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Chapter Fifteen
The War’s Lasting Legacy: Inspiring Arts, Culture and Sports
For most men and women, the Great War was a struggle for survival. For a special few, it would become an inspiration for their creative lives, or an opportunity to put in place the teamwork and discipline they were learning on the sports fields and on the hockey rinks that dotted the young province. Sometimes, athletic heroes became war heroes, and for artists and writers, the horrors of the front lines compelled them to put down in words what their experiences were really like. For the generations to come, the war and its aftermath provided fertile ground for novels, plays and works of history.
Contents
Telling the Great War Story in Song, Verse and Novel
Frederick Niven
Hubert Evans
Peregrine Acland
Robert Service
Sachimaro Moro-oka
Stage and Song
Broken Ground
Three Victoria Soldiers’ Poems
Article: E.O. Wheeler, Mountaineer
British Columbia’s Athletes Go to War
Hockey Was Big during the War Years
Art Duncan, Flying Ace
Essential for Morale
The Fighting McWhas—Five Brothers Who Served and Survived
The Seaton Boys and War Canoes in Peachland
The War Canoe
Peachland’s Tragic Loss in World War I
Finding the Mark at Home and at the Front
The BC Regiment’s Distinguished William Hart-McHarg
Sergeant Andrew Ross: A Scottish Rugby Hero
Tommy Burns: Boxer and Soldier
Sidebar: From Our Listeners
Telling the Great War Story in Song, Verse and Novel
And we’re all praying, “Please God, don’t let the fighting be over before I can get over there and take part”
—from John Gray’s play Billy Bishop Goes to War
When John Gray and Eric Peterson stepped onto the stage at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre just before Remembrance Day 1978, they didn’t realize they had a hit on their hands. Billy Bishop Goes to War had all the ingredients for success: catchy tunes, sometimes morbid humour, imaginary dogfights in the sky. But a newspaper strike and a postal strike were also under way, not the best conditions to premiere a new play.
From humble beginnings in Vancouver, Billy Bishop went on to play in Toronto, Washington, New York City and Great Britain. Almost forty years later it is often still playing somewhere in the world, a testament to the enduring theme of the little guy caught up in a great war.
That is the legacy of the war, that an event of a hundred years ago still has the power to inspire writers, poets, musicians, artists and photographers. The men in the trenches certainly appreciated the written word. Whether it was a psalm from the Bible or a suspenseful thriller, soldiers at the front ate up whatever they could get their hands on. Books arrived in packages from home and they were a welcome respite from the tedium and terror of the trenches.
The Thirty-Nine Steps by future Canadian Governor General John Buchan came out in 1915, and it was passed from soldier to soldier. An admiring officer wrote to the author:
The “shocker” arrived just before dinner-time, and though, with our early rising, sleep is very precious to us, I lay awake in my dug-out till I had finished the last page. This, I take it, is the supreme test of a “shocker”: one should never be able to lay it down. It is just the kind of fiction for here. Long novels I cannot manage in the trenches. One wants something to engross the attention without tiring the mind, in doses not too large to be assimilated in very brief intervals of spare time.The story is greatly appreciated in the midst of mud and rain and shells, and all that could make trench life depressing.
Frederick Niven
Poets tried to put the story of the war in words that would have meaning not only in the trenches, but also on the home front. While John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” is probably the best known of these, in British Columbia, one of our first successful writers, Frederick Niven, penned a tribute to the famous Christmas Truce of 1914.
In Flanders on the Christmas morn
The trenched foemen lay,
the German and the Briton born,
And it was Christmas Day.
The red sun rose on fields accurst,
The gray fog fled away;
But neither cared to fire the first,
For it was Christmas Day!
They called from each to each across
The hideous disarray,
For terrible has been their loss:
“Oh, this is Christmas Day!”
Their rifles all they set aside,
One impulse to obey;
’Twas just the men on either side,
Just men—and Christmas Day.
They dug the graves for all their dead
And over them did pray:
And Englishmen and Germans said:
“How strange a Christmas Day!”
Between the trenches then they met,
Shook hands, and e’en did play
At games on which their hearts were set
On happy Christmas Day.
Not all the emperors and kings,
Financiers and they
Who rule us could prevent these things—
For it was Christmas Day.
Oh ye who read this truthful rime
From Flanders, kneel and say:
God speed the time when every day
Shall be as Christmas Day.
Alan Twigg of BC BookWorld says Niven was “British Columbia’s first professional man of letters and the first significant literary figure of the Kootenays. He lived by his wits, as an independent writer, mainly on the outskirts of Nelson, from 1920 until 1944.” Niven first came to BC in 1898, and although he was rejected for military service for medical reasons, he wrote for the British Ministry of Information during the war, a job also held by John Buchan.
Hubert Evans
Of the early BC novelists, Frederick Niven was considered one of the best. Hubert Evans was the next generation, a newspaperman who wanted to write serious stuff. Evans spent a few months writing for the Nelson Daily News before enlisting with the 54th Kootenay Battalion in 1915. He moved to the Signal Corps in 1916 and was wounded at Ypres. By the end of the war, he was a lieutenant.
Evans managed to keep a pen close by through his wartime experiences. He wrote some very entertaining dispatches back to the Nelson paper from training camp in Vernon:
Everyone in camp attended church parade on Sunday, including that loyal old reprobate, Casey Jones, our battle-scarred veteran bull dog, who disgraced himself by becoming involved in a fight. No, that is hardly fair to the old boy. Two collies started it, and so shocked Casey’s sense of Sabbath sobriety that he sailed in and well nigh did for one of the belligerents. He dragged him over the ground and hung to the young upstart until he howled for help. His part of the service ended, Casey fell asleep among the men of the number 2 platoon.
The front didn’t provide much inspiration for humour. Evans’ biographer Alan Twigg says of that experience, “in response to the horrors he witnessed in the trenches as a soldier in WWI, Evans wrote an autobiographical novel, The New Front Line (1927), about a soldier named Hugh Henderson who migrates from older societies to the ‘new front line’ of idealism in the wilds of BC.”
The New Front Line isn’t one of Evans’s best books and is long out of print, but it does capture the mood of returned soldiers seeking some kind of solace out on the land. Much more successful was Evans’s Mist on the River (1954), a novel that inspired many other Canadian writers and earned him the title of “elder of the tribe.”
Peregrine Acland
Hubert Evans wasn’t the only newspaperman from BC to join up and then write about his experiences. Peregrine Acland was editing the Prince Rupert Daily News but enlisted in September 1914 when the war was just getting under way.
On his way to England, Acland wrote a rather idealistic war poem called “The Reveille of Romance”:
All come to that gay festival of rifle, lance, and sword
Where toasts are pledged in hot heart’s blood and Death sits at the board;
For laughing love dreams its delight on lawns of asphodel,
But when the world makes holiday it seeks the courts of Hell.
Now Cossack, Briton, Gaul and Serb clash with the Goth and Hun
Upon grim fields where whoso yields Romance at least has won:
For, amidst all the dying there, the battle-flame and thunder
Herald rebirth of Joy-in-Life, the Renaissance of Wonder.
Though warriors fall like frosted leaves before October winds
They only lose what all must love, but find what none else finds
Save those proud souls that strive to soar beyond their mortal bars
And brooding on Olympian heights are fellows to the stars.
The poem continues on—a little flowery for contemporary readers—and closes with these words:
Who sighs then for the Golden Age? Romance has raised her head
And in the sad and sombre days walks proudly o’er the dead,
—But had we served her loyally through all the vanished years
We might have had the cup of joy without the price of tears.
This kind of writing was common in the opening year of the war. Rudyard Kipling, who was to lose his own son on the Western Front, wrote in similarly idealistic terms in September 1914:
For all we have and are,
For all our children’s fate,
Stand up and meet the war.
The Hun is at the gate!
Our world has passed away
In wantonness o’erthrown.
There is nothing left to-day
But steel and fire and stone.
Peregrine Acland was seriously wounded at the Somme and wrote about his experiences in the 1929 novel All Else Is Folly, one of the classic books about the Great War. Ford Maddox Ford thought the book was pretty good and wrote the preface. “It will be little less than a scandal if this book is not read enormously widely,” he wrote on the dust jacket. All Else Is Folly is now back in print.
Robert Service
Robert Service spent time as a bank clerk in Victoria and Kamloops before he was transferred to the Klondike. He became known as the “Canadian Kipling.” Poetry made him rich and in 1912, he left the Klondike for good. He was forty-one when the war broke out and tried to enlist. His varicose veins kept him out of the fight. But he worked for a time as a stretcher bearer and ambulance driver for the American Red Cross until health problems forced him back to Paris, where he wrote Rhymes of a Red Cross Man (1916). The book is dedicated to the memory of his brother, “Lieutenant Albert Service, Canadian Infantry, Killed in Action, France, August 1916.”
High and low, all must go:
Hark to the shout of War!
Leave to the women the harvest yield;
Gird ye, men, for the sinister field;
A sabre instead of a scythe to wield:
War! Red War!
Rich and poor, lord and boor,
Hark to the blast of War!
Tinker and tailor and millionaire,
Actor in triumph and priest in prayer,
Comrades now in the hell out there,
Sweep to the fire of War!
Sachimaro Moro-oka
A unique perspective on the front-line fighting can be found in Sachimaro Moro-oka’s book, On to the Arras Front. Japanese Canadians had a difficult time enlisting with BC regiments because of racism. As mentioned earlier, they had a much easier time enlisting in Alberta, where regiments didn’t have a race bar.
Moro-oka arrived in Canada in 1906 and worked as a fisherman on the Skeena River. He enlisted with 175th Battalion (based in Medicine Hat) along with over fifty other Japanese British Columbians. When he left Alberta for the front, hundreds of people lined the streets and actually shouted, “Hooray for the Japanese.” Moro-oka was wounded at Vimy. Roy Ito, in his book on Japanese war experiences, We Went to War, captures some of Moro-oka’s memories.
A shell exploded among a group of men and created a terrible mixture of blood, flesh and mud. We looked on in horror. There were bodies with no heads. One poor soul was blinded, blood pouring from his eyes. We crawled over the parapet. We were already cold and wet as we slid into a water-filled shell hole to escape the bullets flying over our heads. We encountered dead men, Germans and Canadians. Stretcher bearers were out searching for the wounded. I wondered how men could possibly survive such conditions.
Moro-oka wrote a haiku that Roy Ito translated:
|
Hei o yaru Rhine no kawa ya Yuk ke mizu |
Soldiers advancing to the Rhine disappear like snow falling into water. |
Moro-oka was wounded and sent to a hospital in England and when King George and Queen Mary visited, the King seemed fascinated by Moro-oka. “Are you Japanese? Can you speak English? How is your wound? When did you join the Canadian Army?”
Stage and Song
An interview with John Gray
The story of flying ace Billy Bishop as told and performed by John Gray and Eric Peterson brought this Canadian hero to a new generation. Billy Bishop Goes to War was launched at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in 1978. Here’s Mark’s conversation with John Gray.
Mark Forsythe: How did you immerse yourself in the Billy Bishop story?
John Gray: Way back then, we were interested in Canadian heroes because we hadn’t really heard of a lot of them. They weren’t being taught in school, nobody knew about them, and there was this general assumption that they weren’t very interesting. And so, the actor Eric Peterson came across this book that Bishop wrote himself between his two tours of duty, and we thought either this guy was a homicidal maniac or there is something about Canadians that we don’t really explore very much. Of the top ten air aces, six of them were Canadian. The Canadian contribution to that war effort was so far beyond anything that our population would have justified, the whole idea of Canadians as a sort of pacific people that don’t fight was certainly belied by these guys.
Mark: If you could go back to the seat at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, what was it like to roll Billy Bishop out for the first time?
John: We were totally unconfident that anyone would be the least bit interested because he was unknown by then. I think Pierre Berton did some things on television on him, but just little snippets of his statistics. We had no confidence whatsoever that the people in British Columbia would give a damn.
Mark: And what was the initial reaction to it?
John: The initial reaction was just a slow buildup. We had a simultaneous newspaper strike and a post office strike. It wasn’t ideal to get the word out! We blamed it on that when we would start with 40 percent houses, and after two weeks we were selling out like crazy. But that became the rule as we toured all over Canada: the first or second performance would be 40 percent houses, and then by the end it would be packed out. It just seemed to catch on by word of mouth.
Mark: This was after the anti-war movement of the sixties and early seventies. Who did you notice in the audience?
John: There were lots of First World War vets alive then. Don MacLaren—another BC ace from North Vancouver—he came. He was pretty deaf but he was that fighter-pilot size, a bantam size that most of them seemed to have. And we would get a lot of World War II guys as well. One of the things that we felt very strongly was the anti-war movement, when it spread over to the notion that not only is war a bad thing, which is a little like saying cancer’s a bad thing. But to go on and say that the guys that fought then were deluded or stupid, that kind of characterization was really wrong. Second World War vets were kind of grateful that somebody actually bothered to get the details right, what it was like to be there. Not knowing how it was going to turn out.
We tend to treat both world wars as though they were scheduled to be over in 1918 or 1945. They weren’t. As far as people were concerned at the time, that was life—that was the rest of their lives, and for many of them it was. And so we’d go backstage after the show and these guys who are vice-presidents of oil companies or transportation companies, they’d be coming in and telling us their own stories with their arms stretched out like kids behind them as though they were planes. It was really kind of touching.
Mark: And as a performer, what was it like playing to someone who had experienced the front—what are you thinking as you’re going through your performance?
John: For the first while we felt a little embarrassed. Here we were portraying something, and the biggest danger that we faced was that we might not get sufficient applause. So we felt a bit shallow. But their generosity was unbelievable. Even years later, when we were doing the show in remounts, we’d have people who flew jet fighters in Korea who’d come back. That was almost the best part of it. Sometimes it would be guys who were in the trenches. One guy claimed to have seen him [Bishop]; he was at Passchendaele and he got into the RAF as a mechanic because as he put it “I got tired of the mud.” They’re very good at understatement, and he claimed to have seen one of Bishop’s victories.
Mark: It strikes me as an authentic connection with an audience that doesn’t happen very often.
John: No, it doesn’t. The wonderful thing is we did it again at the age of sixty-two, the age Bishop was when he died. We had to play him as an old man because we were old men. People came who had brought their parents to the show, and now they were bringing their kids to the show.
Mark: Here we are one hundred years later, is it still important to acknowledge what happened at that time?
John: Unless we really get our heads around what that war was like for Canada, we will never have any sense of how we got where we are now. That was the signal event of the last one hundred years. Before that, the assumption was that in all ways our superior civilization, European civilization which Canada was a part of, was getting better and better. And then suddenly this superior civilization found itself in a bloodbath that was the worst thing that had ever happened in the history of the world. That in itself turns the whole twentieth century into an addendum to the First World War. Plus, before the First World War, Canadians were a bunch of colonial hicks. That’s what we were looked at as by the British and the French—but suddenly they realized that it was a good thing to be strong, to have a high pain threshold, to handle machinery, to be able to ride horses and to be able to deflect when you’re shooting ducks so that the target will run into your bullet. All of these skills that suddenly became so important in the First World War were things that Canadians had. And they realized what they had in common...and that had more to do with building the country than anything else.
Broken Ground
An interview with Jack Hodgins
Novelist and short story writer Jack Hodgins lives on southern Vancouver Island. He was raised in the small rural community of Merville in the Comox Valley. Jack’s fiction has won the Governor General’s Award. He is the 2006 recipient of the Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award “for an outstanding literary career in British Columbia” and the Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence. In 2010 the Governor General appointed him to the Order of Canada. His 1999 novel, Broken Ground, is an exploration of the dark, brooding presence of World War I in the lives of the inhabitants of a “soldier’s settlement” on Vancouver Island. It won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Mark spoke with him about Merville and his World War I research.
Mark Forsythe: Who named Merville?
Jack Hodgins: It was the veterans of the First World War who populated this place, which was nothing but wilderness before. The BC government had some arrangement for these plots of land to be available to returned soldiers. So when I came along several years later, I was surrounded by these adults who had fought in the First World War and had great stories to tell if you could get them to tell.
One of them gave me the impression he had actually dug the Panama Canal himself! They had this very interesting past, which took me most of my life to actually dig out of people, or read about them when a number of members of the community decided some of their memories should be recorded. A little book was made and put together on the history of Merville, where different families contributed their own stories. It was like the second or third generation writing down the tales that their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents had told. There’s a record of them meeting and deciding on a name for the place and so they went through all kinds of possibilities that sounded more like modern real-estate developments— very romantic sounding.
But eventually they decided on Merville because it was the name of a little community in France where many of them had fought.
This really intrigued me, of course. I was dying to see the original Merville and a number of years ago, the cultural minister of France invited a number of Canadian writers to come over for a special festival. I was chosen to be one of the ten people, from right across the country. Having met a number of the photographers and moviemakers they sent ahead of time to film us in our own territory, I got friendly with one of them, and was asking about the location of this original Merville. It turned out to be Merville-au-Bois, a not-too-long drive from Paris. This fellow offered to drive me up there, so I spent a day in the original Merville, was introduced to the mayor of this little place, who told me tales of its past, walked me around and showed me the remains of one of the trenches that still hadn’t been completely filled in. It’s actually a village of no more than two blocks long sitting out in the middle of farmland, and not very far from a number of war memorials in the area.
Mark: Were you able to think why these soldiers who returned might have wanted to honour this place this way?
Jack: He showed me one photograph—in fact he gave it to me—it was a postcard type of photograph of a number of soldiers who looked as if they were camped out in a local barn or very large building of some kind. He gave me the impression that they probably stayed in that village for quite a long time before moving on to some other part of the battlefield.
I got the impression it seemed to be a fairly central part of a central battle at a certain time. So he was very happy to talk about what he knew, or what he was told by his parents about the battle, and we had a nice dinner in his home.
Before I left he said, “I have something to give you.” He went outside and came back in and had this ten-inch-high shell casing. It’s about two-and-a-half inches wide and ten inches long. He’d taken it outside and he filled it up with dirt and he said, “Here, you can take this memory of the war and this soil from the original Merville and take it to your Merville to scatter it on the ground.” So I was absolutely thrilled with this as you can imagine—this is a wonderful thing to be taking home. But you know I got back in my hotel in Paris and started to worry that I would not be allowed on the plane with French soil in my suitcase. It broke my heart, but I had to empty the shell...so I dumped the soil out into the wastepaper basket in the Paris hotel, and clutched the shell casing to myself and brought it home.
Mark: Where does it sit now?
Jack: It sits on the windowsill at the back of my desk so that whenever I’m working it’s just there, between me and the trees outside.
Mark: This all happened as you were thinking about and researching your novel Broken Ground, which is kind of the story of Merville. Did it help you?
John: It did very much. I had long been thinking I should be doing something with this. Nobody else has written a piece of fiction based on the people who settled here or on this piece of land. Maybe I have a responsibility to do it, and I had always been fascinated with the First World War, partly because of having grown up among these people. After I got home and started writing, an opportunity came for me to go back to France to a conference and I went back to Merville-au-Bois, just to renew my memory and to say hello to the mayor and his wife who had been so good to me. But all of it sort of accumulated, and I practically memorized the book of memoirs by the settlers of Merville and acknowledged that in the back of the novel Broken Ground.
[Jack talks about visiting the Vimy Monument to take part in a ceremony.]
I was driven there by a young French couple who claimed to not really understand why I cared about it, but nevertheless were very kind and took me out there. It was the day of the ceremony itself, so there were a lot of people gathered. A brutally cold day. The literally white monument standing up against the sky made my whole self go cold to see it. There was something so powerful in it...and I had the time to walk through some of the tunnels that had been preserved and showed how the Canadian soldiers had been hiding and waiting for the chance to take the attack that was eventually successful—and not so successful in others. A great place, a great moment. There was a moment when we were all gathered together beneath the monument to sing “O Canada.” It wasn’t a very large crowd, but it was very moving indeed. I hadn’t anticipated the reaction that I had. So much of what Canada is now has its roots in that Vimy battle, the sense of identifying with this country, even while fighting alongside the other countries, I think it must have made a huge difference to the way people felt when they came back to their homes. It really was home...and opportunities to create new homes as they settled new parts of the country. Personally I think it’s one of the most important things that we can remember—most important moments, most important events, most important place maybe.
Three Victoria Soldiers’ Poems
By Robert Taylor, Victoria
Selected from Victoria newspapers and one regimental magazine, these three poems express something of the education, values and mortal concerns of many Canadian soldiers in the Great War. The first expresses the idealism and romanticism of some recruits; the second reveals the fear and necessary courage of the soldier under fire; the third, with bitter humour, suggests a soldier’s sense of alienation from some civilians and their misguided concerns. Victoria’s soldiers shared these attributes with their compatriots, but tended to be more literate and to feel more deeply “British” than was the case with servicemen elsewhere in the Dominion.
Born in 1887, Edward M.B. Vaughan trained with the Victoria Fusiliers at the Willows Camp. He was killed in May 1917.
The First Canadian Expeditionary Force
They rose at honor’s bidding
To save the land from shame.
Their names shall live forever
On Britain’s roll of fame.
Their limbs were torn and shattered
By German shot and shell.
Yet still their spirit triumphs
Though strewn in heaps they fell.
For every fallen hero
A hundred bayonets shine,
To guard our red cross banner
On many a hard fought line.
The crimson banners swelling
On every wind that blows
Hold firm the cause of Freedom
Against unnumbered foes.
Hail to the deathless heroes!
The first to draw the blade;
Their lives and homes and loved ones
On Freedom’s altars laid.
They rose at honor’s bidding
To save the land from shame.
Their names shall live forever
On Britain’s roll of fame.
Daily Times, August 4, 1917
As did many of Victoria’s soldier poets, Vaughan retained a romantic view of modern combat, imagining “banners swelling” and referring to the enemy with archaic words such as “foes.” He believed that he was fighting for “honor” and “freedom.” Typical of many of Victoria’s soldier-poets was Vaughan’s loyalty to Britain and its Empire, not to Canada.
Kenneth George Halley of Salt Spring Island, born in 1879, served with the First Canadian Pioneer Battalion at the Battle of Courcelette in 1916, which cost Canada 24,029 casualties.
Afterwards
The battle’s over now. The regiments stand
Shattered and worn upon the ridge they’ve won.
Staring with weary eyes o’er “No Man’s Land,”
Clouded in smoke which masks the morning sun,
Praying a quick relief may come before
Endurance dies, and they can fight no more.
A silence settles down o’er the battle ground.
The brazen voices of the guns are still
Tho’ every breach contains a waiting round
Eager to scream across the captured hill,
To headlong hurl the hostile legions back
And crumble to the dust their fierce attack.
The battle’s over now, the joy bells peal,
And all thro’ Britain’s Empire hand clasps hand;
The platform speakers praise our wall of steel;
Hysteric crowds cheer madly thro’ the land.
But could they see the ground that we have won,
They’d cease their cheering e’er they well begun.
Blackened and scarred, scorched by a poisoned breath,
Stand remnants of a forest dead and still.
Nothing could live before the hand of death
Which fell with dread precision on the hill
And other forms in grey and khaki dressed
Lie ‘neath the trees in never-ending rest.
Crater joins crater where the great shells came,
Amid the tangled wire and liquid mud,
Where ruined villages still smoke and flame,
And streamlets turn to pools of slime and blood.
While here and there, its day of warfare done,
Half hid in earth there lies a shattered gun.
Look near the forts that drown the captured hill,
Mixed with the clay and trampled in the mire,
Small grim-faced heaps are lying stiff and still,
Caught by the blast of dread machine gun fire;
They fell a ripened harvest to the gun,
And every man is some poor mother’s son.
But watch the ridge: a sudden movement there;
A hushed expectancy that one can feel
As tho’ some mighty voice had cried “Beware!”
See from the hostile trench a gleam of steel,
Then high above a brilliant rocket soars,
And down between the lines the barrage roars.
Gone is the silence—nerve destroying screams
Herald the shells which hurtle thro’ the air;
Columns of mud spout up in fan-shaped streams,
Splinters of steel are shrieking everywhere,
While powder smoke, a reeking, dusky pall,
Falls like a great drop curtain over all.
Thro’ the dense fog the rifle bullets whine;
Rattling machine guns hurl their leaden rain:
Wave after wave breaks on the thinning line,
Rolling away to form and charge again,
While thro’ this hellish music loudly runs
The never ending thunder of the guns.
Crowded and close the wavering advance
Crouches to bursts of shrapnel overhead.
Down thro’ their ranks the high explosives dance.
Hell’s imps and outcasts dancing for the dead,
All wreathed in smoke that ghoulish ballet there,
Mocks these poor wrecks who lie too still to care.
Grumbling and slow the thunder dies away
Like some gorged beast by slaughter satisfied.
Slowly the smoke lifts and the light of day
Floods to the ridge where countless men have died.
Look, you of England, see them lying there,
Stout, stalwart sons your Empire ill could spare…
Daily Colonist, March 13, 1918
Like Vaughan, Halley could not avoid using archaic romantic words such as “legions” but he also described realistically the nature of combat in the Great War. The poem comes closer than almost any other piece of verse published in Victoria during the war to giving a real sense of a modern battlefield.
Moreover, he expresses a sense of identity with the enemy which was not uncommon among Canadian servicemen; that is, “forms in gray [the colour of the German uniforms] and khaki.”
Like Vaughan, he was proud to be “British” and identified with the British Empire.
An untitled poem by Private John Mynott suggests that, while perhaps fighting for “honor” and “freedom,” many a Victoria soldier had more mundane concerns. Like most Canadian soldiers, he did not support the prohibition of alcohol sales. Training at the Willows Camp in Victoria, thirty-year-old Mynott proposed a pithy toast:
Here’s to a temperance supper
With water in glasses tall,
And coffee and tea to end with—
And me not there at all.
Western Scot, January 26, 1916
The Canucks’ daily tot of rum gave him warmth in damp cold trenches, a temporary sense of well-being and a brief surge of courage before going “over the top.”
These and other poems can be found in Robert Ratcliffe Taylor’s book, The Ones Who Have to Pay: The Soldiers-Poets of Victoria BC in the Great War.
[Click here for E.O. Wheeler, Mountaineer]
British Columbia’s Athletes Go to War
Young men (and women) in pre-war British Columbia were as “sports mad” as they are today. Amateur leagues for baseball, lacrosse, curling and canoeing were incredibly popular. And hockey was on the rise as covered arenas started to spring up on the West Coast. And it wasn’t just a big city sport. All through the Boundary and Kootenay in mining and smelter towns you could see high-calibre hockey games with professional players. The mountain mining
community of Phoenix had an outstanding team and would have challenged for the Stanley Cup in 1911—but their letter arrived too late. The story of the 1915 Stanley Cup had a happier ending for British Columbia.
The men from this province who went to war were champions in many games of skill. Two men competed internationally in marksmanship. In the Okanagan, recruits cut their teeth racing eighteen-foot war canoes. And others excelled at track and field and mountaineering.
The love of sport continued at the front. British soldiers went over the top kicking footballs in front of them to steel their nerves. And at Christmas 1914, along the Western Front, British and German troops played football during an improvised truce.
Men in search of something to remind themselves of the normal life back home embraced their love of the game. And the endurance, discipline and teamwork they developed through play proved invaluable in the trenches, where instinct and a cool head could mean the difference between survival and death.
Some didn’t make it home. In the Okanagan, that spelled the end of the war canoe league for over a decade. But stories like the ones we found still have the power to inspire.
Hockey Was Big during the War Years
As Canadians entered the trenches at Flanders in March 1915 news from the front was grim, and daily casualty reports were a must-read in local newspapers. But Vancouver’s hockey fans did have something to cheer. Frank Patrick’s Vancouver Millionaires claimed the Stanley Cup in convincing fashion—the first team from the fledgling Pacific Coast Hockey Association (PCHA) to do so.
The One and Only Vancouver Stanley Cup
Brothers Frank and Lester Patrick were professional hockey players who came west to work in their father’s logging and sawmill operation at Nelson. After Joe Patrick sold the business in 1911 they combined a love for the game with entrepreneurship to create a new hockey league on the West Coast. The Patricks built the country’s first artificial ice arena at the corner of Georgia and Denman Streets, with enough seating for 10,500 spectators. A brick exterior prompted locals to dub the new arena “The Pile.” The Patricks wanted to keep fans in the seats and that meant bringing in stars from the east and opening up the game by allowing forward passes, a blue line and penalty shots. Goalies were also allowed to move around. Spectators watching that 1915 Stanley Cup series against the Ottawa Senators were witnessing the future of the game, as these innovations were later adopted by the NHL. Frank Patrick was responsible for twenty-two rule changes that stand to this day. His brother Lester ran the PCHA team in Victoria, where his Cougars won the cup in 1915.
Frank wore multiple hats: owner, manager, coach and player. Frederick “Cyclone” Taylor was a true star lured from the east who led the team with six goals as they swept the eastern champions three games to none (6–2, 8–3 and 12–3). Twenty thousand fans watched the three playoff games, some travelling into the city from Chilliwack and other Fraser Valley communities via the BC Electric line. They paid anywhere from fifty cents for cheap seats to fourteen dollars for box seats—a small fortune when the average day’s pay was about two dollars. Craig Bowlsby described the Millionaires’ Stanley Cup victory in his book, Empire of Ice: “The Vancouver dressing room was a mass of celebration. Ottawa’s haughty reserve broke down, and the Senators crowded into the Millionaires’ sanctum to give their congratulations. They readily admitted that they had been beaten by the better team.”
Art Duncan, Flying Ace
William James Arthur “Art” Duncan played with the team in the 1915–16 season, then enlisted with the CEF. Before going overseas he suited up with the 228th Battalion hockey club of the National Hockey Association in Toronto. He would soon trade a hockey stick for the control stick of an aeroplane, scoring eleven victories with the Royal Flying Corps. Duncan was awarded a Military Cross, and later a Bar to his Military Cross:
For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. This officer sighted fifteen enemy scouts attacking eight of ours and immediately joined in, destroying one enemy aeroplane, which fell with a wing off. He then attacked and drove down three other machines, maintaining the fight until the eight had got back to their lines. He has also, with another officer, destroyed an Albatross scout, which he followed down to a height of 200 feet, in spite of heavy machine-gun fire from the ground.
On his return from the Great War, Captain Duncan rejoined the Millionaires and played professional hockey and coached until his final season with the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1931.
Essential for Morale
When he wasn’t playing hockey or lacrosse, Cyclone Taylor worked for the British Columbia Department of Immigration and volunteered two weeks into the war. But immigration officials were considered too important, and Taylor was made exempt from service. So was team owner Frank Patrick, who wanted to establish a Sportsmen’s Battalion like those being raised in the east, but his professional hockey team was deemed essential for morale on the home front. Other professional hockey players enlisted, including Allan “Scotty” Davidson, a fast skating star who captained his Toronto Blueshirts to a Stanley Cup in 1914. He was killed while fighting in Belgium in June 1915 at the age of twenty-three.
The Vancouver Millionaires won the PCHA championship five more times and went to the Stanley Cup final three more times. In 2014 the Vancouver Canucks and Ottawa Senators met again at the NHL Heritage Classic; this time the Senators prevailed in front of fifty thousand frustrated fans at BC Place Stadium. These days some hockey faithful can be seen wearing the famous Millionaire “V.” The glory days of 1915 can still fire the imagination and hopes of Vancouver’s long-suffering hockey fans.
The Fighting McWhas—Five Brothers Who Served and Survived
With help from Chad Walters, a descendant
The McWhas came from New Brunswick but most of them ended up somewhere in Western Canada in the years before the war. Back in New Brunswick, Percy and his brothers Fred and Arthur (Cappy) curled and played hockey and rugby. And they were good. Arthur’s rink won the Ganong Cup and later represented New Brunswick at the Briar. Clifford was a pretty good baseball player as well.
When he came west, Percy McWha became a star hockey player with the Phoenix Club, a mountain mining city near Greenwood that disappeared after the war when the market for copper collapsed.
The Boundary mining district around Greenwood, Grand Forks and Phoenix was booming in the early 1900s. Boundary and Kootenay mines and smelters were a big part of the BC boom and they produced some impressive hockey clubs as well.
The boys from Phoenix stood out. In 1911, the team was a force to be reckoned with in Western Canada and the northwest US. With the provincial title sewed up and an international cup in their display case, team management decided it was time to challenge for the Stanley Cup, and they sent off a wire to Ottawa. Unfortunately, the team was too late to qualify.
For history fans, it is a fantasy hockey story that has enough fact to keep the dream alive. The Phoenix legend lives on in the hearts of many Boundary hockey fans.
When the war put an end to hockey in Phoenix, Percy McWha signed up in June 1916. He listed his occupation as electrician. He featured in some of the dispatches from friends at the front. This letter appeared in the Grand Forks Sun on January 18, 1918, one of many letters from soldiers sent to friends at home:
Your letter reached me in a muddy little village in France. I have been up in Belgium for awhile and that part of the world is worse than France. My chum was killed there last trip...There are a number of Grand Forks in this battalion. Rooke was wounded and McWha has been transferred to another battalion and has a bombproof job.
By 1918, a lot of men were looking for bombproof jobs, jobs that might keep them out of the line of fire and provide a safe return home to friends and family. To die with only a few months of fighting left seemed even more pointless than it did in the early years of the war. Percy McWha’s new job, whatever it was, did prove to be bombproof. He and all his brothers who served survived, one of the happy stories of the war years.
Percy’s brother Clifford (who was known as Duce) played baseball in New Hazelton while working on the Yukon Telegraph. Descendant Chad Walters says Duce became a friend of poet Robert Service while he was in the north. And the Great War wasn’t the only scrape he was involved in. Before that, he was a cable operator in Bamfield when the Valencia went down in 1906. Clifford was one of the first on the scene to rescue survivors. Over a hundred died, including all the women and children. Chad’s mother once said that Clifford “was involved with some kind of sea rescue in very bad weather.”
The Seaton Boys and War Canoes in Peachland
With help from grandson Don Seaton in Vernon
The war changed communities in some unexpected ways. The community of Peachland in the central Okanagan had a vibrant sporting life before events in Europe interfered. The pride of Peachland was its war canoe team. There were men’s teams, women’s teams and mixed teams—all racing beautiful thirty-foot wood canoes. It is believed that Peachland hosted and won its first war canoe race in September of 1909. The last Peachland Regatta was in August of 1913. The next August, British Columbia was at war and members of the team were enlisting. Some never returned.
Alec and John “Jack” Seaton were members of one of those championship teams. They were farming and ranching around Peachland before the war. Donald Alexander “Alec” was the oldest, born in 1895 and the first to enlist in May 1915. In June he took the steamer Sicamous to Vernon Camp and wrote home:
They paid our way to Camp and also dinner on the Sicamous and it was some dinner—spring lamb,green peas, cocoanut pudding and ice cream. We came to Vernon on the passenger train. There are tents innumerable—cook tents, supply tents, as well as tables and wash stands. All the Peachland bunch are together. We get paid $5.00 per week and will be docked $10 dollars for our uniform.
Aug. 21, Shorncliffe, England—Last Monday we had a review before the Duchess of Teck,Queen Mary’s mother, and Sammie Hughes (the Minister of the Militia) with about 10,000 men on the field. It looked swell to see the bayonets shining in the sun, to hear the six bands, and the pipes. It sure makes a person hold his head up. Expect King Geordie any time. Working 18 hours a day, with 500 of us digging trenches along the coast opposite the big French seaport town, Calais.If Germany gets the upper hand in France, they will immediately bombard the British coast. Just my old trade, handling a shovel. Better eat a few peaches for me. They sell fruit here, but if some BC fruit was here, a person would have a gold mine...
Nov. 21—I will be in Flanders by the early part of December. It’s all foolishness going to thefront—they say it is dangerous over there.
Dec. 3—(somewhere in Belgium) Your humble servant is lying on a pile of straw in an old barn at a farmhouse. The firing is six miles away and the large guns are plainly heard, the rockets plainly seen. Soaked through. Quite a bit of sport on now—2 football games on the 1st and tomorrow a bunch of running races and more football. I am not getting cold feet yet, but it seems rotten shooting a human being. However, that is what we are here for.
Dec. 7—Our pack now weights at least 90 pounds—150 rounds of ammunition, a rifle,entrenching outfit, bayonet, water bottle, haversack, ground sheet, one double blanket, overcoat,2 extra pairs of socks, washing and shaving outfits, as well as other dope we use. So it sure weighs,but we are equal to it any day.
Feb. 3, 1916—I heard from John [his brother] to-night. I am sorry he didn’t tell me he was going to enlist or I would have told him not to. By the time he is here, we may be in Berlin.
April 2, 1916—There are not very many out here who will be sorry when the war is over, believe me. It’s no good and four months is plenty for yours truly. You asked me if I “really liked the life out here.” Well it’s got to be done and we might as well smile as cry. The one thing that bothers me the most is seeing fellows laid out and no possible means of avenging their deaths. Archie [his brother]speaks of several more Peachland boys thinking out enlisting. I hope they don’t have to come out here.
On April 29, Private Donald Alexander Seaton’s mother received a telegram advising her that her son was killed in action on April 14, just a few days after he sent his last letter. The Vernon News ran a story under the headline “A Peachland Hero” that said “it was a great shock to all when we heard a Teutonic shot had found its home in his manly breast.”
His captain in the 7th Battalion wrote:
He and the balance of his bombing party were having a game of their own with a German who was firing flares. As he fired each flare, they all loosed their rifles at the flash. This caused the German to stop and commence to fire back at them. One of those bullets hit your son and killed him. He was laughing at the time because of the way in which they had bothered the enemy.
Brother John was wounded twice at the front but survived the war and settled in Winfield. Archie signed up in November 1916 and was killed near Vimy Ridge. Another brother, Bill, was too young to serve but had a distinguished career as a teacher and educator. A Vernon school is named after him.
The War Canoe
The Penticton Museum and the SS Sicamous Inland Marine Museum are in the process of restoring some of the vintage Okanagan war canoes. Races are being held again to commemorate the golden age of canoe competitions before the war.
The War Canoe
By F.M.B.
[part of a tribute poem that appeared in the Kelowna Record in 1918]
A blearied sun, in a smoky sky,
The lake with a little chop,
A pavilion hung with bunting gay,
And a grandstand packed to the top.
A band had played, the people cheered
And applauded with much ado,
When the starter announced through a megaphone:
“The race for the War Canoe.”
The classic race—the day’s event—
Was the silver cup and shield,
And the Okanagan championship,
On a fair and open field.
So Peachland brought the best she had,
And a valiant showing made;
Fifteen men wore green and white,
To compete with the Fire Brigade
Peachland’s Tragic Loss in World War I
By local historian Richard Smith
Peachland gave a greater sacrifice to Canada per capita than any other town in the Dominion. As in many towns in the Canadian West, immigrants were encouraged to start a new life in this new country. Many of those early pioneers, many single men, came from the British Isles. They were looking for land, gold and prosperity for their future. When World War I broke out, these same young men were still loyal to the country of their birth and signed up in great numbers to defend the “old country.” Such was certainly the case in the town of Peachland and not limited to single men either. They waved their families and friends goodbye as they boarded the great steam sternwheeler SS Sicamous, which took them to the Canadian Pacific Railway troop train at Vernon, BC, for training in Eastern Canada. Having signed up so early in the war, their chances of becoming a casualty were greatly increased.
Certainly through the war the CPR telegraphs arrived with terrible news for the local population and at the same time letters home were arriving at the little post office. Slowly as the war progressed some of the wounded returned home to tell tales of trench horror, and some to say nothing, as the experience was best put out of the mind.
To honour their citizens who made the supreme sacrifice, a cenotaph on a boulevard was created, duly engraved. The mayor planted a memorial maple tree at the intersection of the two main roads in town. In 1919 the Governor General of Canada arrived to honour the veterans and open the local fall fair. Two other Governors General would come in 1948 and 1951 to do the same, Alexander of Tunis and Vincent Massey. In recent years the cenotaph was moved and rededicated, and the maple tree was cut down, not to be replaced.
In August 2013, a memorial Paddle Festival honoured our war canoe team members who put their paddles down in 1914 and took up arms instead, never to paddle again.
Local citizens do turn out in very large numbers for the annual November Remembrance Day ceremony, as they always have since World War I.
Finding the Mark at Home and at the Front
The Okanagan’s Allan Brooks: Rifleman and Renowned Ornithologist
Allan Brooks was born in India in 1869 where his father, who was an engineer on the Indian Railways, shared his love of ornithology. The family came to Canada when Brooks was twelve and moved to Chilliwack, where he began his extensive private collection of bird specimens.
In 1899, Brooks moved to Okanagan Landing and built a reputation as an illustrator and big-game hunter. Along the way, he illustrated Birds of Washington and Birds of California.
Before the outbreak of war in 1914, he went to England as a member of the Canadian Rifle Team to compete at Bisley. He was still in England when war broke out but came back to Canada to sign up because of his militia connections. Brooks returned to England with the 9th Battalion of the first contingent. He was forty-five and was quickly made a captain and then major while serving in France. Brooks was mentioned in dispatches three times and received the Distinguished Service Order, eventually becoming chief instructor at the Second Army sniping, observation and scouting school.
His DSO citation read:
For conspicuous gallantry in the operations of 2nd and 3rd September in front of Arras. As brigade observing officer he showed great daring and initiative, pushing forward at all times with the most advanced troops under the heaviest fire. Taking a wire with him, he kept brigade headquarters well informed of the situation, and enabled the commander to make decisions that saved many lives. When the enemy were retiring he pushed forward over 500 yards in front of the infantry and telephoned back information from a long distance in front of our advance. During the two days he personally killed twenty of the enemy by sniping shots.
Even at the front, Brooks continued to sketch local wildlife and record how birds and wildlife responded to the shellfire. After the war he returned to the Okanagan where he resumed painting and collecting bird specimens. Major Brooks died in 1946 and his collection of nine thousand bird skins ended up at the University of California. The Allan Brooks Nature Centre at Vernon keeps his legacy alive. Robert Bateman said of Brooks that he was one of the “foremost realistic bird painters of the early twentieth century” and cites him as a major influence and inspiration.
The BC Regiment’s Distinguished William Hart-McHarg
A trip to the BC Regiment’s drill hall on Beatty Street quickly confirms the honoured place of Lieutenant-Colonel William Hart-McHarg in the history of the Duke of Connaught’s Own. He was born to a military family in barracks in Ireland in 1869 and immigrated to Canada before the turn of the century. Hart-McHarg studied law in Winnipeg and moved west, first to Rossland where he became a lieutenant in the newly formed 102nd Rocky Mountain Rangers. He served in the South African War and then settled in Vancouver, where he joined the Duke of Connaught’s. Hart-McHarg, like Allan Brooks, was an outstanding shot and was repeatedly selected to compete at Bisley. In 1913, he won the Kaiser Cup, making him world champion.
When the 7th Battalion was organized to fight in the Great War, Hart-McHarg became commanding officer, leading them at Neuve Chapelle and Ypres. But it was at Ypres that his luck ran out. According to his obituary, the 7th Battalion was holding down a position near St. Julien on Friday, April 23, 1915. After some heavy shelling by the enemy, Hart-McHarg and his second-in-command, Major Victor Odlum (another Vancouver officer who would later take over the battalion), set out to reconnoitre the area but came under fire. Hart-McHarg was hit and Odlum went for help. He brought back a medic and Hart-McHarg was treated in a shell hole. They managed to get him to a hospital but he died of his wounds the next day.
It was later revealed that illness had reduced him to a diet of biscuits and milk while he was at the front, but he was determined to serve under difficult circumstances. In a moment of candour, he told a friend that he had only a few years to live. Military service had been central in his life and he seemed to be devoted to distinguishing himself as a soldier and leader before the illness could incapacitate him. The famous Brooding Soldier monument now marks the battleground where Hart-McHarg and many other Canadians fell in the Second Battle of Ypres.
Sergeant Andrew Ross: A Scottish Rugby Hero
He served in a British Columbia regiment, but in Scotland he’ll always be remembered for his competitive spirit in rugby. Andrew Ross was born in Edinburgh and between 1905 and 1909, he played five times for Scotland, winning two and losing three.
Ross trained as an engineer and after working as assistant engineer for the Edinburgh Municipal Electric Station he caught the travelling bug and headed for Vancouver. He was in the Canadian North when word of the war reached him. This is an excerpt from one of his letters:
November 29, 1914—We arrived in Vancouver from Albert Bay on the 11th of this month, and have started training...In this Second Canadian Contingent most of the men are splendid shots. At200 yards yesterday A Company were shooting. Twelve men made the highest possible and about 70 per cent of the Company did not drop more than five points. I had eight bulls and two inners...
The work in camp is hard, but we all like it, as we have to get into good condition for the British Army.
Hastings Park, Vancouver, January 8, 1915—A man feels that it’s worth his while giving up his life to save millions of homes, such as ours, from the fate of poor old Belgium…We don’t want to have to stay too long in England drilling, so it is with a jolly good will we go into our drills here. You find that nearly every man has his drill book in his tunic pocket, and reads it up at odd moments.
Serving with the 29th, Tobin’s Tigers, Ross wrote from the front in September 1915:
Our line varies from 30 to 250 yards from the Germans…The Germans occasionally give us a “hymn of hate” in the shape of shrapnel morning and evening. The star shells at night are fine. In fact, if you keep your head down and listen to the crack of the rifles, and watch the incessant stream of star shells, you would think you were at a firework show.
In April 1916 the corporal of his section wrote:
On the morning of the 6th April we were serving together in the trenches. While attending devotedly and most courageously, under very heavy artillery fire, to our wounded men, he was himself hit, and falling over a man he was dressing, died instantly. Quite reckless as regarding his own life, he exposed it to save, as his quick attention undoubtedly did, the lives of a great number of our men.
His commanding officer wrote:
He was killed while doing his duty like man, on the morning of 6th April. No man could do more. He was a splendid character and was loved alike by his Officers and men, all of whom feel his loss most keenly.
Tommy Burns: Boxer and Soldier
He wasn’t from British Columbia and his real name wasn’t Tommy Burns, but he did have some interesting BC connections.
Burns was the only Canadian-born World Heavyweight Championship boxer. Born into a German Canadian family in Ontario in 1881, he started a career in prizefighting in 1900 and then changed his name to something sounding more Scottish. Wikipedia says, “At a time when most white fighters adhered to the so-called colour line, refusing to fight African Americans, Burns had half a dozen contests with black boxers prior to his clash with the legendary Jack Johnson.” During World War I he joined the Canadian Army, serving as a physical fitness instructor. That might explain this trip to Vancouver. He fought a bit after the war but his glory days were behind him. The Depression wiped out his savings and he went into the ministry. He died of a heart attack on a visit to Vancouver in 1955 and was buried in a pauper’s grave in Burnaby.
Tommy Burns is now in the International Boxing Hall of Fame and a special plaque marks his grave.
From Our Listeners
“Joe in 1916”: A song I wrote tells a story that was told to me many times by my grandfather about his brother Joe, who was machine-gunned in World War I. [Read more]
The War Diary of Corporal Kempling: Almost a hundred years ago, a twenty-two-year old carpenter from St. Catharines, Ontario, landed in northern France as a soldier in the Battle of the Somme. [Read more]
A Boy Soldier’s Diary: But Fred, the dynamic, fun-loving brother, enlisted in 1915. Desperate to be with his brother, my father enlisted on December 14, 1915, lying about his age to qualify. [Read more]
Sports Star to Trench Runner to Mayor: The eldest brother, Walker, was killed going over the top, and soon Lewis and his twin, Philip, had enlisted in different regiments with the hope of sparing their mother another tragic telegram. [Read more]
Another Runner: Gordon Stuart Struan Robertson was a “runner” in the trenches and later on had the use of a motorcycle! The going rate of pay was a cool twenty dollars per month. [Read more]
There’s Trouble in the Balkans: Cecil grew up in genteel poverty, so that at age sixteen, he enlisted as a cavalry trooper in the Royal Sussex Regiment to serve in the Boer War. When it ended in May 1902, he returned to Wales, with a still-unsated appetite for adventure. [Read more]