Keeping the Old Flag Flying, by Mike Richardson

[Moonraker]

There’s  some very good material in this well-presented account. Naturally I was particularly interested in Kenneth’s time on Salisbury Plain in 1914-15 and I can’t recall many individual  memoirs that give so much information about the four months spent there by the First Canadian Contingent.

 

The young Kenneth had various jobs in Wales, Germany – and Canada, where like so many British immigrants he had a hand-to-mouth existence before enlisting in the 88th Victoria Fusiliers on July 29, 1914 – when it was obvious that war was imminent. Within a week he was guarding Bamfield on Vancouver Island and the end of one of two trans-Atlantic cables,  before joining the First Contingent at its vast new assembly and training camp at Valcartier.

 

After further training of sorts (in almost daily  poor weather)  on the Plain, Kenneth, now a member of the 7th Battalion, endured the Second Battle of Ypres – where the Canadians performed magnificently – and was wounded and captured and taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Göttingen, housing British, French, Belgian, and Russian prisoners. Kenneth’s wound was only slowly healing  and this led to his being transferred to neutral Switzerland as  an internee at the holiday resort of Mürren, with the Swiss Government being happy to see the hotels – empty because of the war – in profitable use. The major challenge now was to fill the time. There were parades and inspections of  various sorts, but the internees were able to organise their own amusements with concerts. Relations were allowed to visit, and one day Kenneth was surprised by the arrival of his sister Ada. Other internees had visits from their fiancees, and there were a number of marriages.

Kenneth describes an array of colourful characters among his comrades, senior officers, British women living locally and a succession of chaplains and welfare officials. Some men were repatriated, but in 1918 the first cases of Spanish influenza occurred, resulting in some deaths – a particularly sad end for those who had endured combat, wounding and years of confinement.  The Armistice saw prompt repatriations but Kenneth was one of  the last to leave, arriving at his sister’s in Northamptonshire in time for Christmas. 

 

Kenneth re-joined his 7th battalion at Seaford, before sailing home in April 1919.

 

The original memoirs were well written and very readable, and Mike Richardson has done an excellent job of interpolating explanations of what might not be clear to some readers and of providing general background. He has gone to some trouble to identify the people not precisely named in the original. All together, the book provides a very worthwhile personal perspective of the experiences of the First Canadian Contingent, of being a PoW and, perhaps most significantly, of life as an internee in Switzerland.

 

Moonraker

 

(One or two of you may be puzzled, as I posted the above this morning - in the wrong part of the Forum! Oops. Now I've managed to move it to the correct sub-Forum.)

 

 

[A Lancashire Fusilier by Proxy]

I recently finished reading this book, so will post a few thoughts here.

I found the earlier part of the book regarding Kenneth’s enlistment, travel to the UK, and initial training, engrossing; that part was enhanced for me by the fact that my own maternal grandfather followed a similar path, having emigrated to Canada to seek his fortune in about 1909, and then joined up with the CEF from there.

Kenneth’s account of what happened once he got to the front was nail-biting, and I was sorry that that section was cut short when he was taken prisoner, as probably - at least in the first instance - he was, though in the long run it may have improved his chances of survival.

The ensuing account of his imprisonment in Germany was difficult to read, but not unexpected.

What was unexpected for me was to learn how ultimately he and others were released from that ordeal. It was interesting to learn how life was structured for the ex-prisoners in Switzerland, interacting freely with each other and various ex-pats resident in Switzerland, and to contrast it with internment in the German prison camps.

After a while, however, the novelty of life in Switzerland palls, and the realisation dawns that, despite the notional freedom, the truth is that Kenneth and the reader are locked together in irrelevancy and bourgeois pettiness until finally released by the end of the war. This part of the book provides rare insight into an aspect of the war that is not often reported on.