Simcoe 95-year-old 'represents the boys'
By JAMES ELLIOTT The Spectator
95-year-old Simcoe resident Frank Close is one of 14 First World War veterans who returned to Northern France to mark today's 75th anniversary of Vimy Ridge, the battle many historians believe crystallized the Canadian national identity.
PART OF every day for the past 75 years Frank Close has given to remembering his old friend Andy Doughty.
The pair were still teenagers when they went to the Methodist Church in Garnet that July morning, 1916, to volunteer for the Canadian Expeditionary Force.
They joined C Company of the Haldimand Rifles. By November, they were in England. By Christmas, they were dug in on the Western Front in France.
Like many Canadian regiments, they were broken up to reinforce other regiments, and the two were part of a group of 45 assigned to the Royal Canadian Regiment.
The following spring they were crouched in the cold, grey mud of Picar-dy, part of the 30,000 strong Canadian force poised to attack Vimy Ridge on Easter Monday.
The night before the attack they'd been herded, along with an additional 500 troops, into the infamous Zivy Cave, ready to go over the top at dawn.
During the night, an officer appeared, collared Andy and took him up to the


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surface. An hour later what was left of their bodies was brought down in a sandbag. An artillery shell had landed on top of them.
"That was a shock to me," Private Close, now 95, recalls, "because Andy and I were chums. I don't think there's a day passes that I don't think of him."
Andy Doughty, the Nanticoke farmboy who never came back, will be just one of the memories Pte. Close takes with him today when he returns to the killing fields of Vimy for the first time.
Likely he'll remember the German rifle bullet that hit him "like a brick" and ripped up his backside, leaving him with a thick, white scar.
Likely he'll remember the poor wretch of a sergeant he'd found lying in the mud. "He had 16 bullet holes in him, must've got caught
with a burst of machine gun fire. He hadn't died yet but there was nothing we could do for him."
Likely he'll remember the devastation Canadian artillery rained on German infantry. "Actually, I never saw any live Germans. They were wiped out by the barrage."
He might also remember when Canadian troops arrived on the Continent the English derisively referred to them as "camouflaged civilians." But after their overwhelming success at Vimy they became an elite group, the generals' first choice as shock troops.
"I went through the summer of '18 where we were made attack troops and I suppose I went over the top six or seven times. Vimy was the first one and you remember it better. It became more of a business to us. We became what you call professionals. We knew what we had to do and how to go about it."
Pte. Close knows he was lucky to survive so much combat, but says he never was scared.
"I'm a pretty cool egg, I guess. That's what they used to say in the trenches. My philosophy was if it was coming to you, you was gonna get it, and I never worried about it really."
After the war, he returned to the farm and resumed his life, far removed from the horrors of the "war to end all wars."
He regards his three years on the front lines as a simple matter of duty. "I'd far rather have stayed home, you know, but if you didn't go somebody else would have to go in your place."
Returning to the battlefield today involves one more duty, every bit as important as his last.
Just before leaving for Europe last week, he made a simple promise: "I'll do my best to represent the boys."


Yokoyama, The Spectator
Frank Close displays some of his mementoes from the First World War.