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Soldiers

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A Family of Brothers
J Brent Wilson
Goose Lane Editions/
Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society

University of New Brunswick history professor J Brent Wilson’s contribution to the growing body of literature about the First World War is well timed to take advantage of the interest the centennial of the end of that war has generated. Published as Volume 25 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series, A Family of Brothers recounts the story of the 26th New Brunswick Battalion, an apt subject indeed.

The 26th was the first infantry battalion raised in the province and the only one of nine recruited there (one of them jointly with Prince Edward Island) to fight on the Western Front in France and Flanders.

The story of this unit has been told before, most recently in New Brunswick’s “Fighting 26th”: A History of the 26th New Brunswick Battalion, CEF, 1914-1919, published in 1994. Wilson’s approach is different from that of this regimental history, as he wanted to provide an in-depth examination of the soldiers who made up the battalion.

The result is a story “about how ordinary men, many of them young, unmarried, and living at home when they enlisted, found a place in history and experienced one of the greatest and most tragic events of modern times.”

It is an ambitious goal, as by the end of the war an astonishing 5,719 soldiers had served in the unit. This may explain why the book is considerably longer than most other volumes in the series.

In any case, this number is in keeping with other Canadian infantry battalions that fought on the Western Front, especially those that were part of the first two divisions to see combat: 1st and 2nd Canadian Infantry Divisions (the 26th served in 2nd Division).

Another major difference in Wilson’s approach to the story is his sources. In addition to standard primary and secondary documents, he relies heavily on letters, diaries and the few post-war memoirs written by soldiers who served in the battalion. Yet, as Wilson admits, “some important parts of the story are either missing or underreported, mainly because the records do not exist.”

Using a chronological format, Wilson takes the reader through the formation of the battalion in late fall of 1914, followed by a lengthy period of training in New Brunswick and Britain until mid-September 1915, when it deployed to the Western Front and fought there until the end of the war. A final chapter recounts a little-known facet of the war: the battalion’s time as part of the Allied occupation force in Germany, followed by a stint in Belgium and Britain until shipping was available to transport the unit home in May 1919.

Wilson also includes what he terms two thematic chapters outside the chronological timeframe, which focus on other topics not usually covered in standard battalion histories. This includes details of soldiers’ lives at the front, especially before and after battle, the experiences of casualties once they left the unit and an examination of the men who joined as reinforcements.

The accounts of the battles in which the soldiers of the 26th participated are particularly well told. This begins with the unit’s disastrous baptism of fire in October 1915 in an action the troops called the “Crater Fight”—which resulted in 21 killed and 31 wounded of the 50 plus who took part. This first taste of the harsh reality of combat also earned the battalion the nickname by which it was known for the rest of the war: “The Fighting 26th.”

The stories of other battles follow—names that still resonate with us today—the Somme, Vimy Ridge, Hill 70, Passchendaele and this country’s most glorious feat of arms ever: Canada’s Hundred Days, from Amiens on August 8, 1918 to the Armistice of November 11.

During its three years and a bit at the front, 900 soldiers from the battalion were killed and nearly 3,000 wounded. When the 26th returned home after the war, a mere 117 of the original 1,150 recruits that left Canada were still with it.

Wilson has produced a fast-paced, detailed narrative of a Canadian battalion at war. By including several first-hand accounts within the wider story, he has brought his chronicle to a very personal level, allowing the reader to connect with the soldiers in ways that many military histories do not.

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The core of any good story is a character setting out to reach a goal and runninginto obstacles. War, with the clear goal of victory and the clear obstacle of enemy fire, is the ultimate story. Pacifists and war-history buffs alike are hooked.

The stakes are high—we get one life and we guard it at all costs, yet millions spend their lives cheaply during war—and the tension is a natural result. By twist of time, we living today can answer the question they died not knowing: who won? This dramatic foreshadowing makes reading about past wars fascinating.

Wars also serve as great What-If junctions of history. What if Duc d’Anville’s French mission to Mi’kma’ki in 1746 had arrived in full force? Perhaps today this would be a province where most spoke French or Mi’kmaq, while an English-speaking minority huddled around Fort Anne.

Three new Atlantic Canadian books on the First World War unearth information and add angles of understanding to the war that shaped our world.

In I Remain, Your Loving Son: Intimate Stories of Beaumont-Hamel, editors Frances Ennis and Bob Wakeman show that a million deaths are a statistic, but one death is a tragedy. For 30 sunny minutes on Canada Day 1916, German machine gunners scythed a summer’s crop of men from the Newfoundland Regiment; 324 fell dead, 386 fell wounded and only 68 remained standing.

Ennis and Wakeman turn the statistics back into humans. We meet eager recruits like AJ Stacey, who pointed his toes inward at CLB Armoury when enlisting so his fallen arches wouldn’t disqualify him. William Yetman lied about his age and quickly marched overseas before his frantic mother and father could run into town and haul him home.

“In memory, I can still see the crowd on the wharf. Women trying to get a goodbye handshake and a kiss from their sons. And sweethearts waving goodbye. And the fathers and the brothers cheering the departing ones, trying to keep a brave front,” wrote Howard Murray.

Where Duty Lies: A New Brunswick Soldier in the Trenches of World War One advances us to 1917. We find Frank Grimmer staggering through the meat-grinding Western Front, his boater hat andGatsby days as the son of a prominent New Brunswick family blasted away. Ordered to join a crew reclaiming a German railway on the slopes of Vimy Ridge, he felt artillery shells explode at the job site.

“The Germans sent over an awful dose of gas; such a night as poor devils put in,” he scratched onto a letter sent home. “We can still smell gas in our dugouts. We had to wear our gas helmets from 11 p.m. until 7 a.m.”

He thanked cousin Alice for the hand-knitted socks. They may well have spared him trench foot, a nasty condition that rotted wet feet under marching men. Grimmer marched

through the war, marched back home and buried mental wounds behind the front of a blustery old warhorse. When a rookie Mountie warned him of the dangers of jaywalking, he barked: “I made it up Passchendaele Ridge and back, so I can get across Water Street, St. Andrews, without your help.”

His nephew, John Grimmer, pieces his story together, adding another face to the faceless numbers.

On the first day of the First World War, just five nurses served in the Canadian Army Nursing Corps. In Brian Douglas Tennyson’s Nova Scotia at War: 1914-1919 (which was just shortlisted for an Atlantic Book Award), we learn their matron was Pictou County’s Margaret Macdonald. She founded the rapidly growing service that would heal the wounded soldiers; she became the first woman in the entire British Empire to earn the rank of major in the armed forces.

With her were five other Nova Scotian nurses, including Addie Tupper, 45, who lied a decade off her age so she could serve overseas. She died of pneumonia in England in 1916–a statistic never added to the war-front dead. Tennyson paints a portrait of Nova Scotia at war, from the front-line soldiers to the at-home farmers and miners fuelling the war effort.

When Tennyson was writing Nova Scotia at War, someone asked him, “What more is there to say?”

His answer explains why we are still drawn to war stories: “The war didn’t end in 1918, even if the killing stopped. Its impact on those who went overseas, and those who waited at home, and everyone else, was profound and haunts us still.”