was one year above the 38-year-old limit for nursing sisters. Fraser and Dussault were posted to No. 2 Stationary Hospital, the first Canadian units on French soil.

In her diary, Pearl Fraser described treating hundreds of wounded at the hospital, in Le Touquet.

“All men gave the same sad story. Their best men and officers gone and some killed unnecessarily. One of the Black Watch told me his captain, a splendid fellow full of courage, got out of the trench to get a chicken which was crossing the road and the sniper picked him off.”

The wounded soldiers told her conditions at the front were terrible. Desolate countryside, abandoned farms, shell holes everywhere, rifles, cloaks, bayonets laying on the ground, bodies left on the ground.

“The men who have come in during Jan say the ground is covered with the dead and that during December and this month very few have been buried. Some are swollen as big as horses. Many are on the ground their heads on their arms in perfectly straight position..."

Feb. 18, 1915. A trainload of wounded, including 15 PPCLI, first Canadian patients.
“Had another terrible one. So all they ended do[ing] was pack and bring him back without locating the trouble. During the early afternoon he talked a lot. Died at 4:30 p.m.”

March. “A desperately busy month.”
March 12. “Such terrible wounds and ill men. May it never be my luck to see again.”
She also worried about her brother Alistair, who was at the front with the PPCLI.

Though he was wounded twice at Vimy Ridge, Alistair would survive the war. However, Pearl and another brother, Laurier, who also enlisted, wouldn’t come home.
Laurier died in March 1918 when the Germans shelled his battalion's positions.

Pearl was aboard HMCHS Llandovery Castle, a hospital ship on its way to Canada when it was torpedoed by a German submarine in June 1918. She and Dussault were among the 234 victims. The submarine surfaced and fired at the survivors in the water.

One survivor, Sergeant Arthur Knight, recounted that he had made it onto a lifeboat with the nurses but it was then sucked under by the sinking ship. “I saw some of the sisters pitched out and that was the last of the boat as far as I am aware.”

A British navy officer, Kenneth Cummins, was on a ship that sailed by, days later. More than 80 years he was still haunted by what he saw.
His ship was carrying troops to Africa and was under order not to stop and sailed by the floating bodies.

He told the historian Max Arthur that he saw “bodies of women and nurses, floating in the ocean, having been there some time. Huge aprons and skirts in billows, which looked almost like sails because they’d dried in the hot sun."

The family didn’t know about Pearl’s diary, which only covers the first year of the war, until it was found in storage after Alistair’s eldest son died in 1997 and relatives went to inventory his summer home.

The Fraser family shared the diary with Paul Ciufo, librettist for an opera about the Llandovery Castle tragedy that premiered last summer. Among those who attended was a descendant of Sgt. Arthur Knight.
llandoverycastle.ca

It was a global conflict that saw fighting in China, Mesopotamia, Arabia, East Africa and the Pacific. For Canadians, the war meant the Western Front, a wet, cold corner of northern France and Belgium repeatedly gouged by trenches, cratered by shells, poisoned by toxic gases.

But Newfoundland, a British dominion that wasn’t yet part of Canada, raised its own regiment that served under British command. And that’s how Newfoundland soldiers found themselves in the Dardanelles, fighting the Ottoman Turks in the ill-fated Gallipoli expedition.

One Newfoundland NCO, John Gallishaw, recalled in his memoirs that he was on watch duty with a Scottish soldier who had been at Gallipoli for four months. The man said he’d give Gallishaw five pounds if the Newfoundlander would shoot him in the arm or the foot.

"When ye're here as long as I've been here, ye'll be prayin' fer a 'Blighty one'," the Scotsman told Gallishaw, referring to an injury just serious enough to get one out of the combat.

Another Newfoundlander was James Moore, a 22-year-old longshoreman with a heart tattooed on his right arm, who landed at Suvla Bay in September 1915. In a letter to his mother he described the aftermath of a terrible storm and his injury by shrapnel.

He returned to action in the spring of 2016, when the regiment was nearly wiped out at Beaumont Hamel. Passages had been cut open in the barbed wire in front of their trenches, to allow them to pass through. But that only helped the Germans target their machine-gun fire.

“Men were mown down in heaps,” the regimental diary said.
“Many more gaps in the wire were required that had been cut. In spite of the losses the survivors steadily advanced until close to the enemies’ wire by which time very few remained.”

During the night, survivors crawled through the no man's land back to their lines.
The next morning, out of a total of 801 soldiers who went to battle, only 68 men had returned for roll call.

Moore survived Beaumont Hamel but in the fall was injured by a shell blast that forced surgeons to amputate his right foot and his left leg above the knee. His letter to his mother was published in the St. John’s Evening Telegram.

Here's a photo of Private Moore. His great-granddaughter, Stephanie Furey, is a corporal in the same regiment.

The files for the Newfoundland regiment can be particularly poignant because they include letters from the family to the military authorities.

The mother of L.Cpl. Walter Alexander, a 23-year-old fireman from Boswarlos, after being notified of her son’s death, wrote back to say that “my husband and myself tender our humble duty and thanks to their majesties and the Newfoundland government.”
therooms.ca/sites/default/…

Edward Bewhey, a St. John's labourer, died in Gallipoli. His mother, Ellen, wrote that: "...his loss to me was indeed a very heavy blow, yet I feel that my loss was his country's gain, and this assurance helps to lessen our sorrow.”
veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembranc…

John Booth worked as a cooper, making barrels for a herring packer. After he and a co-worker enlisted, his employer wrote in vain to the regiment to get them back. “Our business cannot be carried on without them.”

Personnel records for Canadian soldiers and nurses can be found here bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/m…
For the Newfoundland Regiment, therooms.ca/thegreatwar/in…

The Canadian Great War Project website is also an invaluable resource
canadiangreatwarproject.com/general/about.…

Here is for example the file of Calgary carpenter Tokutaro Iwamoto, one of more than 200 Japanese Canadians who enlisted. He was awarded the Military Medal after capturing 20 Germans at the battle of Hill 70.
central.bac-lac.gc.ca/.item/?op=pdf&…
(photo from Nikkei National Museum)

The story of the Japanese Canadian veterans of WW1 is worth noting because, despite their service and medals, the BC legislature didn’t give them voting right until 1931. Then, during WW2 they were interned.

Some files make you wonder what is the real story behind the man. Here for example, is a Chilliwack sawmill worker named Harry Robson, born in Mexico. But then, he later admits that he is actually Harnom Singh, with a wife in Punjab.
central.bac-lac.gc.ca/.item/?op=pdf&…

There's the five Tyo brothers, sons of a Cornwall bricklayer (the name was originally Taillon). All five enlisted, only one came home. Two of the brothers died with two days and a few miles apart at the battle of Hill 70.

Cecil Gillespie was only 16, but lied about his age. At Vimy he came face-to-face with a German and struck the other man so deep with his bayonet he had to fire his rifle to pull it out. He was then discharged for enlisting as a minor after his mother wrote to PM Borden.

George Goudie of the Newfounland Rgt was captured at Arras. At the end of 1917 thousands of wounded allied POWs were transfered to Switzerland. So he got to wait out the war in a hotel in the resort town of Interlaken.

I found this pic of Goudie in Australian archives. Taken after rowing in Interlaken with Aussie and New Zealand soldiers. He’s sitting on a chair, to the left.
Then the Spanish flu struck. Goudie and four others on this photo died of the flu within days of each others.

You won’t find Alberta farmer Humphrey Charlton in those files because he enlisted in the British army. But Google Charlton and Riqueval and you’ll find that he led a group of soldiers who captured a strategic bridge in 1918, earning the DSO, just short of a Victoria Cross.

And this is one of the sadder documents you’ll find. Private George Lawrence Price of Moose Jaw, Sask., was fatally shot three minutes before the 1918 Armistice was to begin at 11 a.m., Nov. 11.

I shall post a link to the story once it is published this weekend.

Here is a link to the story.

theglobeandmail.com/canada/article…

One thing I hadn't mentioned previously. Only one of the 5 Tyo brothers who enlisted had children. That was Arthur, who died at the battle of Hill 70. The following year his widow died of the Spanish flu.

As a result their son Vincent, who was 5, was placed in an orphanage while his sister was raised by the grandparents.
Vincent left school early to find work. One of his sons, Gary, told me he remembers growing up poor and living in subsidized housing.

Gary is now a realtor after a stint in the Canadian Forces and the Ottawa police. But you can see how the impact of the war rippled through decades and generations.

And here's an article by @jessleeder about black Canadians who wanted to serve but were segregated into a construction battalion.
theglobeandmail.com/canada/article…

By the way, when I was a teen growing up in Montreal, there was near our home a park and a university building named Jean Brillant. I must admit it is only now that I realized he was a Quebecker who was awarded the Victoria Cross in 1918.