John Goheen
SPECIAL TO THE TRI-CITY NEWS
For the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI), there was little time for celebrating the New Year during those first days of 1915.
Having arrived in France just weeks before, the battalion was now on the move towards Ypres in Belgium. The unit, raised by Montreal millionaire Hamilton Gault and paid for from his own funds just months before at the outbreak of First World War, was Canada’s “first in the field” — the PPCLI was the first Canadian unit to go overseas in 1914 and, in those early January days, the first on active service in the Great War.
On Jan. 6, 1915, the PPCLI took over 1,150 yards of the front line near Voormezele, southwest of Ypres, Belgium. The conditions were appalling, the trenches resembling muddy ditches, really. Recently occupied by the French, they were found in a miserable state — “filled with water and conditions trying,” according to the unit diary. Then, on the morning of Jan. 8, the diary records “the enemy shelled trenches with shrapnel and HE (high explosives)… casualties slight.”
This was just the beginning. Few of those originals would see summer, let alone the next New Year.
Among those original PPCLI men were 35-year-old L/Cpl. Henry Bellinger of Brantford, Ont. and 27-year-old L/Cpl. Norman Fry of Ottawa. These men were typical of the early war makeup of the battalion. Both were British-born with a decade each of previous military experience in the British army. Both had come to Canada to start a new life but quickly answered the call when Gault raised the PPCLI.
Sadly, they would share one more thing in common. Those “slight casualties” noted on Jan. 8 included two killed; while we do not know who was killed first, Bellinger and Fry were the first Canadian soldiers to lose their lives in the Great War.
They would not be the last. The killing fields of the Western Front would exact a terrible toll on the PPCLI and the 47 other Canadian fighting battalions that would ultimately serve in the war.
One hundred years on, Canadians should remember that the Great War marked a pivotal turning point in our nation’s history. For the first time, Canada played an important, and ultimately decisive, role on the world stage and, in doing so, began to develop a national identity at a great cost. The war changed how others viewed Canada and how we viewed ourselves.
Sadly, many Canadians have forgotten the Great War and do not realize that it was the greatest and most traumatic chapter in our history.
Canada was a small country in 1914, with a population of just over 7.2 million. Most people lived in rural communities and even our largest city, Montreal, had fewer than 500,000 people — with Vancouver just over 100,000. Our pre-war regular army was insignificant by any standard, with just a few thousand trained soldiers, 600 horses and a scattering of militia units across the country.
Yet within three years, the small Dominion fielded the four-division-strong Canadian Corps, a “national’ army, really, and hailed as one of the best — and perhaps the very best fighting formation on the Western Front.
Canada’s first major action was at Ypres in April 1915, when the 18,000 men of the 1st Canadian Division prevented an Allied rout by holding the line against gas and overwhelming numbers at a cost of more than 6,000 casualties including 2,000 killed in just three days. Far worse would come.
By the time the Canadians entered the Somme Campaign in late August 1916, more than 11,000 Canadians had already been killed in the war. By then, two more divisions were overseas and, by the end of the year, a fourth division joined the Canadian Corps in the field. Their 10 weeks in the Somme bloodbath in the fall of 1916 marked some of that campaign’s few successes; 24,000 Canadian casualties were grim testimony to the nature of the fighting. The Canadians were learning the business and cost of war.
Stunning victories the following year at Vimy Ridge, Hill 70 and Passchendaele marked the Canadian Corps as an elite formation. They were earning a reputation, they were good and they knew it. Canadian achievements on the battlefield came at a heavy cost — more than 35,000 casualties in those three 1917 battles was grim testimony to the price of success.
But it was in 1918 that the Canadians would play a decisive role in a series of major battles known as the “Hundred Days” between August and November. They “were brought along to head the assault in one great battle after another.” The Corps’ reputation as shock troops was solidified for all time at Amiens, the Scarpe, the DQ Line, Canal du Nord, Cambrai and the final push to Mons.
The Canadian contribution was decisive at this stage of the war. They took on one quarter of the entire German army on the Western Front. They smashed the hinge of the German defence system and made it possible for the overall Allied advance that ended the war. These last three months accounted for 20% of all Canadian casualties in the Great War — almost 46,000 killed, wounded or missing.
Four years of war transformed a citizen army of volunteers into a highly effective fighting force — they were the finest army Canada ever put into the field. The list of Canadian achievements was outstanding, the cost was staggering. More than 600,000 Canadians enlisted and just over 400,000 went overseas to fight for “King and Empire” in the Great War; more than 68,000 were killed and another 176,000 wounded — more than 245,000 Canadian casualties in four years of war.
We live in a fast-paced world, where younger eyes seem fixed on the present and the future rather than on the past, and 100 years is a long time. Yet the passage of time does not make the contributions and sacrifices of those Canadians who served any less significant. Charles Laking, Canada’s last living witness to combat in the Great War, died more than a decade ago. Now that they are all gone, it is left to the rest of us to remember.
“To you from failing hands we throw the torch….”
--John Goheen has been the guide and historian for the Royal Canadian Legion’s Pilgrimage of Remembrance for 20 years. He is principal of Rochester elementary school in Coquitlam.
