Bandsman Lyman Nichols, eventually called upon for more than his musical skills in the Great War.
It was nearly the last question I fielded the other night. I’d just told the story of Uxbridge youth Lyman Nichols – how (underage) he had joined Sam Sharpe’s 116th Ontario County Battalion in 1915, but when he turned 18 how, as a bandsman, he joined the 116th officially and marched off to the Great War, how he survived the battles at Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele, and how he’d come home wounded among 160 surviving soldiers (of the regiment’s original 1,600).
“What had helped the Canadians get through?” someone at my Vimy dinner audience in Peterborough asked.
“They were task-oriented,” I suggested. “Perhaps more than all the regular soldiers from Britain and the Empire, the Canadians before the war had been farmers, lumberjacks, fisherman, labourers, even students who all understood the meaning of getting a job done.”
Veteran John Watson shares a lighter moment before my book talk in Swift Current, July 19, 2023.
I was told he was coming. John Watson arrived a few minutes before I began a presentation about a major Second World War story, last Wednesday night in Swift Current, Sask. Watson is a tall man. He wore a red jacket, a scarf, and had a twinkle in his eye as we shook hands.
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Watson,” I said. “I understand you’re a veteran, that you served overseas in the last war with the Regina Rifles.”
“Yes, I did,” he said. “But don’t forget the ‘Royal’ part.”
“The Royal Regina Rifles,” I corrected myself, then added, “No doubt ‘Royal’ because of you.”
He laughed and said, “I was just a rifleman.” (more…)
Anita Anand, stressing the important role family plays in treating PTSD.
It was a morning dedicated to dealing with invisible wounds among veterans. It brought together former soldiers and first responders who are coping with trauma, support groups trying to help them, and politicians finding workable solutions to post-traumatic stress disorder in Canada.
Among the first to speak, Anita Anand, the minister of national defence, climbed the podium steps on Tuesday to address the gathering. She paused, scanned the faces of those present and offered a personal note.
“This is a difficult time for the military community,” she said. “I wish to recognize and remember officer cadets Jack Hogarth, Andrei Honciu, Broden Murphy and Andres Salek.” (more…)
Globe and Mail (Nov. 8, 2018) front page features artist Tyler Briley and his sculpted relief of Sam Sharpe installed on Parliament Hill.
In one of the first notations he jotted into his combat journal, First World War soldier Sam Sharpe recorded the actions of his rookie Canadian battalion. The 116thOntario Country Regiment was experiencing its baptism of fire in France. It was April 9, 1917, the first day of the battle of Vimy Ridge. His men were not fighting German soldiers, but laying wire in communication trenches on the Allied side of the Western Front. L/Col. Sharpe noted that his men endured a hail of artillery shells as they worked. Members of the 116th were wounded or killed, including one of his closest friends in the battalion.
“It is awfully sad,” Sharpe wrote. “Lt. John Doble was killed instantly by a shell, while leading a wiring platoon. Ontario County is paying its toll in this great struggle.”
This Sunday – for the 100thtime – at the 11thhour of the 11thday of the 11thmonth – we will gather at the cenotaph at Brock and Toronto streets in Uxbridge. (more…)
At 22, Tim Laidler didn’t have a worry in the world. As a reservist in the 2nd Battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry in 2008, he felt confident he could accomplish his eight-month commitment in Afghanistan – guarding supply convoys in Kandahar Province.
This particular day, however, Cpl. Laidler had been assigned an additional task, guarding the gate at Kandahar Airfield. A civilian ambulance approached. He opened its doors for a routine check and was suddenly faced by an Afghan girl of 16. She’d apparently been forced into an arranged marriage and felt her only way out was to set herself on fire, to be saved by the Canadians, or die by her own hand. She died.
“What had the global community come to, that a young girl had resorted to kill herself in front of me?” Laidler asked himself. “I suddenly felt myself disconnect. I felt myself die inside.”
Nearly 30 now and a survivor of post traumatic stress disorder, Laidler spoke to an audience of MPs, senators, active and retired soldiers, and a number of invited guests (myself included) on Tuesday. The 1st Annual Sam Sharpe Breakfast (exploring Veterans’ Mental Health and Wellness) was arranged by Durham MP Erin O’Toole and co-hosted by retired Gen. Romeo Dallaire, now a Canadian senator.
As MP O’Toole described it, the gathering over a breakfast in the Centre Block on Parliament Hill was designed to bring together key advocates trying to help Canadian veterans coping with operational stress injuries (OSI). O’Toole explained that he organized the event in honour of one of the original sufferers of PTSD.
Col. Sam Sharpe campaigned for, financed and led the 116th Bn to war in 1916.
“Col. Sam Sharpe was a Member of Parliament (for Ontario North) who served on the battlefields of the First World War,” O’Toole said last week in the Commons, “before returning to Canada where he took his life struggling with his mental injuries.”
Unlike Uxbridge’s own Col. Sharpe, Tim Laidler found help before harming himself. A former comrade-in-arms recommended he participate in the Veterans’ Transition Program, a research initiative at the University of British Columbia, connecting veterans with other veterans struggling with OSI. At first, Laidler said he resisted saying he didn’t need counsellors telling him what to do. But he learned to open up to his peers and that in turn opened up a brand new career.
“Otherwise,” he said, “I’d have gone off to a little corner of the country and disappeared.”
Laidler is now a Masters student at UBC as well as executive director of the resulting Veterans’ Transition Network. He explained that VTN all started with about a dozen guys in 1999, and has grown to about 400 volunteers whose goal is to launch similar programs across the country by 2015 allowing VTN to one day assist 150 veterans a year. Through his own story, Laidler emphasized that help had come from his community, from his buddies, from his family, but not from either the local or national offices of Veterans’ Affairs Canada.
Laudable for community, I thought, but not for the federal government or its civil service whose job is to help the veterans constituency. Indeed, VAC via the government’s current Veterans’ Charter has in some cases paid veterans lump sums to eliminate them from being a long-term drain on federal pension budgets.
Romeo Dallaire served in the United Nations mission to Rwanda in 1994.
Co-chairing the information breakfast with O’Toole this week, Senator Romeo Dallaire offered his own take on the growing PTSD problem. In 1994, Gen. Dallaire had commanded the United Nations assistance mission in Rwanda. The genocide he witnessed in the African nation became the subject of his 2003 non-fiction book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. The resulting PTSD had forced Dallaire’s release from the Canadian Forces in 2000, when he turned to lecturing and conducting research on conflict resolution.
During the Tuesday morning session, Dallaire lamented that despite the end of the Afghanistan operation last year, Canada “is still taking casualties. Not just the walking wounded,” he said, “but those taking their own lives.”
I asked Dallaire about the elephant in the room at Tuesday’s Sam Sharpe Breakfast. Why wasn’t the body most responsible for veterans’ welfare, Veterans’ Affairs Canada, present and accounted for at the breakfast?
“Canada’s veterans are an unlimited liability… and (caring for them) is a lifelong covenant,” he said.
“What about the Veterans’ Charter?” I asked. “Isn’t paying veterans lump sums instead of living up to that unlimited liability, cutting them out of the system, violating the covenant.”
“We can’t talk about the charter,” he rationalized. “It’s still before Parliament.”
It appears, nearly 100 years after the Ontario Regiment was decimated at Passchendaele, Belgium, sparking Col. Sam Sharpe to take his own life in 1918, that just like it was back in the Uxbridge colonel’s day, the fate of Canada’s veterans lies more in the hands of family, community and fellow soldiers than it does in Veterans’ Affairs Canada, the body most responsible to service that unlimited liability.
"The Canadians held on and won at Kapyong because they believed they were the best men on the hill that night," author Dan Bjarnason writes in his book. "And they were right."
It was just over a decade ago, as I recall. We were on the eve of a different federal election. The membership of the local Royal Canadian Legion had asked me to address the Remembrance Day banquet. I chose to acknowledge veterans of a forgotten war for a forgotten principle. At the branch, that night, was friend and veteran Bud Doucette. I recognized him and those other Canadian volunteers who fought in the Korean War to uphold the peace charter of the United Nations.
“I felt very proud,” former Lance/Corporal Doucette told me that night. “The war and our service have gone pretty much unnoticed.”
Mother Canada mourns her dead atop Vimy Ridge memorial in France.
It’s not often a person walks in the footsteps of an ancestor. Nor are there many opportunities to sense the sights, sounds and smells that someone who lived nearly a century ago experienced.
Recently, I read about such an experience when I was asked to endorse an application by a member of our community for the Beaverbrook Vimy Prize. As part of her application, Rebecca MacDonald, 17, wrote about her great-grandfather, Walter James MacDonald, an engineer in the 13th Canadian Mounted Police who served at the Battle of Vimy Ridge in April 1917.
“Standing in the trenches and the fields of Vimy Ridge, I could feel his spirit,” she wrote.
