Robert Paterson's Weblog

World War 1 - The Ritz and the War

This picture is of the Ritz Carlton Hotel in 1915.

As their men trained at Vacartier in August and September, many Montreal families in the Square Mile, prepared to follow their men to England.

Here is Francis Chattan Stephens, the father of my great Aunt Frances.

He was in Valcartier and would sail on the Alaunia in September.

This is his immediate family. My aunt Frances is on the right. Her brother Johnny is on the left. He was left behind with his granny. As we will see, this was not the safest decision.

Aunt Frances recalls "Being buttoned into outdoor clothes, taken to the Ritz Carlton Hotel on Sherboroke Street, and put to rest in a bed with a white wickerwork headboard, in a room full of white furniture."

Her mother Hazel (Kemp) had closed the house on Pine Avenue - it was to become the Norwegian Consul General's house. She and Frances would follow Chattan to England.

But now this was the first step. Many other families were making the same kind of preparations. The Ritz would have been filled with people that Hazel knew well and was related to. 

The Ritz was primarily a residential hotel. This role of the home away from home would expand during the war. After the war, many Square Mile widows and older women retired there. The irony is that the Ritz has been recently remodelled and now is once again such a place. Check out your new home at the Ritz here.

The Hotel had opened in 1912 and two of the key investers were my Uncle Montagu Allan and Cousin, Charles Meredith. It was our "family hotel". The monthly rate began at $29!

As an aside, after the war, Alec, my paternal grandfather was to have his haircut every week at the barbershop at the Ritz. My maternal grandfather, Charlie Ballantyne, had a multi decade liason with the housekeeper. I benefited from this. In the 1980's I used to stay at the Ritz for a few days most months in my time as an insvestment banker. She had long retired at my grandfather was dead but the key staff, the Concierge, Danny, and the key bar staff had all liked him and her very much. I was indeed treated like family!

This is a typical sitting room of a suite in 1925. When I used to stay in the 1980's my bedroom was an updated version of this room with the fireplace. (photo credit McCord Museum Montreal)

As war broke out in Europe, some of the conflict was mirrored at the Ritz. The General Manager, Rudolf Bischoff was a Prussian and many of the staff were German and French. Bischoff left, never to return, and his job was taken over by Mr Frank Quick. My Aunt Frances described him as the "Stoutest man I have ever seen" (Essays in Growing - her private memoir 2008).

Aunt Frances would leave the Ritz shortly and take a ship to England with her mother. They would rent a house near Salisbury Plain, where the CEF was to spend a horrible winter under canvas. It rained nearly all the time.

She was going to England against her husband's wishes though. He writes to her dated November 5th that says: "I got a letter from you as much said to Blazes with staying in Canada, that you were coming over. This letter I got just after writing you you and rather discouraging the idea for which I duly ask for forgiveness."

They would be part of a large contingent of Montreal women. In later posts we will follow some of them. These women were to surprise themselves and men generally by their toughness and resilience and their ability to get major projects done. They were also to suffer as badly as their men too.

 

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The Call to Adventure - Is this you too?

Films such as Lord of the Rings or The Matrix have been very popular. They are based on a myth. The myth is of a person who starts to wake up to the reality that there is something badly wrong with society. They at first struggle. They can feel mad or out of place. But then they find others like them. They then take on the sickness of their society. They face many trials. If they are victorious it is because of their own new personal power.

They become the change. 

The deep appeal of this myth is that it is of course, real. People like you and I can wake up and see what is really going on. At first, we too are confused and hope that the problem will go away. But things happen and we are indeed called to adventure. 

Here is a conversation that I had earlier this month with Cynthia Dennis, a new mother, who lives on Prince Edward Island - the nearest thing to the Shire we can find today!

The premise of our conversation is that we do indeed live in a Matrix. Once you see the Matrix, what can you do?

This is the question that we tackle for the next hour. We made this in the hope that one or two people might find their own feelings embedded in Cynthia's story. Is this person you?

 

We start with Cynthia thinking abut the future and what it may be like for Zadie. Cynthia has this feeling of dread. She cannot be clear about what she fears but she can see the signs that that we are at the end of a time and that in Zadie's life, we will have a great transition that will change everything.

We talk about getting ready for a time when we might not be able to take for granted that food is in the shops or oil in the delivery truck. We realize that we have so few skills of a practical nature. We know so litle about growing food, about fixing things etc. But we have all been to school for decades.

How will Zadie prepare for a time when practical skills will be at a premium and when being able to think critically will be core? For school does the opposite. There we learn only abstractions and how to be obedient. How will Cynthia learn the practical skills unless she drops out?

I ask her about protest. 

Protest is a waste of time is her position. A better use of time is to do the things that each of us need to do to get ready. The world will not change via protest but by our action to make a better one. The change is in us. We have to be the change.

Can we do this on our own?

Impossible!

We have to work with others. The hard thing though is that many of our family and friends want to stay in the Matrix. But with signs of this transition all around us, Cynthia is sad that most people have shut their eyes and do not want to talk in any way about what is going on and what might be ahead.

So maybe we need to find a new family and friends from those that share our view? We need a tribe!

So what is this change? How do we change our own lives? It's so hard!

I ask Cynthia to tell us why and how she gave up drink. This is one of the hardest things that any person can do. In this section, I think we get to the core of the challenge that we all face. How to create a new life for ourselves. How to give up our addictions to the old life.

Here Cynthia makes a commonsense and eloquent reply in full. We see how simple and yet how hard this is. I can never in this summary do her own words justice.

I ask Cynthia how she sees the transition taking place. 

She feels that it will be sudden. It will have causes that seem on the surface to be small. Like the murder of the Archduke in 1914. But that once the process begins it will be rapid and all encompassing.

Where to go? Where do we see the official leadership?

The answer is nowhere. 

We come to the conclusion that we have to ignore the official leadership and make our own preparations. It does seem clear though that rural areas offer more. If food and energy become the central issues, big cities are going to be a challenge. 

Do we have to work hard to try and persuade otthers? 

Probably a waste of time too?

They will be ready if when they are and not before. As the signs of global dysfunction grew, more will wake up on their own. As each of us do our own thing, more will see that we are not mad. 

What is her plan?

To be the kind of attentive mum that will mean that Zadie is self possessed and seure. Ready for a Rock and Roll world. Not to worry abut school. Give her the right kind of experiences. Offer her acceptance for who she really is. Make love the core.

And for us?

Talking is action. For it leads to more understanding. Maybe the best we can really do is to be ready and to accept what will happen? Maybe talking helps us pay attention? And certainly talking helps us get connected and to no longer feel alone and isolated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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This is the Allan "Cottage" in Cacouna. It is where the family spent the hot summer months away from Montreal. I would guess that as the men left for war, that the Allans had their last summer here. It was the last summer that they would ever have together as a family.

The big plan that they hatched was to go to England to support the troops. Lady Allan planned to set up a hospital and her eldest daughter Martha was to train as a nurse and then buy her own ambulence and go to France!

Hugh was at Eton and was as yet too young to join up but I imagine that he would have been here with his sisters for the summer. Term would start next week, so by August 25th, he must have been on his way back to Europe ahead of the troops.

He would leave Eton in 1915 and join the Canadian Black Watch. He then joined the Royal Naval Air Squadron as a pilot. He was killed in action on his first mission in July 6, 1917.

For the 4 Allan children this would have been a magic place. Here they are on the front step in 1901.

Martha is on the far left, then Hugh and then Anna and finally Gwendolyn. 

It all must have been so exciting. Again, thank goodness, we cannot see the future.

Also on board a ship, this time returning to Canada, was a 41 year old doctor who was also an artilleryman who had served as a gunner in the Boer War. There he had seen the need for better medical care. From the ship, he sent a telegram offering his services which were of course accepted. (Source)

He sailed for Canada in the `Calgarian’ on August 28th, having received a cablegram from Colonel Morrison, that he had been provisionally appointed surgeon to the 1st Brigade Artillery. The night he arrived in Montreal I dined with him at the University Club, and he was aglow with enthusiasm over this new adventure. He remained in Montreal for a few days, and on September 9th, joined the unit to which he was attached as medical officer. Before leaving Montreal he wrote to his sister Geills:

“Out on the awful old trail again! And with very mixed feelings, but some determination. I am off to Val-cartier to-night. I was really afraid to go home, for I feared it would only be harrowing for Mater, and I think she agrees. We can hope for happier times. Everyone most kind and helpful: my going does not seem to surprise anyone. I know you will understand it is hard to go home, and perhaps easier for us all that I do not. I am in good hope of coming back soon and safely: that, I am glad to say, is in other and better hands than ours.”

This time he joined not as a gunner but as the Brigade Surgeon with the rank of Major. Meeting him at Valcartier was a horse called Bonfire that had been provided for him by Dr Todd a colleague and a good friend. Bonfire would accompany his master at his funeral in January 1918.

Addendum - here is Bonfire

John McCrae was the author of In Flanders Fields. Here he is in his new uniform in 1914.

 Just before he left, he wrote this to a friend. I think that it must say what so many were feeling.

It is a terrible state of affairs, and I am going because I think every bachelor, especially if he has experience of war, ought to go. I am really rather afraid, but more afraid to stay at home with my conscience. (Prescott. In Flanders Fields: The Story of John McCrae, p. 77)

He would leave the Artillery in May 1915 when the Number 3 Canadian (McGill) General Hospital arrived from Montreal. It was made up of staff from the two main hospitals the General and the Royal Victoria. Here is a summary:

"Further proof of McGill's effectiveness in the war effort was the extraordinary contribution of the Faculty of Medicine. Dean H.S. Birkett, a peacetime officer of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, proposed that McGill should raise, equip and staff a complete field hospital. Made up of medicine graduates, students and nurses from the Montreal General and Royal Victoria Hospitals, the No. 3 Canadian General Hospital (commonly known as the "McGill Hospital") opened in France in the fall of 1915.

Located a few miles from the front, it was a self-contained city of tents that had been donated by an Indian prince. Inside, the hospital housed 1,500 beds, about four times the capacity of the Montreal General at the time. Between 1915 and the end of the war, over 100,000 patients were treated and 11,000 surgical procedures performed. Even more impressive is the fact that, despite the outbreak of influenza and frequent German air raids toward the war's end, the McGill Hospital held its mortality rate down to less than one per cent. Word of the success reached the front lines. As the McGill News reported in 1920, soldiers told each other: "If you get wounded, try to be marked for the McGill Hospital." (source)

 

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The web is amazing. I have found an album of photos taken at Valcartier. This shot is of the artillery arriving at the camp on August 17th, 1914. The weather looks lovely. Unlike today when it is so cold that I have the heat on. In 1914, the men are in their shirt sleeves!

More hot work here as this gun fires what seems to be an entire limber of rounds on the range. I doubt that today, the range would be this close to the tents. The main shell used with the 18 pounder is a HE airbursting shrapnel shell. This kind of shell would be set to burst over an attacking force. The assumption was that war would be in the open.

Here is a short video of modern re-enactors firing the gun as in a "Creeping Barrage". This was a innovation that Alec had a lot to do with. The idea was to roll a curtain of fire just ahead of the advancing infantry. In 1916, at the Somme, this idea was not yet in use. Then the barrage ended. There was a pause and the attacking infantry stood up and walked without support towards the enemy lines. The German maching gun crews had the time to get up from the bunkers and mow the attack down. With the creeping barrage, shells would fall until the first line of the attack reached the trench.

In this video you see the gun layer shift the elevation for each round. 

 

The men in the video look too old and awkward. This was a young man's job and needed extreme athleticism. Not only to man the gun but to manhandle it and to ride all day and dig gun pits.

So here is the real deal. Men stripped to the waist, moving like a machine, in a gun pit.

 

Things go quiet now in Valcartier. I can find very little evidence of what life was like other than there was not enough food and drink.

But in France and Belgium, things were not quiet. On August 18th the BEF was moving forward to contact. In 2 days a patrol of British cavalry would bump into a German Cavalry patrol just north of Mons. The first shots would be fired and the first man would die. The Great War would begin in earnest for the British Empire.

The great irony is that not 100 feet away from this spot, the last man would die in 1918 and it would be the Canadians that would take Mons on the evening of November 10 1918.

So I Ieave Alec in Valcartier for the next month until the 24th when he and the 5th battery board the Ivernia for England.

In the interim, I will explore what the rest of the family are up to.

 

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World War 1 - Valcartier - The First Contingent

World War 1 - Valcartier - The First Contingent

This a picture of the Camp at Valcartier in Quebec where the First Contingent assembled in August 1914.  Alec and the 2nd Brigade CFA had taken a train there on or about the 14 or 15th of August. Men had been arriving since August 8th.

The planned mobilization had been thrown out of the window by the charismatic Minister for Militia, Sam Hughes. Instead of men assembling all over Canada at the armouries and then concentrating, Hughes insisted that all men go direct to Valcartier. 600 men trains were arriving all the time and the camp was being built around the men. Within four days of the opening of the camp, nearly 6,000 men had arrived. A week later the number of personnel in the camp had swelled to 25,000 and soon after there would be 32,000 men and 8,000 horses.

Apparantly it all felt chaotic. But, on reflection, how else could Canada have formed a division and got it onto the Atlantic in such a short time?

Whilst the mills in Montreal were pumping out uniforms and factories were producing equipment, a great fleet to transport the First Contingent was being assembled in Quebec. I am amazed at the pace of how all of this came together. I cannot see us doing this now.

Meanwhile the 2nd Brigade CFA from Montreal would have been getting together with the other artillery units. There was so much to learn. 

This is the gun that was at the core of their war. The 18 pounder field gun.

Here is a brief description 

The 18 Pounder was a quick firing horse-drawn field gun designed to be towed behind a limber and six horses. Originally, the barrel was wire bound with nickel-steel with a single motion screw breach with a cartridge extractor. The idea of fixing both shell and cartridge together gave it the term of ‘quick firing’.

Throughout World War One, the 18 Pounder was operated by the Royal Field Artillery, and in some cases, the Royal Horse Artillery.

The gun and its two wheeled ammunition limber were towed by a team of six light draught horses. The driver of the two horse team rode the left horse of each pair. The two wheeled ammunition limber was hooked up to the horses and the trail of the gun was hooked to the limber. Overall, the total weight of the gun, limber and carriage which amassed to 2 1/2 tons was supported on four wheels!

The gun detachments all rode into action either on the horses or on the limber, which was led by the detachment sergeant on his own horse. During the early stages of the war, the ammunition limber was positioned on the left of the gun, but as the war progressed and larger quantities of ammunition were being used, stockpiles of ammunition were dumped in pits next to the guns.

And here is a short film that shows the elan of the units as they dashed around.

 

All this would have been quite new though in August of 1914. I am sure that they were all quite awkward. In the film we see how slick the crews became. In all the 18 pounder fired 99 million rounds by the end of the war. 

I am sure that in a Camp of 30,000, men did their best to stick close to those that they knew well. I imagine that Alec and his brothers of the 2nd Brigade would have strengthened their bonds in this mad period.

Here is a list of the officers of the 2nd Brigade as they assembled in Valcatier. After the war the few survivors of the entire brigade, men and officers met for a dinner for nearly 40 years after. I have a menu of one of those dinners on the wall of my office. They remained devoted to each other for the rest of their lives.

The record of what went on now dims until they leave Valcartier at the end of September. We can only imagine order slowly emerging from chaos as 30,000 individuals sort themselves out into a Division.

But in October the entries into the War Diary begin and we have the opportunity to know in general what happens to them on every day of the war. 

Meanwhile, the BEF was landing in France and was on its way to Mons in Belgium. Next week, on the 21st of August, the fighting would begin. By Christmas most of the BEF would be killed or wounded. The need for the Canadians would be desparate.

 

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World War 1 - The Scottish Tribe of Montreal - Their King & Country

This is Uncle Montagu Allan, the "Laird" of Montreal. He is in the uniform of the Colonel of the Canadian Black Watch. After WWII, my uncle John Bourne was also the Colonel of the same regiment.

The Montreal that Grandfather Alec was leaving this weekend was centred around about 50 Scots families. They ran the banks, the railroads, the industry and the fiancial system. All the major companies that would evolve into Canada were started by these few families. 

Like Rome in the peak of the Republic, these families were also carefully intermarried in a dyanstic way. So Uncle Montagu's uncle had married his daughter Nina to the son of his main business partner. My own family, the Paterson's seemed to be connected by marriage to most of the inner circle. We were not the wealthiest but, like the Julia in Rome, we were among the oldest families having arrived at first with General Wolf in 1759. The big money tended to marry Patersons! (Wish it were true today :))

Alec's mother, Nina's daughter, had been brought up in the Allan family as her mother had run off with another man and had been banned from ever seeing her daughter again!

The social and business life revolved around Uncle Montagu. This is his house, Ravenscrag. It was a few hundred yards away from the homes of all the inner circle. My father told me that it was impossible to walk the streets in the Square Mile without meeting a relation.

I say all of this to make one point. This community was very tight. It was also imbued with the Scots ideal of honour. It was entwined with Britain too. The family would spend months a year in England and would routinely entertain the British leadership in Canada. Royalty's second home in Canada was Ravenscrag. They were close. Another Aunt was the life time mistress of the Duke of Connaught, the King's brother. Between the wars, my granny Anna, Alec's wife, was the Prince of Wales daily riding companion. 

In every way, this fight was their fight. The Empire was no figment of their imagination and the King was no remote figurehead. This was personal!

So, during these last few days before Alec left with the 800 horses from his extended family, there would have been a social whirl. For, he left not only his mother and father, his two sisters and brother but hundreds of cousins. Like in the novel War and Peace or Gone with the Wind, the community got behind their boys and men.

Little could they imagine what would befall most of them.

And the men were not the only ones who decided to go to Europe and do their bit. 

Here is Aunt Marguerite Allan

She and Uncle Montagu decided to spend the war in England to be close to the men. She was to open a convalescent home for wounded officers. Both Alec and his brother Hartland would spend time there. She would take her two younger girls Anna and Gwendolyn. Her son Hugh was at Eton already. Her older daughter, Martha would become an ambulance driver at the front.

Many other families from the Square Mile made the same decision. They wanted to be close to their men and had the financial ability to do this. As we will see, some paid a very high price for this decision as several were to sail on May 1915 on the Lusitania.

So today was Alec's last day in Montreal until the end of 1918. At least he would make it home. Most of those in the batteries of the 2nd Brigade would remain forever in France. For those families that did not go to England, tonight was the last night that they would ever see their son, father or brother.

As I write these words, I think of my own son and daughter and my nephews, nieces and cousins. I tremble as I think of what it must have been like to lose nearly all of them. Thankfully we can never know the future. And at the time, it seemed like a great adventure.

It would have been impossible not to go. Unlike today, when elites shirk their responsibility, then the Scots of Montreal put everything  they had on the line. This was their sense of the responsibility that they had. After all they were Scots. Honour and Empire was everything to them.

Tomorrow, Alec, and his battery, will board a train that will take them to Valcartier camp where 30,000 men in tents assemble. In just over a month they will board a flotilla of ships and sail for England. The First Contingent will have been raised in Canada and landed in England in 3 months. 

PS Here is the list of men in the 2nd Brigade CFA

The full list of ALL men in the first Contingent is here

 

 

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This map of a tiny part of Montreal, known as the Golden Square Mile, was the social world of my grand father. It was a place where not only did everyone know everyone but you were likely to be related to most of them as well.

This tight social net meant that Montreal men were heavily represented in the first contingent's officers. 

What was Alec doing after he signed up?

Alec's family home on Simpson Street.

He was going to the Craig Street Armoury, about 20 minutes walk from his home on Simpson Street, and two minutes from the Bank of Montreal, to work with his colleagues who were setting up the 2nd Brigade of CFA.

He was a junior Lieutenant in the Westmount Battery which then was the 21st. This number was changed after they reached Valcartier on August 14 to the 5th.

Alongside him, as the Major of the 3rd battery which was later to be the 7th, was Andy MacNaugton who was to be the gunner who changed the war. 

Here he is, a general in his late twenties.

In this interlude before August 14th, the number one job was getting enough horses. They would need nearly 1,000 horses for the brigade. Without the horses, they could not arrive in Valcartier or go to Europe.

This picture of the CFA parading before the King in 1916 will I hope give you a sense of how many horses were involved. The horse in 1914 was still the key element in movement and espcially for artillery.

Where do you get 1,000 horses in 2 weeks?

You got them from your  friends! In 1914, all of his class had many horses. For even though the car had arrived, in 1914,  Montrealers still rode daily, hunted madly, played polo. Most still had actively used carriages and all used horse drawn sleighs in the winter. There was no snow clearance then and primitive tires could not cope with Quebec winter roads and hills.

Our extended family collectively would have had hundreds of horses.

Photo from the MCord Museum 

These are the stables of the Allans - you will get to know them very well. 

Here is the front view.

Photo from the McCord Museum

In charge of all of this horse round up was Alec's Uncle, Charles McEachran. Uncle Charles was a remarkable vet who, with his brother Duncan, had set up the first vetinerary teaching hospital just opposite the Craig St Armoury. 

Source

This is the Craig Street Armoury - Craig St is now St Antoine. Here is where Alec's battery was based. It was yards away from the Bank of Montreal Head office.

It is likely that Alec would have had a major role in this task. He would have called on everyone that he knew. The only way that they could have got 1,000 horses in less than two weeks was from family. Alec and each officer brought two of their own. The rest came from the family stables.

These were not nags but dearly beloved personal and carriage horses. We forget the close attachment that we had with horses. On PEI, they were often buried with the family. To give them up was in a way more wrenching that giving up your son or brother. You expected like a Spartan family to give up your son. But your horse was more like a young child. Also it was a significant financial burden. Most of these horses had been imported at great expense from the UK. Most lived as did the men who owned them in some splendour in heated stabling with beautiful oak stalls with devoted grooms.

The grooms signed up too. The sons of the wealthy Montrealers went to war with the men of their household. It was a medieval experience. In two weeks the men would all have gone. The people left would be without their sons and brothers and without most of their horses and their staff.

No one had any idea what would happen to their sons or horses. No one could imagine this!

In total, about 8 million horses died in the war. None of the Montreal horses returned. Few of the sons returned. Alec lost 16 first cousins. By 1919 the Montreal elite had been eviscerated. 

But all of this was unkown in August 1914. In August 1914, most thought of this as a great adventure.

Who was he saying goodbye too in the last busy two weeks? In the next post, I will introduce you to his immediate and to his large extended family. What partings there must have been. The young men excited and their families proud but fearful.

PS - See the link below to Winnie the Pooh - Lieut Colebourne took his pet bear with him to Valcartier and then to England where Winnie ended up at London Zoo where he was seen by A A Milne and his son Christopher Robin - Hence we all know who Pooh is.

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This is my grandfather, Alec, as part of a group picture of the RMC Senior Football Team in 1913, the year he graduated. He was mad about sports and played semi professional hockey well into his late twenties.

He had gone to RMC as part of plan by his father to instill some discipline.

Alec as a school boy had been involved in an incident at Bishops, a private boarding school near Lennoxville in Quebec, where the headmaster had been thrown into the swimming pool by some boys. In penance, he was sent to England to go to a school called Bradfield where the annual Greek Play was the high point. He hated it there. But, maybe like me, this experience prepared him culturally for life  in the English culture.

His experience at RMC had prepared him also for military life. Very few Canadians had this experience in 1914. It put Alec in a favoured position and enabled him to start the war in the artillery. Here he not only had a better chance of survival but it was the elite branch where nearly all the leadership of the future Canadian Corps would come from. His advice to all of the family later was never to join the infantry!

RMC was and is Canada's premier military college. It was founded in the mid 19th century and was already part of the family tradition. His uncle, Somerled, had been to RMC too back in the 1890's.

Regretfully he was killed in a Polo accident in 1895 and is buried in Quetta then the HQ of the Indian Army and now part of Pakistan. I have just found his grave.

Alec followed in this part of our family tradition. We tend to gravitate to banking or soldiering. When given the choice, he always chose soldiering. Not only had he enlisted on the first day of WWI but he did the same in WWII. He was never comfortable as a banker.

Which is what he was after RMC and before August 1914.

He worked at the main branch of the Bank of Montreal which was very different from the bank we know now. Then it was the equivalent of the Bank of Canada. Alec's Uncle, Sir Vincent Meredith, was its President. Every morning, the police would close of all the traffic from his house on Cedar Avenue to the Bank on St James. At lunch time, the bank would close and all the staff would sit down to a roast that would be carved by the Manager. Not the BMO of today!

Alec could not wait to get out of this!

So, on this day, he turned up at the Armoury in Montreal where the batteries of  artillery based on Quebec assembled their gear and requistioned their horses. In the end, millions of horses and mules would serve and we will spend a lot of time in this series on what their life was like.

In two weeks, Alec and his battery would journey to the new camp at Valcartier, to the North West of Quebec where over 30,000 men from all over Canada were assembling to be part of the first contingent to leave Canada and go to the UK.

He was not alone.

It is hard for us today to have a sense of the feeling in 1914. I think that part of this was a sense of how dull life was. But people were much more Nationalistic then. Canada was very British too. Nearly half of the first contingent had been born in the UK.

Already, on the first day, trainloads of men were converging from all over Canada. Most saw this as a huge adventure. Almost none of the first contingent would return home.

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World War I - A Four Year Series - Telling the story, weekly, of My Grand Father's War

This is my grandfather Alec Paterson as a cadet at RMC Kingston. He graduated in 1913. He was one of a few Canadians that had had any military training before World War 1. I post this picture to introduce the central figure in a four year project of mine to tell the story of one family in the Great War. 

On this day, August 4th 1914, Britain declared war of Germany. Canada was to declare war tomorrow on the 5th. But my grandfather, Alec Paterson signed up today. He served actively until Sept 9th 1918 when he was gassed and invalided out. He was one of a tiny number of men who had arrived in France in February 1915 to survive. He was the most decorated Canadain gunner of he war.

I have committed to write a weekly post for the next 4 years based on his and on the experience of my large extended family. I hope that I live to complete this!

This is a history book and an adventure story that is written in real time. Alec is a good pivot because he was in every Canadian major event and action of the war. What he lives through from the early days until the end, so did the CEF.

His is the universal Canadian story of that war. 

In this project, I am very fortunate. The internet now offers us amazing eveidence. I have for instance the war diaries of Alec's unts for every day that he served. I have his war records. I have shipping manifests, train timetables, maps, photos and drawings. I have a mass of family items as well.

I will focus on Alec. But, because my family is so large, we will also find ourseleves on the Lusitania as it sunk in May of 1915. We will be in Canada, in the UK and in France. We will also look at the impact of this on the women in my family. Some died in the conflict, others drove ambulances, others ran hospitals. Others waited for 4 years to see their man or not. Most lost their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons. I think they had a harder war then the men.

This is also a story of love. We will also see the love that grew among the men. Men who after the war shared a bond that could not be broken and that was held to until the last of them died.

And we will see how the great loss that affected every family changed the nation and the larger world.

I have no idea how this will turn out though really. It will evolve as the story itself does. One of my keenest hopes is that you can join in. I hope that as I talk about the events that affeceted Alec and my family that you may recall and have stories and pictures and letters of your own that we can all share. Imagine what might unfold?

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