H E A R D A M I D T H E G U N S True Stories from the Western Front, 1914–1918 JACQUELINE LARSON CARMICHAEL H heritage heritagehouse.ca Copyright © 2020 Jacqueline Larson The interior of this book was produced Carmichael on FSC®-certified paper, processed chlorine free and acid free. All rights reserved. No part of this pub- lication may be reproduced, stored in Heritage House gratefully acknowledges a retrieval system, or transmitted in that the land on which we live and work any form or by any means—electronic, is within the traditional territories of the mechanical, audio recording, or other- Lkwungen (Esquimalt and Songhees), wise—without the written permission Malahat, Pacheedaht, Scia’new, T’Sou-ke, of the publisher or a licence from Access and WSÁNEĆ (Pauquachin, Tsartlip, Tsa- Copyright, Toronto, Canada. wout, Tseycum) Peoples. Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd. We acknowledge the financial support of heritagehouse.ca the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Canada Cataloguing information available from Council for the Arts, and the Province Library and Archives Canada of British Columbia through the British 978-1-77203-337-3 (pbk) Columbia Arts Council and the Book 978-1-77203-338-0 (ebook) Publishing Tax Credit. Edited by Renée Layberry Proofread by Nandini Thaker Cover and interior book design by Setareh Ashrafologhalai Cover image: Harold Monks, mid-1917 24 23 22 21 20 1 2 3 4 5 at Camp Petawawa. Raymond Harlan Brewster, Canadian Letters and Printed in Canada Images Project. Map of France, 1915, on page iii by the Geographical Section, General Staff (GSGS), British War Office. Author’s collection. CONTENTS Prologue: Two Grandfathers 1 Timeline 24 1 Going on to War 37 2 Wartime Racism 43 3 In the Trenches 65 4 Women’s Work 97 5 Not Wanting to Fight 117 6 1917 and 1918 127 7 F inal Push: The Last One Hundred Days 161 8 The Animals’ War 175 9 The End and What Came Next 189 10 Keeping Remembrance Alive 211 Epilogue 235 Acknowledgements 239 Bibliography 242 Index 246 u Saskatchewan rancher Charles W.C. Chapman in uniform (left) and George Anderson “Black Jack” Vowel on his wedding day in Hanna, Alberta, 1920 (right). VoWEl Family CollECtioN PROLOGUE TWO GRANDFATHERS IN 2016, a hundred years after the Battle of the Somme, a clerk at the Enterprise Rent-A-Car counter in Amsterdam smiled broadly at me. “You rescued us—twice!” she said. She had just learned that I was Canadian. “You’re welcome,” I said, smiling in return. On a research trip to Belgium and France, I was about to experience the powerful effect the former Western Front in Flanders, Belgium, and France had on my ancestors. The two major arenas of the First World War were within an hour’s drive of each other. I was startled by the close proximity of the places my grandfathers fought, where waves of hundreds of thousands of soldiers poured over the gently rolling landscape. That land is still, in many cases, pitted with craters and trenches. Each year, bomb disposal units find thousands of kilograms of unexploded ammunition on the former Western Front. So, when a sign says Do Not WalK oN tHE GRaSS, I don’t walk on the grass. 1 Things I had long been told about my grandfather, Oklahoma-born George “Black Jack” Vowel, led me to even more questions. I knew that he died in his early sixties when his tractor overturned on him in the Peace River Valley. I knew the wartime words penned in let- ters to Louisa “Bebe” Watson Small Peat lived on: CBC Radio based a radio program on them in 1992, and then Peat’s daughter gave them to my aunt, Peggy Aston, who passed them along to me. I had tran- scribed them for a number of articles in the Edmonton Sun, Alberta Views, and other publications, eventually giving George “Black Jack” Vowel a social media persona and tweeting his words as if I were him, in an effort to tell a new generation about his life in the trenches of the First World War. But being in the trenches where he and my maternal grandfather both fought—that was a different experience altogether. I am the second-generation product of two soldiers of the First World War. Both grandfathers, prairie ranchers, were in the war for the four-plus years that Canada fought—like so many others. They survived, but they never talked about it. Despite the surface similar- ities of their backgrounds, the war impacted them in very different ways—ways that would be handed down (for better or worse), like psy- chological heirlooms, to their children and their children’s children. Somewhere in the trenches of Flanders, on the rolling hills of the Vimy countryside, and in Black Jack’s letters and journals, I hoped to find answers to the questions that had been sparked within me. Charles Wellington Camden Chapman My maternal grandfather, Charles Wellington Camden Chapman, was a young Saskatchewan rancher at the outset of the Great War, and a volunteer who signed up in November 1914. 2 Heard amid tHe Guns The cowboy son of an Anglican minister and adventurer, raised partly in the far north of Churchill, Manitoba, Charlie was an artillery man, operating a gun that lobbed eighteen-pound shells at “Fritz,” as the German Imperial Army was dubbed. He was wounded in the leg on October 13, 1915, and shrapnel from the shell was embedded in his back. He was hospitalized for sixty-nine days. After occupying Germany, Chapman came home whole, as far as you could tell, despite his obvious wound. He had a slight limp in his walk and was a bit hard of hearing. Every so often he’d go to the veter- ans’ hospital, and they’d take another piece of shrapnel out. He had kind blue eyes that crinkled at the corners and a hearty laugh that rattled in a chest damaged by mustard gas. He married a lovely Canadian girl named Ruth Showalter, who was of French and German stock. Photos with their six kids show a happy family. But Maidstone, Saskatchewan, was a Dust Bowl bust, so they sold the farm for the price of a rickety Ford Model A, into which they loaded up the clan, with suitcases tied to the running boards and mattresses strapped on top, like Joads from Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. They went to Ladysmith, Nanaimo, and ultimately Port Alberni, British Columbia, where Grandpa Charlie used a particular trick for getting a job: If you’re standing in a job line with hundreds of other men, and if they ask you if you have experience doing X, say “Yes!” even if you don’t; figure out how to do X later. Eventually, he finished his career as a foreman at Bloedel, Stewart & Welch’s chipper plant. He was a good Royal Canadian Legion man, but he never talked about the war. In fact, he tried to forget about the war. When Charlie Chap- man’s kids asked him if he killed any Germans in the war, he grinned and said he only practised on bully beef tins. He was either a loyal hero or a glutton for punishment: Even after four long years in the First World War, he wanted to volunteer for the prologue 3 Second World War. Told he was too old to enlist, he served in the home militia. He didn’t have a perfect life, but he was a genuinely nice guy—cheerful, kind, nurturing, beloved by his children and grand- children. Charlie Chapman outlived three wives, but not his sense of humour. He bore his decline gracefully and played a mean harmonica with dignity in the kitchen band at the seniors’ home in Parksville. He numbered among his friends Tommy Douglas, founder of the NDP and Canada’s socialized medicine. And upon his death, he was laid to a hero’s rest with his fellow vet- erans in Port Alberni’s Field of Honour—not far from the resting place of his brother-in-law, First World War veteran Guy Showalter—under the shadow of a tree grown from an acorn that came from Vimy Ridge. Another grandfather, a very different story. Louisa “Bebe” Watson Small Peat Throughout much of the war, my paternal grandfather, George “Black Jack” Vowel, kept up a correspondence with an Irish woman who was destined to become Canada’s most high-profile war bride of the Great 4 Heard amid tHe Guns l The British Military Medals presented to George Vowel for his service at Mouquet Farm on the Somme. VoWEl Family CollECtioN War. He wasn’t alone in his bid to keep the letters coming in. Accord- ing to the United Kingdom’s Royal Mail, an average of 19,000 mailbags crossed the English Channel every day in 1917. The Royal Mail’s Home Depot was handling twelve million letters and a million parcels at its wartime peak, and an estimated two billion letters were addressed to or from servicemen during the war. Even after Armistice, a Novem- ber 16, 1918 postmark on a postcard from France was still calibrated to urge the public to FEED tHE GUNS WitH WaR BoNDS. George’s early letters to Miss Bebe, as he called her, showed a sort of rough-hewn charm—some magnetism under the displaced rancher exterior. His language was direct, with a homespun charm. “As we are getting used to the mud, we are feeling better, we all are as happy as a pig fed on tater peelings,” he wrote. On a stubborn fellow soldier: “He is just like Paddy’s pig. You can coax but he doesn’t drive worth a darn.” On veering off topic: “If I don’t quit drifting I’ll get clear off my range.” Bebe asked George to describe himself. His response was self- deprecating: “I look like a loose button on an overcoat.” On the other hand, George wasn’t beyond stretching the facts to impress a girl. Embellishments in the letters he wrote to Bebe, accord- ing to family records, included the romanticized claims to be a Texas native (he was born in Kansas), fully Irish (his mother’s name was French), and an accomplished horse breaker (family members recalled he had little patience with horses, compared to his brother Fred). A huge picture of Louisa “Bebe” Watson Small Peat on her wed- ding day hangs in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. An Irish-born author and lecturer, lovely and well-spoken, she married Private prologue 5