By T.W. Paterson
The Cowichan Leader summed it up this way: “The sun of complete and final victory has risen. The dawn of Peace is at hand. The night has been long.”
Because of the significance of this year’s Remembrance Day, the annual special edition of the Citizen looks specifically at the First World War.
You know the one: the so-called ‘Great’ War, the war that was to end all wars. The war that planted the seeds for a second, worse world conflict just 21 years later.
The following excerpt from T.W. Paterson’s book Cowichan Goes to War, 1914-1918, captures the historic month of November 1918 — exactly 100 years ago — as it affected the Cowican Valley after four years and a month during which the Valley had the highest enlistment per capita in all of Canada:
The latest Victory Bond campaign got off to a rousing start in Duncan with 68 subscribers buying almost $50,000 in the first two days. For the entire Valley the goal was to achieve $246,000. It was quickly surpassed.
Then — could it really be true? — incredible news, this time for real after a premature report was denied the previous day!
The Cowichan Leader was about to go to press when it received word, at 3:30 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 6, that Germany had agreed to an armistice! The editor just had time to ask his readers what they had to offer returning soldiers: “Will there be sufficient work to go round? If there is not likely to be, what can we do to create more? Is there nothing we can begin to do now so that we can offer profitable employment to men with a little capital and to men with none? [These questions] cannot be shirked.”
As influenza [the Spanish Flu] continued to gain ground the campaign to sell Victory Bonds continued unabated but with a new emphasis on the need to maintain the supply line to Britain, “our best customer for grain, pork, beef, cheese and other farm products”. In other words, it was no longer about war but about commerce. Sales throughout the Valley easily exceeded the quotas set for each district.
Just in time, Cpl. Athol Sydney Lloyd of Westholme was awarded the Military Medal after three years in the front lines despite his having been so badly wounded at one point that he was offered his discharge. Instead, he’d wangled a transfer to a Motor Transport Corps where he’d been reunited with his brother Cecil. A third brother, Algernon, was on a motor launch in the English Channel and had seen action during the famous raid on Zeebrugge.
How sad that the very issue of the newspaper that announced an armistice also carried an obituary notice for Pte. Herbert W. Dann of Cobble Hill, killed within a few weeks of joining the 7th Bn. and within a few weeks of the war’s end. His father was in uniform, too, in the Medical Corps. Somehow, with her menfolk gone, Miss Danns (sic) managed to carry on running their farm while “devoting herself to patriotic work”.
More good news: Capt. Andrew Mellin and his wife were among the survivors of a torpedoed hospital ship and Capt. Rupert E. Hobday of the West Yorkshire Regt. had a bar for his DSO.
Deadly ’flu epidemic or no, Cowichan was going to celebrate. The war was over! We’d won! When news of Germany’s acceptance of armistice terms reached Duncan at midnight, Sunday the 10th, this time officially, “Telephone wires grew red hot, the city fire bell threatened to become unshipped, motor cars tore around emitting strident music, hidden hoards of influenza preventative were considerably depleted and not a few residents forgot to watch the dawn break over Tzouhalem. They were otherwise engaged.”
Chinese firecrackers added to the cacophony as did the bell and whistle of a locomotive in the train yard. When, next morning, merchants reported for work they found a notice on their doors to the effect that Mayor Miller had declared a public holiday. Because of continuing fear of the ’flu it was agreed that any celebrations should be held outdoors. By 2 o’clock that afternoon, a motorcade of 60 cars, all resplendent in bunting, lined up at Craig and Station streets where the Rev. W.T. Keeling conducted a brief thanksgiving service. With the mayor’s car in the lead and a carload of returned servicemen immediately behind him, the cavalcade headed south to Cobble Hill and Hillbank after dealing with a fallen tree across the road. Had time permitted, they’d have gone on to Chemainus.
That evening, a “band of peacemakers” carrying torches, singing and making noise, roamed downtown streets. At 8 o’clock they converged in front of North Cowichan City Hall (the site of today’s Bank of Montreal) as, across the street in the train yard, a large bonfire blazed and a wooden gallows had been erected. While awaiting the star of the coming show — a straw-stuffed Kaiser Wilhelm II — Miss Monk’s music students sang songs of Allied nations.
Then the “trial” began with lawyer Davie acting as prosecutor vs. William Hohenzollern, defendant, who was charged with a “black list of crimes”. Summarily found guilty (“William” couldn’t really defend himself, after all), Judge Maitland Dougall exchanged his top hat for a black cap and pronounced sentence: to be hanged by the neck then burned at the stake!
To quote an eyewitness: “Away went Willie. He swung above the blaze for a while, then gallows and all fell across the flames. Melody raised her head again, punctuated by cheering as Britannia (Mary Latter) and Canada (Margaret Burchett) were carried round the ring. An Old Contemptible [Kipling’s term of endearment for the British infantryman] (Capt. Sprot, whose artistry fashioned the effigy), a Royal Navy officer (Lieut. Bradley), a Canadian infantryman (A.H. Lomas), shared a similar fate. With final cheers for the men “over there” and God Save the King, the gathering dispersed just before 10 p.m.” Poor Willie endured a second trial by fire at the hands of celebrating Lake Cowichan residents, too.
The Leader summed it up this way: “The sun of complete and final victory has risen. The dawn of Peace is at hand. The night has been long.”
Thus, after more than four horrific years, peace returned to the Cowichan Valley, a rural outpost that had given more of its sons to the Empire than any other community of its size in Canada. Which fact, alas, explains all those names on the Duncan Cenotaph.
For Gnr. John Wooliscroft, the war had ended two weeks before, in France, word of his death only reaching Duncan in time to appear in the same newspaper that heralded “an honourable” Armistice. After working at the train station and as a surveyor he’d gone to Alberta seeking harvesting work and it’s there that he enlisted. But he’s on the Duncan Cenotaph, all the same.
Among the last to be wounded were Koksilah’s Pte. R.W. Coverdale — his right leg had been cut, almost to the bone, from hip to knee — and Pte. S.E. Heald of Shawnigan Lake, with shrapnel in his right arm. Recovering from illness were Lt. A.W. Wallace, Duncan, and Pte. Thomas Drummond of Maple Bay. Pte. Hubert Estbridge, Somenos, was recovering from gas and contusions in a French hospital.
Just home, on sick leave, Pte. A.A. “Sandy” Melville of Cowichan Lake bore shrapnel and bullet wounds in the shoulder, back and neck from the fighting at Hill 70. He, like so many others, would live with his injuries for the rest of his life. As would those who’d lost a loved one, such as Mrs. E.A. Cathcart, Chemainus, of whose husband, Pte. E.A. Cathcart, a lieutenant of the 7th Bn., wrote: “As his platoon officer I always found your husband ever willing to do his duty. Only the previous day, when we made a heavy attack on the enemy, your husband showed great gallantry and devotion to duty, and I can assure you I have lost one of the best soldiers I ever had in my platoon.” He also assured her that Ernie lived but a few minutes, unconscious, after an almost direct hit by a German shell.
For W.H. Galbraith of Sahtlam, Armistice must have been a mixed blessing, coming as it did with notice that his only son, Lieut. W.A. Galbraith, RN, had died at Taranto, Italy, of influenza and pneumonia.
To mark the close of world war, S.H. Hopkins suggested the planting of maple trees at the railway station and “other suitable points” with the help of students. An agricultural instructor, he offered to provide the trees and earth.
Although residents were reminded that, unlike the Germans, ’flu hadn’t signed an armistice, they were going to celebrate anyway with a Grand Armistice Ball at the Agricultural Hall. They were reminded, too, that there was still time to send Christmas parcels overseas.
An unnamed returned Cowichan artilleryman described the bloody fighting when Canadians had stormed the formidable Hindenburg Line, an Allied success that had precipitated the armistice. The Line was “one great mass of concrete emplacements. All his gunpits were of concrete, but he lost them all. For miles he had tunnelled the western front, thinking he could hold it at any cost. The whole of those dugouts were from 30 to 70 feet deep, and all timbered up and fixed with electric lights, a wonderful work of four years for him.”
He concluded his letter: “I hate the brutes. How I love to help kill them.”
Already, there was talk of a proper war memorial, one to be paid for by the city and the municipality and that bore, in the words of E.W. Carr Hilton who volunteered to help bring it about, “the names of all those who went from here and have been killed in the war”. He thought it should be situated midway between the garden and the booking office of the E&N Railway Co. [the present-day site of the Cenotaph which originally stood in the intersection of Front Street [Canada Avenue and Station Street]. “It might be surrounded with a railing with an open entrance for inspection, and later on we may be able to obtain a captured field gun or trench mortar to place by it.
“I was reading that in one of the churchyards in France there appears this epitaph: ‘For your tomorrow they gave their today.’ This, I think, would be a suitable heading.”
Cobble Hill residents had started a fund for their own memorial which, upon completion, honoured the fallen of Cowichan Valley south. E.F. Miller, Jr., responded poetically:
The bullets now have ceased to whine; Where Britain’s heroes lie; But, though they’re gone, their noble deeds; Shall never, never die!
In Chemainus, brightly costumed and masked Japanese residents held a victory parade and carried lanterns on poles to an accompaniment of mouth organs, concertinas and cymbals. And the good ladies of Chemainus were still knitting socks — 146 pair as of the latest report. At Nitinat, at the head of Cowichan Lake, logging operations of Sitka spruce, suddenly no longer needed for aircraft production, closed down. Not so the collectors for the Patriotic Fund who urged residents to, “Carry on! Don’t let premature thoughts of Peace spoil the glorious record of Cowichan.”
Latest word on Capt. G.C. Smithson, MC, was that he’d been given command of an internment camp in Egypt after recovering from malaria. There was good news, too, for the Wallace family: Lieut. F.A. Wallace was no longer seriously ill, his brother Cpl. William N. Wallace had an office job after recovering from a wound. A third brother, Pte. George T. Wallace, 72nd Bn., was back in the line after surviving being wounded at the Somme; at least the shooting had stopped. Home, invalided, were Cpl. B. Excell and Pte. W. Weeks, both of Cowichan Station.
John N. Evans suggested that everyone employing Chinese or alien labourers discharge them in favour of returned men.
Braving the ongoing threat of contagion and bad weather, 200 citizens attended a thanksgiving service, “one of the most historic which has taken place in Duncan,” at the Opera House. The Rev. G.A. Bagshaw reminded the audience that the war wasn’t officially over and that they shouldn’t become complacent: “Today, we may feel we may rest on our oars, but if we look beyond these shores we can see that our soldiers have not yet laid down their arms, that they are still marching forward. It is not for us to call a halt but to proceed with the work we have undertaken.
“We hear from the Red Cross Society that 25,000 Canadian soldiers in hospital need just as much help as they did before the armistice. Surely we will continue to give as before. The British people know how to give. They know how to fight and — they can forgive.
“Efforts must not be relaxed to make this peace well worth having. We must see that our share, however small, will be a real share in the great cause for which our men have been fighting — that of making the world a fit place in which to live.”
Four Cowichan soldiers were home again and three were still in London — free, at last, of their German captors. L/Cpl. J.E. Saunders and Ptes. H.F. Armstrong, A. Goddard and Alan R. Murdie were the latest to return. For Armstrong, North Cowichan’s roads foreman before he enlisted, his war service on the Swiss frontier hadn’t been all that different doing forestry work; why he was medically discharged wasn’t stated. That wasn’t the case for Goddard who’d been hit by shrapnel in the back of the head. After serving with a transport unit and as an instructor, he was released after he came down with pneumonia, and Saunders had injured his ankle while with a railway troop. Murdie, likely because of his age (he’d served in the West African Field Force as far back as 1902-05), had never reached the front lines during two tours in France.
Reported safe in London were Ptes. (and brothers) P.C. Jaynes and J.N. Jaynes, and L.H. Walker. All three went overseas with the 7th Bn. and all three were captured during the Second Battle of Ypres (April 23, 1915). Originally together, Walker was transferred to another camp then the brothers were separated, Percy forced to work in a brickyard, and they didn’t see each other again until the war’s end, in England. In letters home the brothers had used Chinook, a coastal jargon coined by the early fur traders, to inform their relatives of the true state of their food rations.
Freed, too, after three and a-half years, was Pte. Tom Hutchinson, Duncan, whose brother Arthur was still at the front with the Ambulance Corps, and, after two years’ captivity, Pte. Fred Gallant of Chemainus. On 10 days’ leave from the Qualicum convalescent hospital was Pte. Fred Veitch. In Cobble Hill, Albert Galliers’ return didn’t go unnoticed, he being greeted by a large crowd. Badly wounded in France, he’d returned to the fighting upon recovery. In Duncan, there was a warm reception, too, for S/Sgt. Maurice Colliard and Cpl. Albert Herrington.
Not only was Lieut.-Col. A.E. Hodgins back but he’d resumed his old job as an engineer with the provincial government.
For Pte. E.A. Cathcart, who wouldn’t be coming home, Chemainus residents staged a memorial service in the Baptist church. A portrait of Ernie, draped with flags, was surrounded by a sea of carnations and chrysanthemums. For those other good Cowichan men who, like Ernie Cathcart, had given their all, S.H. Hopkins had delivered on his proposal for a living memorial by acquiring eight sycamore maple trees from a provincial government nursery and planting six of them, three abreast, by the main entrance to Duncan Elementary, the other two at the south end of the school. A dedication ceremony was planned for when school resumed and each tree would be named for a Canadian victory, such as Vimy, Mons, etc. It was hoped that there’d be similar tree plantings as had already occurred at Cowichan Bench School.
A special newspaper series began under a headline many must have despaired of ever seeing: ‘Prepare for Peace’. But peace wouldn’t come easily, readers were warned: “…Nothing will ever be the same as it was before August 1914. We have been living as it were on another planet. Phases of the war have reacted on us, it is true, but we have not yet begun really to feel the weight of its influence in our community life. We cannot escape this influence any more than can any part of the shore be free from the actions of the tides.”
To date, few returned soldiers had been greeted upon arrival because of the lack of communication advising of their coming other than an approximation of when they were expected to reach Victoria by CPR steamship. In some cases, complained James Greig, honorary secretary of the Returned Soldiers Commission, “The relatives…practically camp on the wharf until their loved ones do appear.” He’d been promised the use of private cars with which to chauffeur the men to their homes from the Duncan station — once it was known they were coming.
Newspaper editor Hugh Savage thought it a disgrace that “our men should be permitted to continue to return the way they have done in the past, sneaking back as if they were discharged convicts or had something to be ashamed of”. He blamed both government and military authorities for failing to fix things: “It should be the duty of some public body or bodies to arrange at regular intervals, for some event, at which recently returned soldiers of the Cowichan district could be suitably and publicly welcomed home and the public given an opportunity of expressing their feelings thereat.” (Conversely, some Cowichan men reported that they were treated royally each time their train stopped on its way across the country — until they reached Victoria, unannounced.)
An unnamed letter writer thought that returned soldiers should be given employment opportunities building North Cowichan’s roads.
Maple Bay’s Lieut./Col. Brimsley A. Rice, 1-6 Gurkha Rifles who’d spent much of the war in Mesopotamia, was the latest recipient of a DSO. Lieut. Arthur Lane, peacetime commodore of the Cowichan Bay Yacht Club, was now a captain with the 52nd Bn. In an English hospital after seriously straining his back on the last day of hostilities was L/Cpl. T.L. Dunkley of the Can. Overseas Railway Construction Corps, and of Somenos. A.I. Evans was reportedly doing well after another operation on his right arm, Spr. J.E. Evans was home (he at least had been greeted by cheers and a ride) after 21 months in France. For the Bell family it was a happy telegram: their son Cpl. J.B. Bell was safe in England after more than a year in a prison camp. Home, too, without ever having gotten beyond Toronto was Pte. Henry Smith.
Margaret Moss, for whom Duncan’s health centre is named and whose husband Lt.-Col. Moss was still in Italy, had been transferred from the Women’s Royal Naval Service to the RAF as a staff officer.
The latest suggestion for a war memorial came from Alex Herd who wanted a public park to be their monument: “Something worthy of the memory of those who went down into hell and came back again, or who laid down their all upon the altar and died for us.”
So ended the First World War here in the Cowichan Valley — in spirit if not in fact for those who’d served, for those who’d died and for those who were left to mourn, to pick up the pieces and to carry on.
Rather than being the war to end all wars, as we know now, the so-called Great War and the resulting Versailles Treaty merely planted the seeds of the Second World War, an even greater horror in terms of human mortality.
But, for the people of Cowichan who’d given so much to Canada and to the Empire, 1914-18, the dawn of a new year must have brought a sense of relief and of renewed hope for the future.
For a while.