Old Enough to Fight by Dan Black & John Boileau

Author:Dan Black & John Boileau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lorimer
Published: 2013-09-18T03:00:00+00:00

Many Canadian soldiers, like Eric Parlee, had a formal studio portrait taken in England to send to relatives back home before they deployed to France.

When the opportunity arose, Parlee’s parents, Henry and Lily May, were not around to stop him. His mother died when he was five, his father in 1914. After that, his Uncle William stepped in to help. “…I came over to do my little bit and [I am] going to do it like a man if I can,” Parlee told his uncle in a letter from France. He asked his uncle if he managed to “cut the hay on the hill,” noting that he wished he were home to help. “I thought of home a good many times the first day I was in the trenches, but don’t mind it now.” In another letter, the five-foot-five, 134-pound soldier mentioned the rain, the mud, and the constant sniping. “I had a few shots fired at me once or twice, but they could not hit me. I guess I can’t be big enough yet.”7

Another teenager, Private Morris Searle of Toronto, did not experience such luck after emerging from a trench on May 28. Searle had matured considerably since arriving in October to help reinforce the 18th (Western Ontario) Battalion. In April he helped ensure the delivery of ammunition that fed the guns firing on Vimy Ridge, and prior to that he was busy working in the tunnels beneath it. Bending over to pick up a cartridge belt that had fallen on the ground above his trench, Searle heard the sound of a plane and, just as he turned his head to look up, he heard another sound that was much closer. Whatever it was, it walloped him on the back. He sat down and within seconds a buddy was asking him if he had been hit. Searle thought he had been struck by shrapnel, but he did not feel much pain. His friend noticed a hole in the back of his tunic, and asked him to take it off. The friend then saw that the hole also went through his braces and his shirt. “He said, ‘Morris, you are hit!’ When it got dark I went down to the dressing station and then back out to the field ambulance on the crest of Vimy Ridge.”

Searle got a tetanus shot and was shipped further behind the lines to a hospital where he spent part of his time helping the nursing sisters clean the ward. “The doctor came round one day and looked at me and said, ‘How do you feel, Canada?’ I told him I felt fine — other than I had something in my back. ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘you’ve got something in your back … let me have a look.’” The doctor gave Searle a local anaesthetic and worked on him for half an hour. When he was through, he handed Searle a German bullet, which had missed his spine by “a fraction of a hairsbreadth.”

Shrugging it off as a minor wound, Searle rejoined his battalion.

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