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In honour of Remembrance Day, MQUP presents an excerpt from Peter Neary's On to Civvy Street: Canada's Rehabilitation Program for Veterans of the Second World War.
Now aged thirty, he volunteered for the 19th Alberta Dragoons and was soon on his way to Valcartier, Quebec, where the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF, originally Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force) was in training. There, on 24 September 1914, he signed the attestation paper required of a recruit. He gave his occupation as “automobile salesman” (he was working at the time as secretary-treasurer of the Scott Motor Co.) and named his brother Frank as his next-of-kin. He also indicated that he had served previously for three years in the Royal Garrison Artillery. He was given the regimental number 2068. His squadron – men and horses – left Quebec City aboard the Cunard liner Arcadian on 3 October 1914 and arrived at Devonport eleven days later. The Arcadian sailed in a convoy of thirty ships, which transported the First Canadian Contingent, and Woods was therefore among the first Canadian troops to arrive in the United Kingdom. A period of training followed, but he was also able to visit his mother, five of whose sons served during the war in France and Belgium.
On 2 February 1915, Woods and his Canadian fellow cavalrymen embarked for France and eventually took up a position at the Belgian town of Poperinghe in the Ypres salient (from September of that year the units of the CEF that served in France and Belgium were known as the Canadian Corps). During his first months at the front Woods was treated at the British Ophthalmic Centre for an eye injury, and in 1916 he was admitted to No. 2 Australian General Hospital “suffering from a foot in – jury which had cut an artery, a chest condition and general debility.” From there he went to a hospital in Sheffield, England, and after that to a convalescent hospital on the estate of the Duke of Devonshire. In March 1917 he went back to France, where he served with field artillery, running dispatches – sometimes under fire – to Brigade Headquarters. In February 1918 he went on furlough to Canada but was soon back in England, travelling there on a ship carrying men conscripted under the controversial Military Service Act of 1917. Following a period in quarantine, he went to the artillery base at Borden (Sittingbourne, Kent), where he contracted influenza. He recovered from this but was still at Borden when the war ended. His memory of that event was one of sadness: “I was consumed with a sickness of soul. Try as I would to forget I was overwhelmed by memories of comrades with whom I had come from Canada, who had been killed, grievously wounded or were missing.”9 Gunner Woods himself had been through much, but he was fortunate, unlike so many others who had volunteered, to be sound in mind and body. Above all, he was anxious to go home for good to pick up the pieces of a life that had veered far from its expected course. From Borden, he went to Rhyl in North Wales, where Canadian troops were assembled for repatriation, and thence to Liverpool and Halifax. From Halifax he travelled by train to Calgary, meeting “wonderful receptions” en route “with bands playing and refreshment and cigarettes distributed.”
And then came the jolt of arrival. As they disembarked in Calgary and said their goodbyes, Woods and his fellow passengers faced the complex process of readjusting to civilian life, a transition now being experienced by tens of thousands of Canadians as the country pushed forward the complex and at times messy process of demobilization. After the hard years of war, this changeover was both welcome and full of perils – individually and collectively. In Woods’s case, re-establishment meant deciding where to live, finding work, and, above all, reconnecting with children he hardly knew, who had lived separate lives. Like many others leaving uniform, he faced the prospect before him with mixed emotions: he was glad to be back in Canada, but he had “no job, no home and no future mapped out.” From the train, he made his way to the hall of the Great War Veterans’ Association of Canada, an increasingly influential and militant mutual aid organization, founded in Winnipeg in 1917. There he was given directions to find a room for the night. His life had manifestly entered a new and decidedly unpredictable phase. Much would obviously depend on his own imagination, initiative, and perseverance – but much also on how the government of the day responded to the re-establishment needs of those who had enlisted. War had strained Canada’s resources, and peace was about to do the same.
To learn more about On to Civvy Street, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
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