Chrystal Haverstock
Special to The Lake Report
At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the most gruelling of wars that included Canadian and Newfoundland soldiers came to an end. The Great War was over. The guns went silent.
The Armistice was signed in Allied Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s private and requisitioned dining/railway car on the Orient Express. Généralissime Foch and senior British representative, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, represented the Entente, along with German military officers and ambassadors representing Germany.
This war was modern by all standards. It was the first war that aircraft, submarines, tanks, and chemical weapons were put into play. With it came ingenious brutality.
Six-hundred-and-fifty-thousand soldiers from Canada and Newfoundland signed up to fight in the trenches of the Western Front in France, Belgium and Luxembourg, as well as the Ottoman Empire.
These soldiers endured the most horrific environments experienced by man at the time. In addition to bombs and bullets, these men, and their horses, were gassed with chlorine, phosgene and mustard gases that burned their eyes while choking their lungs out.
The brutality of it was such that these chemical weapons of war were banned from use around the world as part of the Geneva Protocol of 1925.
War is not romantic nor nostalgic. It’s blood, guts, disease, starvation and cold.
It’s acrid choking smoke, helplessly watching your friends die, rotting feet from standing in freezing cold filthy water for days and weeks at a time, being blinded by mustard gas, then dying and being buried in an unfamiliar country.
Those fortunate enough to return home came with baggage. A lot of it. These men and women wouldn’t, or couldn’t, talk about it. The atrocities that humans can commit on each other, cannot be unseen, unexperienced.
Now it is called PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Then, it was being shell-shocked. There was no real treatment for that then. Many of these men just lived in hell for the rest of their lives.
Niagara-on-the-Lake sent approximately 500 men and women to Europe in the First World War. Twenty-seven of those soldiers were killed in action, or died of their wounds. Two men died from disease overseas. Five men died in Canada from disease contracted in Europe and Canada between January 1917 and November 1918.
These men are the reason we wear the poppy today.
We will remember them.
Chrystal Haverstock is a board member of the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 124 and chair of its annual poppy campaign.
Lt. Norman Nelles, British Expeditionary Force (Northamptonshire Regiment). Died Jan. 29, 1915. Killed in action, France.
Pte. James Hatt, 4th Battalion. Died June 4, 1915. Died of wounds, France.
Pte. Edmund Peters (Petrzywalski), Royal Canadian Regiment. Died April 16, 1916. Killed in action, France.
Cpl. Wright Lowrey, 4th Canadian Mounted Rifles. Died May 11, 1916. Died of wounds, Ypres.
Pte. Lloyd Griffiths, 98th Battalion. Died Oct. 8, 1916. Killed in action, France.
Lance-Cpl. Ernest Houghton, 21st Battalion. Died July 7, 1917. Died of wounds, France.
Gunner Frederick Leggatt, 84th Battery. Died Nov. 3, 1917. Killed in action, Ypres.
Pte. Adelburt Green, 75th Battalion. Died Jan. 23, 1918. Killed in action, France.
Pte. James Rennie, 12th Battalion. Died Aug. 9, 1918. Killed in action, France.
Gunner Leslie Cudney, Artillery. Died Sept. 7, 1918. Died of wounds, France.
Sgt. John Kelson, 2nd Battalion. Died May 3, 1917. Killed in action, France.
Pte. James Wilmott, British Expeditionary Force. Died May 12, 1915. Killed in actoin, Ypres.
Pte. Charles McCoy, Canadian Field Artillery. Died Oct. 25, 1918. Killed in action.
Gunner William Perry Currie, 13th Battalion. Died May 15, 1915. Killed in aciton, Ypres.
Pte. Charles Thomas Thompson, 13th Battalion. Died July 16, 1916. Killed ina ction.
Gunner Herbert Longhurst, Canadian Field Artillery. Died May 14, 1917. Died of wounds.
Pte. Robert Charles Houghton, 15th Battalion. Died Aug. 15, 1917. Killed in action.
Lte. Edwin Shepperd, 4th Canadian Mounted Rifles. Died Oct. 21, 1917. Killed in action.
Pte. Reginald Thomas, 20th Battalion. Died Nov. 11, 1917. Killed in action.
Pte. Tom Hadley Houghton, 4th Battalion. Died Oct. 1, 1918. Killed in action.
Lance-Cpl. Fred Fisher VC, 13th Battalion. Died April 23, 1915. Killed in action.
Sapper George Brownlee, Signals, attached to the 27th Battalion. Died Sept. 15, 1916. Killed in action.
Pte. Edward Rositer, 19th Battalion. Died Sept. 16, 1916. Killed in action.
Lte. LeRoy Whitside, 46th Battalion. Died Nov. 11, 1916. Killed in action.
Lte. W.J. Wright, 19th Battalion. Died Aug. 26, 1917. Killed in action.
Pte. William Dey, 3rd Battalion. Died Aug. 31, 1918. Died of wounds.
Pte. Edward GM Fisher, 85th Battalion. Died Nov. 6, 1918. Killed in action.
Sgt. John MacKay, 87th Battalion. Died Oct. 31, 1917 of tuberculosis, London, Ont.
Pte. John Henry Cowell, 8th Reserve Battalion. Died Nov. 5, 1918 of influenza, England.
Pte. Albert Emerson Cowell, Welland Canal Force. Died Oct. 12, 1918 of influenza, Queenston.
Pte. Harold George Budd, 75th Battalion. Died Jan. 17, 1917 of disease, France.
Pte. Walter Nisbet, 44th Regiment militia. Died May 23, 1915 of disease, Canada.
Bugler Gordon Ryan, 92nd Battalion. Died Jan. 31, 1916 of disease in Canada.
Pte. Robert Follet Best, 92nd Battalion. Died Feb. 18, 1918 of disease, Canada.
