‘We’re gone unless someone remembers us’
One hundred years ago on Nov. 11, the First World War came to an end
One afternoon the town was shelled while Liles and I were in the stables. The shrapnel was coming down like a hail storm.
Liles and I crouched down behind the horses. I was in trouble as I was down behind Rosie and she had diarrhea and every time a shell burst she let go.
As I was in a safe spot I had to take it. Bill Liles thought it was the funniest thing he ever saw.
A shell had landed in the street and blew a hole in the blacksmith shop. No one was killed but a few men from the 55th battery were wounded.
Jack Hardy wasn’t the type to attract notoriety. He was just 17 — a year too young — when he enlisted with the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force in 1915 and began his service in the First World War.
The boy from Merritton was scrawny, barely tipping the scale at 100 pounds. Labelled in his words, a “misfit” he was transferred to different outfits and eventually was sent to France, where he drove a wagon pulled by a team of two horses in the darkness of night, delivering supplies from base camp to the front. He also helped to lay down reels of telephone lines and tended a stable of horses.
All the while, he carried a small black journal, where he hand wrote in pencil details of his life at war. The anecdotes are rich with descriptive narratives and inflections of humour. His intention was that it would be of interest to his family, a keepsake passed down to generations.
And yet, it has become part of a collection of artifacts bringing to life an easily forgotten time in history. He helps to make history real. Human, says his granddaughter, Donna Broadley.
“He’d be so proud,” she says. “He’d be so happy the history he wrote about, people are still enjoying.”
At 11 a.m., this Remembrance Day, it will be 100 years since the end of The War to End All Wars.
His diary is at the St. Catharines Museum, on display as part of a four-year exhibit that examines the wartime experiences of St. Catharines residents at home and on the front. Doing Our Bit, World War One from St. Catharines to the Western Front, will close the end of November.
On Saturday, the museum will host Stories from the Front, a dramatic reading that will include excepts from newspapers, letters from the front, and Jack’s diary to pay tribute to local stories.
The exhibit will close on Nov. 30, with a 1918 Victory Party, featuring food, drink and entertainment inspired by the era.
And since mid-September, The World Remembers, an exhibit to honour shared histories of nations on both sides of the conflict, has been projecting names of people killed in the war on video screens around the world.
This year, it recognizes people who died in 1918, and from warrelated injuries and illness up to 1922.
In Niagara, the exhibit can be seen in four locations, at Brock University and the Niagara Falls library. Each of the 23,731 Canadian names will be displayed in white letters on a black background, for exactly 90 seconds. Names of the dead from other nations will appear around the perimeter. On Nov. 11 at 9 p.m., the final name will be viewed.
Some 61,000 Canadians died during the First World War.
Jim Doherty, president of the Niagara Military Museum, initiated the display in Niagara. He felt it was a way to honour everyone, not just the prominent and more celebrated figures that line the pages of history books.
In his words: “We’re gone unless somebody remembers us.”
Elizabeth Vlossak, associate professor in the department of history, says it’s an opportunity to reflect on the human cost of war. “If you stand there long enough it becomes increasingly powerful,” she says.
“You start to think of the names as a person. And that person had a family and their death had an impact. “
Jack Hardy made it home. During one trip to the front, he breathed in mustard gas and developed a cough that became progressively worse. Then, he was kicked in the leg by one of the horses. His leg became swollen
and turned green.
He was transported to a hospital in northern France.
He writes: They took me to the operating building where possibly fifty or more operations were going on at the same time. The surgeon who was to operate on me told me not to look at what was going on around me.
Eventually, he arrived by ship to Halifax, then by train to Quebec City and Toronto.
Jack started a new life on 21 acres of farmland south of Virgil, through the soldiers settlement board, established to help servicemen returning from the war to set up farms.
The cost was $5,000. His down payment was $500. It was a good move for Jack; in 1920 he married Rose, the girl next door.
They eventually moved to Merritton, where Jack helped his mother run Hardy’s Hardware, after his father’s death.
“He always had mechanical toys on the counter. He’d wind them up whenever children came in,” says Donna. There was a monkey that clapped cymbals and a bird that pecked the ground.
Leading up to the Labour Day parade, toys that would be given out as prizes were displayed in the front window as children pressed their noses to the glass for a better look.
They always ordered more fireworks than they could sell and set off the leftovers in their backyard, for family.
Jack never talked much about the war. Over the years, he transcribed his wartime diary and banged out more of his memoirs on a manual typewriter, in his basement coal-room-turned-office. In their basement walls, Jack and Rose stored boxes of Kleenex, toilet paper and other supplies, perhaps a residual effect of wartime rationing, says Donna.
She was in high school, when one day she went to their house for a visit but found the door locked. She knocked, but it took a few minutes for them to arrive.
When she stepped inside, Jack confessed with a smile: “We thought you might have been the minister,” before they each pulled a bottle of beer from behind them.
Jack lived to see all four of his grandchildren. He delighted in calling to them, “Come here, come here,” then trapping them between his knees as he sat in a chair, squeezing as they squealed and he laughed. They called him Popsie.
When winter came, he shovelled his own snow. “He was always that kind of man. He held himself straight,” says Donna.
Jack died of an aneurism in 1987. He was 89.
More than 650,000 men and women from Canada and Newfoundland served in the First World War.
They are all dead.
Some 23 years after Jack’s death, the last known Canadian veteran of the First World War died. He was 109.
Only the stories are left.
Over the years, Jack tweaked and revised his stories a few times. It was important to tell the whole story, as he remembered it.
He attached a note to one of his revisions.
The reader will notice that I have repeated myself several times. The reason is that I have takne two years to complete this, also my typing is far from perfect. I wanted to finish this while I am still around.
Thank you.