Sepia Saturday # 345 War & Peace: Wounded in France

I'm continuing with the story of my father's WW1 military service in the Canadian Army. He was shipped from Shorncliff to France, arriving on Oct. 16th, 1917. He was prepared to be moved to the front when my Grandmother got word of it and sent a cable reporting that my father was under age. She also sent a letter or letters to which she received the following reply: 

According to Dad's records, he was moved from the 4th Bde to Etaples, France. If he'd remained on the front lines it's likely he would have been in the 1st Battle of the Somme or the 1st Battle of Arras. Somme battles losses were huge. 177,739 men of Britain and the Commonwealth were killed, wounded or missing. 15,000 were dead and 90,000 missing. As a gunner, it's likely Dad wouldn't have survived. 

Here's a page from the war diaries of the  4th Brigade.

Instead of the front, he spent from Dec. 26th, 1917 to July 29th, 1918 in Etaples. Here's what it was like there according to www.throughtheselines.com.au.

Étaples is a very old fishing town and port, which lies at the mouth of the River Canche in the region of Pas de Calais in Picardy. The Étaples Army Base Camp, the largest of its kind ever established overseas by the British, was built along the railway adjacent to the town. It was served by a network of railways, canals, and roads connecting the camp to the southern and eastern fields of battle in France and to ships carrying troops, supplies, guns, equipment, and thousands of men and women across the English Channel. It was a base for British, Canadian, Scottish and Australian forces.

The camp was a training base, a depot for supplies, a detention centre for prisoners, and a centre for the treatment of the sick and wounded, with almost twenty general hospitals. At its peak, the camp housed over 100,000 people; altogether, its hospitals could treat 22,000 patients. With its vast conglomeration of the wounded, of prisoners, of soldiers training for battle, and of those simply waiting to return to the front, Étaples could appear a dark place. Wilfred Owen [Collected Letters.Oxford University Press] described it as,

A vast, dreadful encampment. It seemed neither France nor England, but a kind of paddock where the beasts are kept a few days before the shambles … Chiefly I thought of the very strange look on all the faces in that camp; an incomprehensible look, which a man will never see in England; nor can it be seen in any battle, but only in Étaples. It was not despair, or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit’s.

Here's a map of the camp on which you can see the Canadian GHP: 

At some point during his time in Etaples he got over to Marles-les-Mines, 85 km inland and had the below photo taken. He must have thought it would be his last. He looks older and more serious than the earlier photo where he was posed standing and holding a swagger stick. 

On Aug. 2nd, 1918 he was rejoined, now to the 4th Bde. He was wounded by gunshot in the eye on Sept. 3rd.

 Newspaper announcement of my Dad's wound. Gunner F. J. Killeen. "Word has been received by his mother at 448 Victor Street, that Gunner F. Jos. Killeen (No. 2043510)has been wounded by gunshot in the eye and is now in...."

He received some treatment on the spot in an American Field hospital and then ended up in Aldershot on Sept. 8th. Four days later he was in Basingstoke which was a recuperative hospital and on Sept. 30th, he was discharged and sent to Bordon Camp. He returned to Canada on the Canadian Pacific Liner "Melita" in December, 1918 and was discharged on Jan. 27th, 1919. 

CPL Melita

He must have enrolled in law school immediately because he graduated in 1922 cum laude with "Ad Baccalaureatum in Legibus" and was admitted to the Law Society of Manitoba Oct. 13th, 1922 as an Attorney or Solicitor of the Court of King's Bench for the Province of Manitoba. 

Military service was the defining experience of my father's life. He loved the army and never quite left it. He went back in again during WWll, training troops in Ft. William, Ontario where I was born and then as a Judge Advocate. After the war, he worked for the Canadian Department of Veteran's Affairs, The Veteran's Land Act and as legal counsel for Deer Lodge Hospital in Winnipeg - the Veteran's Hospital. He was very patriotic and disappointed that both his daughters left Canada and moved to the U.S. 

See Sepia Saturday for more stories of War and Peace.