The
first to die was Lt. Frederick C. Andrews, SAC class of 1915, killed on March
16 of that year while fighting with the Royal Leinsters. “After the gas attack
at Ypres in 1915,” Stewart writes, “Andreans were involved in all major battles
of this grand conflict. Sadly, many
of the young men who helped establish St. Andrew’s in the early years would not
return.” Lt. Maurice Malone, Class of 1913, was killed during a German assault at
Ypres on June 3, 1916. He closest friend was a fellow Andrean, Lt. Richard A. Brown, Class of 1914, who earned the Military Cross at the Battle of Vimy Ridge
and was killed on Nov. 14, 1917, at Passchendaele. At St. Andrew’s, Brown had
set the school record in its annual cross-country run. Malone and Brown are
buried near each other in in the Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery in Belgium.
Lt. Lindsay Wright,
who had captained the championship football team at SAC, was killed by a German
high-explosive shell on Aug. 28, 1918.
In
the first volume of his two-volume At the
Sharp End: Canadians Fighting in the Great War, 1914-1916 (Viking Canada,
2007), Tim Cook, tallies the casualties: “In Canada, a nation of not yet 8
million in 1914, 430,000 men and women served overseas, and more than 61,000
were killed. Another 138,000 were wounded in battle, many crippled for life.
With Canada’s twenty-first-century population pegged at a little more than 32
million, the proportional Great War losses today would be approximately 250,000
dead and more than 550,000 wounded. In 1918, almost every community mourned a
generation lost to the killing fields of Flanders and the Somme, marking their
sacrifices with monuments, statues, and cenotaphs across the Dominion.”
In
“`He was determined to go’: Underage Soldiers in the Canadian Expeditionary Force,” (Historie sociale/Social History,
2008), Cook estimates that as many as 20,000 underage Canadians served overseas
during the Great War, and some 2,270 were killed. Many lied about their age in order to
enlist. He writes: “Most underage soldiers who enlisted were 16 or 17 (and
later 18 when age requirements were raised to 19), but at least one cheeky lad
enlisted at only 10 years old, and a 12-year-old made it to the trenches.” Only
in mid-1917, after three years of war, was a special unit, the Young Soldiers
Battalion, created to keep underage Canadian soldiers in England, away from combat.
The
best-known Great War poem, “In Flanders Fields,” is a rondeau written by Lt. Col. John McCrae, a Canadian physician who had joined a fighting unit of the
Canadian Expeditionary Force as a gunner and medical officer. On May 2, 1915,
during the second Battle of Ypres, his friend Lt. Alexis Helmer, age
twenty-two, was killed by a German artillery shell. McCrae conducted the burial
service and soon wrote his poem, which was published in Punch that December. McCrae contracted pneumonia and cerebral
meningitis, and died in a military hospital in France on Jan. 28, 1918, at age
forty-seven. In The Great War and Modern
Memory (1975), Paul Fussell says of the poem’s first two stanzas, “So far,
so pretty good.” He calls the final six lines “a propaganda argument—words like
vicious and stupid would not seem to go too far.” Aesthetically, Fussell is
correct, but even my mother, born in 1920 and not a bookish woman, knew some of
the lines of “In Flanders Fields” by heart and pinned an artificial poppy on my
shirt each Armistice Day before I left for school. I wouldn’t argue the point.
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