Now, more than ever – Never Forget
He was loading detonators into hand grenades on a moonlight night somewhere in Belgium about half a kilometre from the front line, when the bullet sheared through the “meat” of both his legs, just above the ankle. “I thought somebody had lashed me,” he recalls. He spent three weeks in a field hospital and re-turned to the trenches.
Before he was injured a second time – his jaw shredded by flying shrapnel – he had survived the onslaught at the Battle of Vimy Ridge and seen the carnage of Hill 60, when his battalion went in with 1,100 men and came out with 127.
He was just a teenager, like so many, talked into a signing up by a soldier his sister was dating, inspired by his buddies who were doing the same. He had barely turned 16 when he first donned the uniform in 1914, but the recruiters had fudged his enlistments by making him a bugle boy. “I never blew a bugle,” he says. He landed instead in the thick of the war, following the fiercest fighting from Belgium to France.
Clifford Holliday died yesterday, at the age of 105. Of the 650,000 Canadians who served, he was one of only 8 surviving WWI veterans, and the last who had seen combat.
hat tip – Pol:Spy
More in the extended entry.
One chill Easter dawn in 1917, a blizzard blowing in their faces, the four divisions of the Canadian Corps in France went over the top of a muddy scarp knows as Vimy Ridge. Within hours, they held in their grasp what had eluded both British and French armies in over two years of fighting: they had seized the best- defended German bastion on the Western Front.
How could an army of civilians from a nation with no military tradition secure the first enduring victory in thirty-two months of warfare with only 10,000 casualties, when the French had lost 150,000 men in their unsuccessful attempt?