The story of four brothers who went to war
FOUR BROTHERS WENT OFF TO WAR; ONLY ONE SURVIVED
Two black-and-white photographs used to hang in the hallway just beyond Leanna Knox-Kinsman’s bedroom in her parents’ old bungalow at 300 Joseph St. in Carleton Place, Ont. One was of her great-grandfather’s home on nearby McArthur Avenue, a stately limestone Victorian mansion with a wraparound porch and expansive views befitting William McDiarmid’s position as a prominent local businessman.
The second image, and the one that has always felt so familiar to Knox-Kinsman, was of her grandfather, Leo McDiarmid, and three of his brothers, Arthur, Harold and Victor. The photo dates from 1915. War had broken out in Europe. The McDiarmid boys are in uniform and range in age from 16 to about 30. Harold looks serious; Arthur, with his stick-out ears, is boyishly smiling; Victor appears to be trying hard not to smile; while Leo, the eldest, is seated, with his right leg crossed over left. His hair is cropped short. He is handsome.
Leo was the only one of the four to survive.
“The story of the McDiarmid brothers has always been a part of our lives,” says Knox-Kinsman, whose mother, Martha, was Leo and Anna McDiarmid’s only child. “We grew up with their story. It is something I think about all the time — I think about all the people that we are missing from this family.
“I think about what those boys’ lives would have been like, had they lived. I think about how young they were when they were killed, and how awful losing them must have been for their mother, Mary.”
Canada’s victory at the Battle of Vimy Ridge ranks among our nation’s founding myths. Canadians fought together, died together and triumphed together, over a seemingly unbeatable German foe. We did this, we have been taught through the decades, and by doing it a national sense of Canadian self — distinct from our Old World, Anglo-Irish-Scots blood-ties — was born.
But in Carleton Place, Vimy Ridge has a different meaning. It is not about the birth of a nation, but about a family burying its dead.
Dave Knox is Leanna’s older brother. He lives “on the fancier end” of Julie Anne Crescent, according to his wisecracking sister, about 10 houses away from the spacious two-storey home Leanna and her husband, Roger, built about 15 years ago. Leanna and Roger are public servants. Dave worked in “waste management.” He is the curator of a clear plastic storage container full of McDiarmid family treasures related to the First World War. He spread the contents on his sister’s sunlit kitchen table on a recent afternoon.
Shuffling papers, Knox produces a letter dated March 24, 1914, five months before Great Britain declared war on Germany. It is from Victor McDiarmid to his older brother, Frank, a medical student at McGill University in Montreal. (Frank was called home to run the family business during the war. A sixth McDiarmid, Donald, was too young to join the fight. There were also four sisters: Evangeline, Frances, Natalie and Jane.)
Victor writes about shooting crows, carving decoy ducks and the exploits of the Ragged Seven, the local hockey powerhouse he starred for. His younger brother, Arthur, was the goalie.
“If Carleton Place had been playing all winter the way they played last night the championship would be resting here, instead of at Renfrew,” Victor wrote to Frank.
Victor notes that it is “half-past 10” and that everybody is in bed, “except for Leo,” who is not “in yet.” He reminds Frank to bring his “air rifle” home the next time he visits, and says he needs to go fix the “furnace,” before signing off with the imperfect signature of an early adolescent.
“When you read their letters from before the war, and the things they write about, about animal traps and hockey games — a younger brother writing to his big brother in the big city — you get a real sense of how these were just kids,” Dave Knox says, shaking his head. “I just can’t get over how young they are.”
There were 4,000 people and 25 cars in Carleton Place in 1914. The McDiarmid family owned a substantial chunk of the main street, known as the “McDiarmid block,” and operated a bustling “Dry Goods” store specializing in men’s hats, gloves and made-to-measure suits and shirts. William McDiarmid, the patriarch, owned shoreline on the lake south of town. His sons were avid hunters and sportsmen. They featured prominently on local hockey teams, paddling crews and in trap shooting competitions.
Harold McDiarmid had hazel eyes and a sense of mischief. He was working as an engineer in Nova Scotia when the war began. His first notable act in uniform was getting fined $3 for drunkenness in England during the Christmas season of 1915. Harold transferred to a machine-gun unit to get to France, and was wounded once before catching a bullet in the thigh at Vimy in April 1917. The leg became infected. On
YOU GET A REAL SENSE OF HOW THESE WERE JUST KIDS.
May 8, the Carleton Place Herald reported he had “succumbed” to his wounds. Harold McDiarmid is buried in Etaples, France.
There is an undated photo of Victor McDiarmid, the letter writer, on the steps of a train at Carleton Place station. He has a rucksack with him, and radiates excitement. Victor went missing at Vimy. His body was never found.
Arthur, the baby at 16, was gassed at Vimy. He was sent back to Canada for treatment at a sanatorium near Kingston, Ont. “He wasn’t even old enough to drink,” says Dave Knox.
Arthur’s doctors reported on March 4, 1918, that he was refusing further treatment because his “people” wanted him “home.”
“He wanted to come home to die,” says Leanna KnoxKinsman.
His former high school classmates mustered eight cars to parade him around town upon his return. They presented him with a signet ring. They regarded him as a hero. Their lives were just beginning. Arthur’s was shot to hell. His ruined lungs gave out on Jan. 20, 1919. His final words, uttered to his sisters in the big house on McArthur Avenue, were: “I’ll be leaving tonight.”
Leo McDiarmid returned from France and opened a sporting goods store. Frank, the brother who sacrificed a medical career to keep the family’s fortunes afloat, owned the menswear shop next door. Leo was nicknamed “Sport.” Frank was known as “Togs.” The brothers were inseparable. They hunted together at the lake, ate together and laughed a bunch.
Leo got involved in local politics, was mayor for a time. He died in 1967, at the age of 83. Frank, a lifelong bachelor, moved into his niece’s home at 300 Joseph St., which is where his greatniece, Leanna, and greatnephew, Dave, remember him. Smelling of tobacco, hand-carving his own pipes, reading them stories, plying them with treats after church and encouraging them to ask their mother, Martha, to get “Uncle Frank” some more “medicine.” Code, they learned later, for another rum and Coke.
Frank McDiarmid never spoke of the brothers he lost in France. “You can only imagine the guilt Uncle Frank must have felt being the brother who didn’t go,” says Knox.
It was left up to Martha Knox to tell her children about the three uncles she never met but knew, as flesh and blood, through the stories of her aunts, the doting McDiarmid sisters: Arthur, who was always referred to as “young Art”; Harold, the engineer, who went away to Nova Scotia; and Victor, the dashing young hockey player.
Leanna’s son, Simon, visited Vimy a few years back. He found his great-great uncle Victor’s name on the memorial there. Emma, his older sister, now teaching in Hong Kong, did a school video project on the brothers, interviewing her grandmother, Martha, before she died.
Even as she aged, and even after two strokes, Martha Knox insisted on laying a wreath at the cenotaph in Memorial Park on Remembrance Day. The marker was unveiled in 1924 by the McDiarmid boys’ mother, Mary. Trace down the 47 names etched in stone and there they are, one after the next, stark and silent: “H. McDiarmid, V. McDiarmid, A. McDiarmid.”
“My mother lived that experience — through her grandmother — and so this was a real loss to her, as though she had known the three uncles,” Leanna KnoxKinsman says.
“I think we have learned, as our parents have passed away, that, yes, the circle is broken, but you have to reform it.”
Family stories need to be retold, lest they be forgotten.