These pictures are dated, and in the first instance, very specifically: Eleven forty-five a.m. April 4th, 1916. The second is dated January 4th, 1917, an exact 10 month period. What is striking is the difference in his face. He carries a youthful and somewhat jaunty air in the first, although by the third year of the war its brutalities were by then well-known. It is clear, though, that ten months in the trenches of the Western Front have marked him. In the second his jaw is tight as if his teeth are clenched. His eyes are sad and intensely watchful. And he has a sleepless face, the line marked under his right eye, as if he had just been awakened in order to take the photo. And in the second too, he seems to be crouching down. All the better, in the world of trench warfare that he survived, to dodge a bullet that would be aimed at his head.
From the back of the first card:
"Dear sister just a line or two for the present time to let you know I am well hope you are improving. Now I must tell you Remie is gon away last night with the Bushmen Regiment 224th Overseas Batallion but they are not going where they Fighting he is going where where the fighting was going on the starting of the war 2 years ago i tried hard to go with him but the 159th wouldn't let me transfer with them Remie is coming back in 18 months Free he has all his papers to that afect good bye from Louis .."
I wonder what this son of the French would think of me posting his personal correspondence next to an entry about headless penises? 😆
My maternal ancestors arrived on the shores of New France sometime in the 1640s. And what is quite odd about Louis is that he was a royalist at a time when French Canadians were quite suspicious of their British keepers. This cultural rupture would worsen once Hitler had invaded Poland and the famous line "conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription" would be later touted by Mackenzie King.
On leave in London, Louis would meet May Wilson and they would be married during the course of the Great War. He would take her, this girl of the Empire, from her home in the most powerful city in the world at the time, to the wilds of northern Ontario. There she would bear him a girl, my mother, and die in childbirth.
All the hills and vales along
Earth is bursting into song,
And the singers are the chaps
Who are going to die perhaps.
Charles Hamilton Sorley
All the Hills and Vales Along
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