November 11, 2013 will be over by the time this column appears. The poppies will be thrown in the garbage, the special broadcasts on History television will be over, and we'll forget for another year the heroes past and present who died to protect our way of life.
My challenge to you is not to forget. Celebrate in some small way, every day, the lives of those who faced the fear of the unknown to protect the lives of those they loved. For soldiers and their family war is personal. Make it personal for you.
My great grandfather fought in World War I. He was one of the first soldiers to volunteer in the Crownest Pass. Like many coal miners, once he arrived at the blood-soaked soil of northern France he was assigned to a tunnelling company.
Every job in the armed forces can be a dirty one, but the tunnel rats lived in filth and darkness every day. Their job was to tunnel under the Germans, lay mines, and scurry back before they were detected. The German tunnellers had the same job and often their meetings had explosive results.
My great grandfather lived through two of the deadliest battles of World War I - Passchendaele and Vimy Ridge, where over seven thousand Canadian soldiers lost their lives. Once the exhausting battles had been fought, soldiers were susceptible to typhoid and my great grandfather ended up in the military hospital at Etaples, 27 kilometres south of Boulogne.
The conditions at the hospital were notoriously primitive, and many soldiers died from inadequate medical treatment. The Germans machine-gunners also used the patients for target practice as they flew low overhead.
At the war's end, my great grandfather was transported, with 17,000 others, to Kimnel Park Army Camp in north Wales. Here they awaited transport back to Canada. Understandably, the soldiers were anxious to return to their families, everyone knew that the first soldiers home would have the pick of the available jobs.
The British who ran the Kimnel camp required the soldiers awaiting transport to complete almost thirty different forms, answering over three hundred questions. The food was bad, and the price of everything in nearby towns was inflated to take advantage of the well-paid Canadian soldiers. Even the weather didn't cooperate, the winter of 1918-1919 one of the coldest on record. The last straw was the news that the troop carrier intended to take the Canadian soldiers home had been detoured to pick up Americans. The United States had joined the fighting late, and her soldiers had been in battle for only a year.
A mutiny broke out in the camp, and four Canadian soldiers died. My great grandfather, thankfully, was one of those who made it home.
Every family has their stories. Please remember them, share them, tell your children, and do more research so you have even more information about the contributions these people, real people, made to our freedom. Attestation papers for World War I soldiers are available for a small free from the federal government; many unit war diaries are free on line.
Our family members who fought for us deserve to be remembered. Never to be put away with the poppies.
