Slaughter in Sanctuary Wood

Trenches deadly for Edwin Booth, one of Canada’s 110,000 war dead

The horror that surrounded Pte. Edwin Booth in the days before his death in Belgium was punctuated by rare moments of bucolic splendour.

“Had a bathe in a stream. The country is lovely around here. After dinner my friend Farmer and I went to the woods and laid down under the trees and had a good sleep,” Booth wrote to his mother on May 27, 1916.

The rest of his hours were filled alternately with the terror of enemy fire and the drudgery of the trenches.

“Fritz busy with machine guns,” he wrote, using the nickname of the German enemy. “Fritz exploded a mine but it fell short. Also sent over ten or 15 whiz bangs (heavy artillery shells) at our posts. Smothered us with mud but didn’t do any damage. Heavy bombardment to our left.”

A week after this last letter home, Booth was killed in a savage German attack that wiped out most of his unit. He was 30 years old.

Booth’s name surfaced again on Wednesday when it was selected at random from the list of more than 110,000 Canadian war dead by @WeAreTheDead, a Twitter account created by the Citizen as an ongoing remembrance project.

Every hour of every day, @WeAreTheDead tweets out the name of one Canadian killed in service.

For the past five years, the Citizen has profiled the name that is tweeted at 11:11 a.m. on Remembrance Day. This year, Booth’s name came up. Some early details of his life are provided by Where the Fallen Live Forever, a 2014 book by Mark Potts about men from Crewe and Nantwich in Cheshire, U.K., who died in the Great War.

Booth, born Sept. 11, 1885, was one of nine children of Florence Booth and Charles Edwin Booth, a druggist who lived on Crewe’s high street. Edwin attended Sandbach grammar school until 1891, when he was 16. His father died in 1904. Then, in January 1907, Booth arrived in Halifax aboard S.S. Tunisian.

It is unclear if Booth’s ultimate destination was Canada. In January 1908, he crossed into Detroit, listing his last home as Chatham, Ont., and his destination as Chicago.

Later that year, Booth returned to Canada, crossing through the “port” of Winnipeg, and sometime later arriving in Saskatchewan. The 1911 census lists him in the small town of Saltcoats, near the Manitoba border.

Other members of the Booth family also immigrated to Saskatchewan. Siblings Florence, Norman and John came and settled in the village of Dubuc in 1909. Arthur arrived in March 1914.

Three days before Christmas 1914, the three brothers — Edwin, John and Arthur — travelled south to Moosomin to enlist with the Canadian Mounted Rifles Regiment.

Edwin, then 29, listed his occupation as farmer. He stood five-foot-nine, with dark hair and grey eyes, according to his attestation papers. His religion was listed as Church of England.

Eighteen months later, Booth’s regiment was billeted in Steen-voorde, France, close to the Belgian border. The Canadians were commanded by Lt.-Gen. Julian Byng, who would later become Canada’s governor general.

From his billet, Booth wrote home to mother Florence, in a letter included in Potts’s book:

“We go back into the trenches early next week but only for about eight days and then the rumour is that we go back for six weeks rest and move to another part of the line. Hope it’s right.

“Here is a bit of my diary about my last trip:

“Saturday: Last billet for the trenches. Fritz shelled the train. We were shelled all the way through the town and there were bodies lying all over the place. We lost 15 from one company.

“Sunday: Was in a reserve trench all day. Went out to posts at night.

“Monday: At posts all day. Nothing much happened. …

“Tuesday: Still at posts. Fritz busy with machine guns. Bill Charlton and Or Win were killed going from one post to the next....

“Wednesday: Pretty quiet all day. We came out at night.

“Thursday to Saturday. Working parties every night from support trenches. “Sunday: Working party all day. “Monday. Are now in dugout in the ground of an old chateau. It is beastly hot. Went to the front line on a working party, got home at 2:30 a.m.

“Tuesday. Had a bathe in a stream. The country is lovely around here. After dinner my friend Farmer and I went to the woods and laid down under the trees and had a good sleep. Working party at night. Fritz turned machine guns on us. I got my head and part of my body into a shell hole. I came out wet through ….”

On June 2, in what would become known as the Battle of Mont Sorrel, near Ypres, German artillery began pounding the Canadian positions.

Then, in the afternoon, four German mines detonated under the Canadian trenches in an area terribly misnamed as Sanctuary Wood. The Canadians sufered an 80-per-cent casualty rate.

Military records list Booth’s date of death as June 5, but Potts believes he died on that first bloody day. Booth’s family was notified several weeks later. It would be only the first terrible news they would receive from the war.

In January 1918, Booth’s older brother Frank, a Royal Navy aviator, died after sufering wounds and landing his aircraft in Lille, France. And in December 1918, younger brother Charles of the Royal Naval Reserve died of influenza aboard HMS Hazel. He was buried in Greece. Brother Arthur survived the war with a leg injury and returned to Canada in 1929.

Edwin Booth’s headstone is at Ypres Reservoir Cemetery.