THE GRAND RIVER SACHEM April 24, 1985 Page 12
Ypres and Caledonia: April 1915
by Bruce Duncan
"The first volunteer from Haldimand to be killed at the front was Private George Edward King of Dunnville, who was killed in action on the 31st of March. The deceased.... 
was about 22 years of age." Thus ran a story in the Grand River Sachem of April 21, 1915, seventy years ago this week. George King had been in Europe for six weeks, a soldier in the 37th Haldimand Rifles then part of the Canadian Expeditionary 
Force's 4th Battalion; he was one of 70 men in the first contingent that Haldimand 
County was to supply to King and country. A second contingent was still training in England and included 14 of Caledonia's young men. Two of them, T.W. Pettigrew and W. Simpson, would never return home.
George King missed by three weeks the first battle that Canadian soldiers fought during the Great War of 1914-1918. It was called the Second Battle of Ypres and it began on April 22. He was, instead, one of the thousands of weekly casualties during "quiet" times in the trenches, the "wastage" as the Army commanders called 
them.
While the Sachem of April 21 was being read, the German Fourth Army was waiting for the right wind in order to release 160 tons of chlorine on the Allied lines - the first use of poisonous gas in warfare. 
With wind from the north on the 22nd, the gas was released at 5 p.m. to drift in a choking, deadly cloud over French and Algerian regiments on the Canadian's left. By midnight, the Germans had advanced 3 km. behind the original French line and the Canadian front was wide open on that side.
Officers scrambled to fill the gap. At midnight, two battalions, including men from Hamilton's 91st Highlanders, attacked 
the Germans digging in in Kitchener's Woods and suffered 66 casualties. They took the woods in a bayonet charge but with unprotected flanks and out-machine-gunned, retired to their original positions. At 5:45 a.m. on the 23rd; the 4th and 1st Battalions charged over 1500 yards of broken ground towards a ridge manned by the Germans. The response was overwhelming 
and the two battalions were pinned down in the valley, shelled with tear gas all morning.
At 4:25 p.m. they attacked once more, this time with substantial aid of seven English battalions but again were repulsed and finally dug in 600 yards south of the new German trenches. The 4th Battalion suffered 454 casualties including Major
Go By Bus-Go With Us!
Cookstown - A springtime day out with lunch included. May 9. Per person. 
$37.00
Mother's Day — Take Mom out on her
special day. Brunch included. May 12. Per person. $26.00
Lilac Festival - Lunch and admissions 
included. May 21. Per person.
$38.75
OR SEE YOUR LOCAL TRAVEL AGENT
HM Tours and Travel
CHARTER BUS SERVICE
TRANSPORTATION by HEASLIP MOTORS Ltd., Ontario Travel Registration #1619984
14 MAIM ST. S.,
HAGERSVILLE HAGERSVILLE HAMILTON 416-768-3147 526-0026
Edward L. Kelly, who had led that first contingent from Haldimand. Although wounded, he recovered sufficiently to participate 
i the fighting at Langemarcke four weeks later - and was killed there "by a bursting shell." Another Haldimand officer, 
Lieutenant Cameron Brant, was killed 
at Ypres.
By the time the battle was over, dozens of attacks and counterattacks and two more gas releases later, Canada's casualties amounted to 232 officers and 6,024 men. The people of Haldimand County 
would spend many days in trepidation thinking of their sons, brothers, husbands and friends in that bloodied corner of a foreign field. For some, the worry would last another 3-1 years, for others, it would end with a short and regretful telegram, and for many more, by word of injury or capture.
The boys of the 37th had marched along the dusty roads of Cayuga in the wonderfully 
warm August of 1914, singing, laughing and joking among themselves, and worrying that the war might be over before they got there. How could you be a hero that way? By August 20, they were off to join thousands of other young men at Valcartier Camp in Quebec. Then it was England and the rain and mud of the wettest 
winter in memory on the Salisbury Plain. When Lord Kitchener reviewed them in February, 1915, just before they sailed for France, he joked that the trenches would be a pleasure for them after the mud in England.
Second contingent
The second contingent from Haldimand left on November 7, 1914 from the Grand Trunk station where the Sachem reporter described the scene: "Hundreds upon hundreds 
thronged the streets and the GTR Station on Saturday morning to see the second 
contingent off....Long before the arrival 
of the 9:20 train from Cayuga, the people gathered at the station....When the train arrived, many pitiful scenes were witnessed, old men and women crying for the boy who was leaving them. Others with children in their arms, trying their best to keep from crying, for the children's sake. Sisters and brothers lined the station to say goodbye to their loved ones; sweethearts and lovers getting and giving their last embrace.
All of these sights greeted the eyes of the spectators....When the train pulled out, the band played "For King and Country", the boys singing "It's a Long Way to Tip-perary". The Township of Seneca even presented their lads with a $5 gold piece each, good money for men in service at $1.10 a day.
They were off, flushed with patriotism and the zeal and idealism of youth, enjoying 
a camaraderie not felt in peacetime. They went into a hellstorm of guns, gas and barbed wire where the strategy of the 19th century tried to overpower the technology of the 20th; where generals used 
"the chests of brave men to defend against machine gun bullets."
Back in Caledonia, however, life went on. A few things changed. Prices went up; patriotic events were staged; but generally, 
things were pretty much the same. On April 28, 1915, in the Sachem that told of the Ypres Battle, an article also noted that "seeding is about through and the ground never worked better, the seed going in very easy. The prospects for a bumper harvest never looked brighter."
On May 5, the Village Clerk, John Avery, entered on the front page the following: "Notice To Chicken Owners. In accordance 
with the By-laws of the Village, all chickens are forbidden running 
at large, and the owners are requested 
to see that they are properly
fastened up, so that they will not annoy the neighbours, and save costs."
The Women's Christian Temperance Union held regular meetings, Alderson's Warerooms were advertising Ford Tour
ing Cars (made in Canada) for $590 and the political cartoons in the Sachem were pro-Tory.
In the trenches of Flanders, however, the young men from Haldimand were living 
in a different world, where 17 lb. shells dropped out of the sky with the roar of an express train and exploded with a deafening 
crash, a wave of terrible heat and ragged, 
red hot hunks of metal that zipped through bodies, severing heads or limbs or torsos. Shrapnel shells burst overhead with a white puff and blasted steel shot all around, through soft caps (there were no helmets until 1916) and split skulls. Bullets whined and whistled from every direction and kept you down, down, down in the mud and blood and other slime whose origin was best not considered. There was gas and no gas masks (they were hastily brought in within a month). Gas ate at your lungs, dissolving them so that you drowned in your own red, frothy fluid after a day; two or three if you were not so lucky.
There was the infamous Ross rifle in your hands, the one Colonel Sam Hughes swore by and men swore at. It jammed after repeated firing and was tossed aside whenever a good British Lee-Enfield could be found. Over all the chaos below was the unceasing noise, the crescendo of shells, bullets machine guns, screams, moans -and far off in the distance, birds singing.
What could possibly have prepared the boys from Haldimand County for the war? For seeing men blown into little fragments or dropped into ragged khaki heaps by machine gun bullets, for looking at a field littered with the bodies of their friends in the 4th Battalion? For exhausting 48 hour stretches of battle? For listening to the eldritch groans of the dying out in No Man's Land where the merciless rats searched first for the livers of fresh corpses?
If they returned home, how could they reconcile their years at the front with the censored and clean-cut reports the Government passed onto the newspapers? Reports that described the early stages of the Second Battle of Ypres thus:
Heroic Canadians
"Heroic Canadians Saved Allied Line The glory of the combat has gone to the Canadian troops. After the shock and surprise of the unexpected German assault was over they were, from all indications, the first to regain their balance and to rush back upon the positions they had been forced to abandon, driving the Germans to retreat, taking a considerable number of prisoners, including a colonel, and recapturing four 4.7 inch guns which had been left behind.
Even the casualties were simply "killed in action" or "wounded" as if these things occurred with precision and neatness. The reality was "blown into small pieces" or "hand ripped off" or a myriad of other grisly ways to die or be maimed. The truth of the war had to be seen and to see it you had to be a soldier. The men in the trenches laughed at the newspaper reports and the folks at home disbelieved the gruesome truth. The full story was revealed when it was safe to do so - after the war.
It is that full story that we should remember when we stand in front of the Caledonia cenotaph and read the 28 names and the sinister battlegrounds - Festubert, Givenchy, the Somme, Cambrai, Passchendaele and Ypres. For if those boys of 70 years ago could tell us how they saw and felt and died, they would say as well, "Never, never again." Ypres in 1915 was only the first of the terrible battles that Caledonians fought in; there were more to come. From 70 years distance, we should remember how they suffered; to forget is to insult those brave young men. And resolve that those who returned came home with - "Never, never again."