The last veteran – closing the book
The death of John Babcock, the last surviving Canadian veteran of the First World War, has a special meaning for those who have family links to the men and women whose lives were tied up in that great struggle. The news report is here.
For me, it “closes the book” on my father’s era. He served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force from 1915 to 1919. Percy Argyle, #198747, joined the 94th “New Ontario” Battalion in Rainy River. He went overseas almost immediately and later was transferred to the 1st Battalion, Canadian Mounted Rifles.
Dad was there when the Canadian troops followed a “creeping barrage” of shelling to conquer Vimy Ridge on Easter Monday, 1917. He was seriously wounded a few days later and shipped out to a hospital in England. In a letter he wrote me in 1960, Dad had this to say about Vimy:
Age has a habit of dimming names and places and names of people but it can never dim the sights and sounds of what we experienced. The shelling, the mud, the apparent confusion out of which grew a single purpose, take the Ridge or else.
The courtship of my parents qualifies as a romantic tale. My father had met my mother in Canada. Both were immigrants from England – my mother was Irish and Dad descended (we believe) from a Scottish family.
“She must have loved me a lot,” he told me, recounting how she had followed him overseas. He applied for permission to marry in December 1916 and they were wed in Dad’s hometown of Ilkeston. Their first-born, Percy Edward, came into the world on November 22, 1918. I was a much delayed arrival.
After the war, my parents went to St. Louis, Missouri, to live with my mother’s sister.
Dad told me an interesting story of their border crossing at Niagara Falls. He was asked whether he had a job to go to. He had been tipped off that he should answer No. “If you said Yes, they wouldn’t let you across,” Dad recalled.
I always wondered about this. I finally discovered, in a few sentences in Edward Rutherford’s new novel, New York, the reason for that seemingly unfathomable policy He depicts an Italian family at Ellis Island being asked the same question.
“There were two reasons for this strange rule. The first was that the United States wanted men who were anxious to take any job they could find. The second was to discourage an illicit trade. For there were padroni who promised jobs, paid people’s passage … He’d be waiting for them in the park near the docks, and take them into lodgings. And before long the new arrivals were in his power, trapped like slaves, and fleeced of all they had.”
I wish I’d known about this anecdote when I met Rutherford when he was in Toronto recently. As it was, we were able to discuss the Ragtime era in the context of both our books — mine being Scott Joplin and the Age of Ragtime.
Like many war veterans, my father was a troubled man much of his life, although I never realized it while I lived under his roof. My sharpest memory is of the damage that shrapnel had done to one leg. His calf oozed fluid the rest of his life.
Dad died in 1978. He was 87, and had lived a pretty full life having raised four sons and survived three wives.
The Historica-Dominion Institute has set up a Facebook page urging a National Day of Commemoration in honor of Mr. Babcock and our other veterans. You can see it here.
