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    Hold the Oxo!: A Teenage Soldier Writes Home
    Hold the Oxo!: A Teenage Soldier Writes Home
    Hold the Oxo!: A Teenage Soldier Writes Home
    Ebook140 pages1 hour

    Hold the Oxo!: A Teenage Soldier Writes Home

    By Marion Fargey Brooker

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    About this ebook

    Short-listed for the 2014 Forest of Reading - White Pine Award for Non-Fiction

    Canada was young during the First World War, and with as many as 20,000 underage soldiers leaving their homes to join the war effort, the country’s army was, too. Jim, at 17, was one of them, and he penned countless letters home. But these weren’t the writings of an ordinary boy. They were the letters of a lad who left a small farming community for the city on July 15, 1915, a boy who volunteered to serve with the 79th Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders.

    Jim’s letters home gloss over the horrors of war, focusing instead on issues of the home front: of harvesting, training the horses, and the price of hogs. Rarely do these letters, especially those to his mother and father, mention the mud and rats, the lice and stench of the trenches, or the night duty of cutting barbed wire in no man’s land. For 95 years his letters remained in a shoebox decorated by his mother.

    Jim was just 18 when he was wounded and died during the Battle of the Somme. Hold the Oxo! tells the story that lies between the lines of his letters, filling in the historical context and helping us to understand what it was like to be Jim.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDundurn
    Release dateAug 3, 2011
    ISBN9781554888719
    Hold the Oxo!: A Teenage Soldier Writes Home
    Author

    Marion Fargey Brooker

    Marion Fargey Brooker has spent many years writing dramas, historical, and human interest stories for educational radio for Grades 1-12. She is the author of Thin Ice and Noreen and the Amazing No-Good Horse. She lives in Edmonton.

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      Book preview

      Hold the Oxo! - Marion Fargey Brooker

      Belgium.

      Introduction

      My Dear Grandma,

      You might call this a thank-you letter. It is in appreciation to you for, so many years ago, saving each of your son’s letters — letters that were treasured by his sister and his brothers and have now been read and re-read by his nieces and nephews. Had you looked into the future, could you have dreamed that by saving Jim’s letters we would come to know so much about an uncle who died years before we were born?

      It is October 1914, and the Patriotic Society in Belmont, Manitoba, is holding a dance and box social to raise money for the war effort. You bend over a shoe box, covering it with cream-coloured velvet, mitering the corners, and gluing them all in place. On the lid you paint a Union Jack, flying high, and inscribe underneath it the date — October 14, 1914. In it you will put the lunch that will be auctioned off at ten o’clock this evening, the lunch break during the dance. Do you even dream as you work on the box that nine months from now it will hold the letters home from your son, Jim, who is now in high school? That fall, both sides in the battle that has just begun overseas believe that the First World War will be over by Christmas.

      The tall, handsome young woman decorating the shoe box is not the grandmother I remember. My memory is not one of a young mother raising four children, but of a fragile lady with arthritis confined to a wheelchair. Being the youngest in the family, I was allowed to skip the evening church service, and I remember crawling in behind you in your high mahogany bed, where we would talk or you would read me stories. The smell of wintergreen, the cure-all for arthritis, still brings back those memories.

      Only after having children of my own, Grandma, could I understand the heartache of losing a son. I am haunted by the thought of Jim being buried so far away from home, with next to no chance for you to visit his grave. You would be comforted to know that Jim has been visited by and has become a real person to three generations of our family. If I could speak to you of one thing, I would choose to describe to you the cemetery just outside Étaples where he is buried. A large white cross, magnificent in its simplicity, stands as a benediction over the graves. The cemetery slopes gently to the English Channel, where you can look across the water to England. Red poppies do, indeed, sway in the breeze here. A stooped French veteran with a blue beret, an old man now, lovingly tends the graves. We found Jim’s. The picture you received of a stark pile of dirt with only a wooden post to identify Jim’s resting place has been replaced by a soft-beige granite stone. Summer flowers arch over his name.

      I procrastinated in writing Jim’s story. I wanted to do justice, not only to Jim but to all who fought. My dilemma: who should tell the story? In the end, I let Jim speak for himself by using excerpts from his letters. However, when I began filling in the background details, of which Jim speaks little in his letters — about life in the trenches and on the battlefields, and the hardships of war — I could often hear Jim’s voice saying, How could you know? You weren’t there.

      Yes, I have visited the battlefields of Ypres and the Somme, and the Canadian monument at Vimy, touched with my fingers the names of soldiers with no grave that are carved in the Menin Gate and the Thiepval Memorial. I have seen the battlefields of Flanders — lush now — zigzagging grassy trenches, craters no longer filled with the bodies of men and horses, the barbed wire long gone. I have stood surrounded by the trees in Delville Wood and touched the one mutilated tree left standing on its own at the end of the war, its leaves and limbs shredded by artillery fire.

      LEST WE FORGET

      Canadian National Vimy Memorial

      This impressive memorial is dedicated to the memory of Canadian Expeditionary Force members killed during the First World War. It also serves as the place of commemoration for First World War Canadian soldiers killed or presumed dead in France who have no known grave. The monument is the centrepiece of a 100-hectare preserved battlefield park that encompasses a portion of the grounds over which the Canadian Corps made their assault during the Battle of Vimy Ridge.

      The inscription on the monument reads: TO THE VALOUR OF THEIR/COUNTRYMEN IN THE GREAT WAR/AND IN MEMORY OF THEIR SIXTY THOUSAND DEAD THIS MONUMENT/IS RAISED BY THE PEOPLE OF CANADA.

      The sculpture of a sorrowful woman, Canada Bereft, on the Vimy monument represents Canada — a young nation mourning her dead. The massive sculpture was carved from a single 30-tonne block of stone.

      The memorial was restored over several years and rededicated by Queen Elizabeth II in 2007, the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. The site is one of two National Historic Sites of Canada located outside of Canada.

      I have walked among the row on row of white gravestones stretching to the horizon at Tyne Cot, near Passchendaele, flowers bending gently now in the summer breeze over the cold granite. I have stood outside the concrete bunker where John McCrae bandaged shattered legs, swabbed gaping wounds, and I have rested in the tiny cemetery outside this dressing station at Essex Farm where McCrae rested one afternoon during a lull in the fighting. He had just lost a friend, and it was here that he wrote:

      We are the Dead. Short days ago

      We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

      Loved and were loved, and now we lie

      In Flanders fields.

      But Jim is right. I wasn’t there. The countryside today is not the countryside of the First World War. I can only try to imagine it, and my mind cannot comprehend such horror.

      Because of censorship and of wanting to protect you all from war’s savagery, many of Jim’s letters speak, as you know, more of what is happening at home on the farm than on the battlefields of Belgium and France, so I have not used his letters in their

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