Between 1914 and 1918, Galt, Preston and Hespeler rallied to the Allied cause far more enthusiastically than Kitchener and Waterloo.
The three cities that later became Cambridge fully shouldered the burden of blood, and all the anguish that followed. Their effort and the cost they paid leaps from the numbers.
•Cambridge put 1,548 residents or native sons into uniform and 332 of them died, an analysis of library and casualty records reveals. Enlistments represent almost 10 per cent of its pre-war population.
•Kitchener and Waterloo put 595 residents or native sons into uniform and 100 of them died. Enlistments represent three per cent of the pre-war population.
The first local recruits to die reveal much about the war's conduct at home and overseas.
Ross Briscoe perished first. He was 22, from Galt, an educated man working as a bank clerk who had trained for seven years in the local cadet corps and militia.
He was killed Jan. 6, 1915, accidentally shot while training at a rifle range in England. If his death seems wasteful, the second local war death drives home the point.
John Thomas McMaster, 33, enlisted as soon as Canada went to war. The Hespeler-born weaver had 15 years of militia training to test in battle.
He's now a footnote in history — the first soldier to die in France with the Canadian Division.
On Feb. 11, 1915, McMaster stumbled and fell beneath a troop train in Nantes as troops disembarked from England, where they had trained. His arm and leg were severed.
Combat soon claimed its first local soldier.
Edward Callan, 26, left his carpentry job in Preston to enlist. He emigrated from England in 1913 to follow his brothers. He had served in the British Royal Marines.
Callan reached Armentières, near the Belgian border, as the war was settling into its stalemate. Massive armies were digging into trenches, separated by a thin stretch of no man's land.
After reaching a trench, Callan was shot within 12 hours, killed Feb. 20, 1915. He was the first local soldier killed in action.
Comrades buried Callan near the trench. The army lost his grave, as it later did with 130 other local men, their remains lost in battle or their burial sites forgotten.
Tellingly, the first three recruits to die came from Galt, Preston and Hespeler. They died honourably but also lamentably, foreshadowing the slaughter to come.
By the war's end on Nov. 11, 1918, nine million in uniform were dead, among more than 60 million who fought.
Suspicion about Berlin's enthusiasm for the war erupted bitterly in 1916.
By January of that year, Berlin and Waterloo had sacrificed just four war dead. This compares to 39 dead from Galt, Preston and Hespeler, which combined had a smaller population.
The Stratford Herald put it this way: "The sons of Berlin are reluctant to do their part for the land and the flag under which they have prospered and gotten rich war contracts."
Worried about lost sales, Berlin business leaders led the charge to change the city's name. A resolution sent from a public meeting to Berlin council on Feb. 11, 1916, said:
"Whereas it would appear that a strong prejudice has been created throughout the British Empire against the name 'Berlin' and all that the name implies,
"And whereas, the citizens of this City fully appreciate that this prejudice is but natural, it being absolutely impossible for any loyal citizen to consider it complimentary to be longer called after the Capital of Prussia,
"Be it therefore resolved that the City Council be petitioned to take the necessary steps to have the name 'Berlin' changed to some other name more in keeping with our National sentiment."
Two public referendums followed and Berlin became Kitchener on Sept. 1, 1916.
By then, Berlin and neighbouring Waterloo had sacrificed 11 soldiers to the war. Towns that make up Cambridge had sacrificed 70.
Berlin almost melted down while stumbling toward its new name.
Desperate for volunteers, an army battalion sent gangs of soldiers into the streets of Berlin and Waterloo, hunting for men to put in uniform. Complaints poured into civic leaders about bully gangs and strong-arm tactics.
A council of tradesmen urged the government to send the battalion away over its "disgraceful conduct." The battalion commander responded by labelling the council cowardly, shameless and unpatriotic.
Plagued by desertions, low appeal and unhealthy recruits, the local battalion ultimately sent fewer than 300 men overseas. It had been aiming for 1,000.
Berlin council asked a committee of 99 men to propose a new city name. They came up with six choices promptly ridiculed across the nation: Huronto. Bercana. Dunard. Hydro City. Renoma. Agnoleo.
Agnoleo is an obscure Italian boy's name meaning angel or heavenly messenger. Renoma means famous in Esperanto, an artificial language no country speaks. Bercana mixes Berlin and Canada.
Embarrassed, Berlin council rejected the choices and took over the search for a new name. Then fate intervened.
On June 5, 1916, British war leader Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener was killed when a German mine sank his battleship off Scotland. His death stunned the Empire.
Elsie Master wrote a letter published June 7 in the Berlin News Record.
"The name of Kitchener would be a heritage to the citizens of Berlin in the generations to come, and will always be typical of splendid patriotism, tremendous energy, great attainments, and a sense of unswerving honour and rectitude," she wrote.
"The name would be one no citizen need blush for, and one our country and Empire would recognize as standing out in bold contrast to all that is implied in our present name of Berlin."
The idea caught on. Master helped make history when a public referendum endorsed the new name.
Among the earliest battles in the war was a failed attack on three German trenches at Givenchy in France, June 15, 1915.
Though a small battle by Great War standards, it ranks among the bloodiest for this region, killing 11 soldiers from Galt, Preston and Hespeler.
The dead included labourers, mechanics, a moulder, a printer, a shoe-cutter, and a businessman. All volunteered in 1914 with the first wave of recruits. Eight were British immigrants.
None were from Berlin. This did not go unnoticed by three Berlin soldiers who felt heat after surviving the battle.
"We hear a lot about Berlin not sending recruits and we get chided over it on account of coming from there," they wrote to a Berlin newspaper.
Berlin's Givenchy survivors pleaded with their hometown to send more recruits. "The more men we get the sooner the war will be over."
Their appeal made little difference. Ten local soldiers died more than a year later, capturing the ruined village of Courcelette on the Somme battlefield in France. It was Sept. 15, 1916, two weeks after Berlin renamed itself Kitchener.
Galt, Hespeler and Preston sacrificed eight soldiers. Kitchener and Waterloo sacrificed two.
Suspicion about Kitchener's war effort persisted. Recruit Ivan Bowman, 20, joked about it in his diary while training in England in April 1917. He was from Kitchener.
"I visited the German Spy camp as the Gun Duty Battalion is called by many of the boys for its members are mostly men of German extraction," he wrote. Sent to the front, Bowman survived the war, playing with the battalion band.
Galt supplied the region's two greatest war heroes and the only local woman to die.
George Kerr, 23, rushed forward to single-handedly capture four machine guns and 31 prisoners on Sept. 27, 1918. This earned the Galt Collegiate graduate a Victoria Cross, the Commonwealth's highest honour for bravery. He survived the war.
Storekeeper Frederick Hobson, 43, rushed the enemy to hold them off with bayonet and rifle, preserving a machine gun that was temporarily silenced by shell that killed most of its crew.
The enemy shot him dead but reinforcements reached the machine gun. His bravery Aug. 17, 1917, earned him a Victoria Cross.
Determined to do her part, nurse Evelyn McKay reached France in 1917. Behind the front lines, the former Galt Collegiate student wore a blue dress and a white veil while caring for wounded soldiers. Soldiers called her a bluebird.
She died of influenza Nov. 4, 1918, one week before peace was declared. She was 25.
Hespeler supplied an estimated 127 recruits connected to the Coombe Home, on Guelph Avenue. It was a temporary residence for orphaned or destitute Irish boys, sent to Ontario as migrant labourers.
Casualty records show at least 27 former Coombe Home boys died for Canada.
Robert Ingham, 21, was the first. The salesman was killed by a German shell April 24, 1915, in a dugout in a front-line trench in Belgium.
Farmer Neville Oldfield, 22, was the last. On Oct. 11, 1918, he was helping comrades lay telephone lines when an enemy shell killed him instantly.
Their deaths helped cement Hespeler's standing among the nation's most patriotic towns.
Hespeler lost 65 war dead. By population it sacrificed more heavily than Galt and Preston, and five times more heavily than Kitchener and Waterloo.
Waterloo County's north and south further split in the conscription election of Dec. 17, 1917, regarded as the nation's ugliest federal campaign.
Canada was desperate for soldiers. Prime Minister Robert Borden campaigned for public support to break his pledge not to send men to war against their will.
On Nov. 24, 1917, Borden came to Kitchener to campaign on a Saturday night. About 300 opponents attended at the Queen Street auditorium where he was to speak.
Critics unfurled banners, rained down boos, hooted and hollered. Borden tried to speak. Hecklers drowned him out. Indignant newspapers across the country reported the silencing of the prime minister as an insult, inflaming tensions.
After a furious campaign, Kitchener and Waterloo landed unsurprisingly among a handful of Ontario communities to elect an anti-conscription legislator. Cambridge endorsed a conscription candidate.
Canada backed conscription and it began ordering men to fight, including local men of German descent.
The war claimed 22 local conscripts including Clayton Underwood, 23.
Like many German speakers, the Bloomingdale-born shoemaker did not choose to fight. He played championship baseball for the Kaufman Rubber Company where he worked.
Compelled to fight, Underwood helped spearhead the last 100 days of the war that put Germany on the run. After shrapnel tore into his stomach, he died of his wounds on the final day of the war, Nov. 11, 1918.
In the dark at 4:40 a.m. on Nov. 11, Galt residents first learned the Great War was over. The bells at city hall began to ring, signalling an end to fighting on the Western Front at 11 a.m.
Jubilation followed. People rejoiced and paraded. They showed no fatigue despite spontaneously celebrating four days earlier when premature reporting said the war was over.
It was a "carnival of fun-making" the Galt Daily Reporter said. The Kitchener News Record called it "the greatest day in the history of the world."
People made noise with whatever they could: bells, sirens, whistles, horns. Fireworks followed at night. In Kitchener, discord was not quickly forgotten. A city councillor was compelled to kiss the Union Jack.
But soon, historians and community leaders sought to move past hard feelings, glossing over the lesser sacrifices made by Kitchener and Waterloo.
To subdue anti-German sentiment, they sought to reframe the region's heritage as Mennonite. Steps include the opening in 1926 of the Pioneer Memorial Tower, a celebration of Mennonite roots overlooking the Grand River.
In 1939 Canada was at war again. In the Second World War lasting until 1945, three towns that are part of Cambridge again recruited soldiers more heavily than Kitchener and Waterloo.
But the numbers sent to fight Nazi Germany were not nearly so far apart. Unlike two decades earlier, it was everybody's war.
Go online to therecord.com to remember 486 local dead from the Great War.
jouthit@therecord.com
Twitter: @OuthitRecord
jouthit@therecord.com
Twitter: @OuthitRecord
Its the first year the city has added the crosses to the Kelowna City Park
Remembrance Day is Sunday, and the City of Kelowna has added an additional sentiment to this year’s day of remembrance. A Field of Crosses now joins the Cenotaph in Veendam Gardens in City Park. Names and dates are depicted on the crosses from men and women from the Okanagan area who served and died in both World Wars.
“We came today to have some private time,” said Sharlene Mentanko, who was enjoying the beautiful day with her mother Fiona. “You can really see and feel the number of men and women with the crosses. It makes me feel a huge appreciation and gratitude. It makes it all feel a little more real.”
RELATED: Remembrance Day ceremonies planned throughout Central Okanagan
A brisk, but sunny Saturday afternoon at City Park was a perfect spot to take in the Field of Crosses, where the sun lit up the bright poppies and wreathes that hung on the crosses.
“If we can just come to thank them, it goes a very long way,” said Margery, who was also at City Park on a beautiful Saturday afternoon with a friend. “Some of them were just kids. They didn’t hesititate. They did it for their country. This is a very nice memorial.”
RELATED: Meet the B.C. veteran who helped fight to recognize Remembrance Day
The City of Kelowna will hold its annual Remembrance Day ceremony at Veendham Gardens at City Park at 10:30 a.m on Nov. 11.
More details on the Okanagan’s Remembrance Day ceremonies can be found here.
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The guns fell silent on Nov. 11, 1918. A date that marks the signing of the Armistice ending the First World War 100 years ago. The Armistice was signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front of World War I. The Armistice took effect at eleven o’clock in the morning – the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918. And from that historical agreement, Armistice Day, (later called Remembrance Day) continues in perpetuity, lest we forget.
On November 11th, we gather together to honour and reflect on the members of the Canadian Armed Forces who fought to defend our values and freedom, and those who continue to serve our country today. Within the District of Algoma, there are a number of commemorative ceremonies taking place.
It is estimated that over 10,000 men and women have enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces from within the Algoma District. From the War of 1812, through to today’s present conflicts and peacekeeping missions around the world, local men and women are answering the call to service.
The Veterans Commemorative Monument (VCM) is a way for citizens in the Algoma region to express our commitment to never forgetting those who have served our country.
In the interview above, VCM Committee members Phil Miller, Clyde Healey and Bruce Pearce speak on the living legacy the Veterans Commemorative Monument will be for the Algoma region. The VCM committee continues to fundraise to reach the goal of 80% of the projected cost in order to begin construction.
Since the interview was first aired, Terry Sheehan, Member of Parliament for Sault Ste. Marie, presented the Veterans Commemorative Monument Committee with a cheque (Nov. 2, 2018) for $25,000 to advance the funding of the VCM Project.
If you would like to purchase a granite marker to support the ongoing effort of the VCM Project, please go to http://thosewhoserved.ca/
To find a Remembrance Day ceremony in your community, go here: https://www.ontario.ca/page/remembrance-day?gclid=Cj0KCQiAoJrfBRC0ARIsANqkS_6-GcclHMQ0t2d8zD5HTVV4ok7rZXVuGepEh30rVGFFVDEI44T4_EMaAslzEALw_wcB
It can be rewarding to take time out and pay respects, writes Jude Dobson.
Holiday travel is often very much about you. What you want to do in that down time you've been hanging out for and saving your pennies to enjoy, and the memories you want to make. But sometimes the best holidays are about reflection and thinking of others. If you haven't clocked it — it's 100 years ago today since the end of World War I, the Armistice being signed on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 at Compiegne in a forest glade some 60km north of Paris.
Tyne Cot Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery and Memorial to the Missing, Belgium.
I'm a bit of a homing pigeon for France. It is of course a most fabulous destination to visit — quaint villages, majestic chateaux, art overload, beaches, mountains, vineyards, wine and cheese. Lots of cheese and every sort of it you could ever imagine. What is not to love?
For me, however, France has also included many visits over the years to the various New Zealand memorials, a fair few of the Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries and a museum or three. I'm probably one of "those" mums — the one that has the itinerary sorted for a few educational visits along the route. And why not? In my mind it does our children a disservice not to encourage an appreciation of what went before.
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There is a sombre beauty in a mass of beautifully kept war graves. And a pretty special moment comes when, as a travelling Kiwi, you find the specific grave you've been looking for and see the name of someone you know of. If you have some context about why they ended up buried so far from home, that's even more satisfying.
If this all sounds like something way too hard to research, there are some amazing bespoke tours out there in which a historian will join you on the road to give you the story of New Zealanders at the front and how the war played out.
Plus, that way you won't get lost or have arguments about navigation with your driving companion. Some travel companies will even help you research your relatives.
I was talking to Stephen Parsons, (House of Travel Palmerston North) recently and he was saying how satisfying it was to help people research their relatives using the war records and find the path they need to follow.
He recalled helping a person in their 80s research a relative at Gallipoli, then was there with them, physically helping them up the hill at the end of the journey.
An emotional moment ensued.
The reality is that most New Zealanders will have a relative who took part in World War I, whether or not they survived it. Of the 16,700 of us who died overseas, 12,500 are on the Western Front in France and Belgium.
Jude Dobson at Le Quesnoy Communal Cemetery Extension, France.
Last year I spent quite some time researching my grandfather's war. I never met him — he died when my father was 16 — but we were going to France anyway, so I morphed the northern France part of the road trip to follow his war. It was a pretty amazing feeling to walk where he walked, even see the chateau on the outskirts of a small town that had been made into the British Officers accommodation (he was English) and literally see where he would have slept.
We also visited Carriere Wellington in Arras, which is one of those places you just have to go as a Kiwi. And if you are going to northern France, also add the Last Post ceremony at Menin Gate at Ypres, Belgium to the must-do list.
Close by are many places where New Zealanders fought and died — Messines, Gravenstaffel, Longueval and of course there's Tyne Cot Cemetery. It's the largest of the 960 Commonwealth War Graves Cemeteries (CWGC) on the Western Front. There are 198 Kiwis buried here among the 11,900 servicemen of the British Empire. Of all the graves, only 3605 are identified. That tells you something of the ferocity of the battle.
The surrounding lush rolling Belgian landscape was anything but 100 years ago — it was a muddy, obliterated mess that would entomb a great many men. On the walls at Tyne Cot are the names of those not found — 34,996 to be exact (of which 1166 are New Zealanders who died in October 1917, in the bloodbath of Passchendaele). All up, that's more than the population of Timaru, gone.
Le Quesnoy is a destination to add to your travel plans too. This is the town that the NZ Division liberated on their own, on November 4, 1918, a week before the war would end. The fortified town was occupied by Germans for most of the war and the Kiwis elected not to fire over the inner walls to spare the civilians. After a day long, hard-fought battle our men entered by a ladder. A medieval operation in many ways but one the locals have never forgotten. Go for a stroll through the Avenue des Neo-Zelandais, spot Place des All Blacks, walk through the New Zealand Garden and see the NZ memorial on the ramparts.
And most importantly, go and see where our future museum on the Western Front will be — right here in this town in the wartime mayor's gracious residence on Rue Nouvelle Zelande. It's about to be renovated to be our place, our home to tell our stories. Kiwis are very welcome here in this little town.
The Dolores Cross Project gives Kiwis further opportunity to pay respect to those who went before us and paid the ultimate price, so we can have the future we do. Dolores Ho is the archivist at the National Army Museum in Waiouru. She wants to see the graves visited of every New Zealander who lies overseas as the result of war — more than 30,000 of them — with a piece of New Zealand left behind for them. She has started the Dolores Cross Project to achieve just that. Aptly, the name Dolores comes from the Latin word meaning sorrow, grief, pain and sadness. She makes harakeke crosses to cradle the poppy and asks for volunteers to help place the crosses at each grave and document the visit with a photo of the cross placed. She is almost half way there in her mission, but there's still some 15,000 graves that need a visitor.
In July this year I was filming in and around Le Quesnoy for the documentary series I have made about the liberation of the town (watch it on nzherald.co.nz). I contacted Dolores to see who needed to be visited and got sent a list of 20 or so men in Romeries Cemetery (we have 106 Kiwis in this one).
NZ soldier Bernard Ayling on stretcher at Le Quesnoy. Photo / Auckland War Memorial Museum Tamaki Paenga Hira
The cameraman and I set to our sad but satisfying duty. Between us we looked on the map of the cemetery I'd downloaded and printed, found our men, and planted a poppy.
We took a moment to thank them for their service and photographed their grave, now with an added touch of New Zealand. One of them — Lewis Evans — I knew quite a lot about from the research I did for the documentary. He was an unsung hero who really deserved an award for gallantry, in my humble opinion. Another, Bernard Ayling, I knew of as the wounded man on the stretcher in an archive photo. I looked at the faces of the men in that photo — their concern wondering if he would survive. Alas, he did not.
It felt good to sit there at their graves for a while; to actively think about them.
I thoroughly recommend thinking of others on a trip, especially if your lovely holiday destination has some Kiwis buried there who were on active service. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission has an amazing site that will tell you exactly where all our fallen are (cwgc.org). And visiting some of those sites, seeing some of those museums is time well spent.
It's good to remember the past. It gave us our future. Lest We Forget.
● 10 per cent of NZ went overseas to war: 100,400 New Zealand men left for war from a population of 1,093,000 (1914 census). Another 9200 would serve with other Commonwealth countries.
● Of those leaving from NZ, 58,000 — more than 50 per cent — would become casualties (dead and wounded). 16,700 died overseas:
● 860 from sickness, accidents, protracted wounds, gas
● 640 in Sinai and Palestine
● 2700 in Gallipoli
● 12,500 on the Western Front
Bernard Ayling's grave in Romeries Communal Cemetery Extenstion, France.
FACT BOX
To arrange your own personalised Western Front battlefield tour, contact
House of Travel
Find out more about the Dolores Cross Project at facebook.com/DoloresCrossProject or email dolorescrossproject@gmail.com
Watch Jude Dobson's documentary The Liberation of Le Quesnoy at
nzherald.co.nz
