In March 1917, Private James Robert Johnston of the 14th Canadian Machine Gun Company entered the trenches of the Western Front for the first time below Vimy Ridge. Within a few weeks, he was transporting supplies and equipment across the ridge to newly captured German dugouts, after having participated in the Canadian Corps’ greatest victory to date. Over the next year and a half, Johnston fought in many of the Corps’ other major battles, including Hill 70, Passchendaele, Amiens, Bourlon Wood, and Valenciennes. After five months in garrison in Belgium following the Armistice, he finally returned home to New Brunswick in June 1919. Twenty-one years old, a three-year veteran of the First World War, he was filled with experiences that remained vivid in his memory for the rest of his life.
James Johnston was born in Boston on Christmas Day, 1897, after his parents moved from the Moncton area to Massachusetts. When Jimmie was five years old, they returned to New Brunswick, settling in Notre Dame, near Moncton. There he attended school until grade eight. After leaving school, he worked mostly in the woods because his father ran a logging camp. In the off-season, he held a variety of farm jobs.
In April 1916, he felt restless working in the lumber woods in Nova Scotia with his father, and at age eighteen he decided to enlist in the Canadian Army. He joined the 145th Battalion at Moncton; after several months of training at Sackville, southeast of Moncton, his unit moved to Camp Valcartier, near Quebec City, the main training camp for Canadian troops preparing to deploy overseas. They arrived in England in October, and by early November, only seven months after joining up, he was in France with the 26th New Brunswick Battalion. This battalion had been raised in New Brunswick in November 1914, and it served with the 2nd Canadian Division in France between 1915 and 1918. Popularly known as “The Fighting 26th,” it was one of only two infantry battalions from New Brunswick to see active service at the front.
Johnston’s first grade class, Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1903. Johnston stands in the back row, third from the right. JFC
In January 1917, Johnston volunteered for the Canadian Machine Gun Corps, and in April he went into action in the Battle of Vimy Ridge as a member of the transport section of the 14th Canadian Machine Gun Company. Later in the year, he was drawn into Hell — the Battle of Passchendaele. Following a period of leave in London, he returned to the front, where he contracted the mumps and then a fever, which caused him to spend several weeks in hospital.
On March 21, 1918, the Canadian Machine Gun Corps amalgamated its companies to form large battalions. The 14th joined the 4th, 5th, and 6th Companies to form the 2nd Canadian Machine Gun Battalion. Johnston served with the 2nd until he was transferred to the 4th C.M.G. Battalion on June 18, 1918, and there he finished out the war. When the end of the fighting finally came on November 11, he was at Le Havre on leave. After the Armistice, he spent the winter in Belgium, near the battlefield of Waterloo. It was not until April 1919 that he left for Canada; he reached Saint John in June, where he was discharged, and he returned to Notre Dame.
Following the war, Johnston lived with his family and worked at various jobs, including at Lockhart’s sawmill. In 1922, he moved to Boston and became a steam fitter in Bethlehem’s and other shipyards. He married Edith Geddes of Gladeside, New Brunswick, in 1929, and in 1932 their daughter Anna was born. When the shipyards closed during the Depression, the family returned to Notre Dame, where Johnston found employment at Taylor’s General Store. Around 1935, he began working for K.C. Irving, scaling lumber in Kent County and installing fuel tanks, until he was hired by the Canadian National Railway in 1940 as a steam fitter. Two sons, Don and Ralph, were born in Moncton in 1941 and 1944. Apart from a year in Newfoundland in 1954-1955, Johnston remained with C.N. in Moncton until he retired in 1962, and then he worked as a commissionaire until he was seventy-two years old. He died on August 28, 1976, at age seventy-eight, and was buried at Fairhaven Cemetery in Moncton; Edith passed away in July 2000.
Like many Great War veterans, Johnston never forgot his experiences in France and Flanders, although he lost touch with many of his wartime comrades when he was separated from them, both during and after the war. After he went to hospital in March 1918, he never again saw one of his closest friends, Bill (Guy) Barkley. However, chance meetings kept memories of the war alive for him. About 1922, he met another close friend, Danny (Nick) Nicholson, in Boston. At the same time, in a strange coincidence, Johnston was at work in a Boston shipyard when a new pipe fitter came up to him, and they started talking. Johnston told him he had better put his cap on, because he was getting oil in his hair. The man said that he could not wear a cap. He had a silver plate in his head, and wearing a cap bothered him; he had been shot down over France while in the Royal Flying Corps. Questioning him, Johnston found out that the man was the flyer he had seen shot down over Ypres in November 1917. In later years, Johnston renewed old wartime friendships as an active member of the 145th Battalion Veterans’ Association.
The fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War One rekindled Johnston’s interest in his wartime experiences. In the summer of 1964, he returned to the European battlefields, touring the Ypres and Vimy areas for a few weeks with members of his family. Among other sites, he visited war graves and memorials including the Menin Gate at Ypres and the Vimy Memorial in search of names provided by the families of deceased soldiers. During the trip, he kept a journal recording his wartime recollections from almost fifty years earlier, which he entitled, “My Ten Days in Passchendaele.” Afterwards, he expanded on this to produce from memory the closely written fifty-seven-page text he entitled “Memories of the Great War,” upon which this book is based.
Johnston states at the outset that his memoir is not a history of the war; rather, it is an account of his own wartime experiences. As such, it is largely episodic in nature, recounting individual occurrences within a loose chronological framework. The narrative is easily followed until the beginning of 1918. Then, as he observes in Chapter Five, events began to blur, as he and the rest of the Canadian Corps left trench warfare behind and began a war of movement. To clarify the course of Johnston’s experiences, brief chronologies of the actions of his units are provided at the beginning of each chapter. Similarly, either because the details of major battles were lost in the frenetic activity of large-scale fighting, or because, as a transport driver, Johnston was usually held in the rear in the early phases of offensives, Johnston’s recollections of Vimy and Hill 70 are brief, all but subsumed in the chaos of daily operations during the Battle of Passchendaele. The Battle of Amiens, in August 1918, is missing altogether, and, except for the capture of Valenciennes, the Advance to Victory between September and November 1918 is also unrecorded.
Reunion of the 145th Battalion Veterans’ Association. Johnston is seated fifth from the left in the back row. JFC
Johnston’s memoir exhibits significant strengths in at least three areas. First, it offers a vivid portrayal of Johnston’s passage from novice recruit to “old soldier” by the time he was twenty-one years old. Throughout the memoir, we share Johnston’s experiences: smoking for the first time on Christmas Day, 1916 — his birthday — when he was feeling homesick; learning how to gamble by playing Crown and Anchor; seeing an airplane for the first time; discovering the dangers of drinking at the front; and developing a soldier’s black humour by betting on how long another soldier and his team of horses mired in the mud in the open could survive the German shelling. We learn how troops survived, sometimes by liberating coal and barrels of beer from railway cars (“Salvaging was one of the finer arts of soldiering in those days”) and on other occasions by removing from the kit bags of dead soldiers their rations of bacon and bread. Realizing in retrospect that this action might be seen as “crude and heartless,” Johnston explains, “We did not consider this robbing the dead, as we would not touch anything else on them. A person must realize that under certain conditions a lot of our normal actions have to be curtailed, as survival is very necessary to help out the other fellow as well as yourself.”
Second, Johnston was an acute observer of the war, remarking shortly after arriving at Ypres that “Vimy was war, but Passchendaele was Hell.” From the memoir we learn about soldiering on the battlefields of the Great War: the randomness of death, when a dispatch rider passing him some distance behind the front was struck in the head and killed by a stray machine gun bullet; his ever-present dread of drowning in the water-filled shell holes; and the pressures of combat, when he drove his team slowly through intense German machine gun fire (which he called “silent death”) and, much to his amazement emerged unscathed. We are also introduced to the psychological stress of the war, especially during Passchendaele, when Johnston came close to breaking under the relentless strain of battle. Finally, we see how Johnston came to admire noncombatants from the Salvation Army and Y.M.C.A., whose gifts of tea and chocolate bars, often passed out under fire, were a powerful tonic to troop morale.
Lastly, and uniquely, we learn of Johnston’s experience as a horse driver in the transport section of the Canadian Machine Gun Corps. He wrote, “Very little has been said about the horses and mules that were used, and what they suffered is beyond all description.” In early 1917, he took charge of a team of horses, which he considered “one of my lucky breaks in the army.” This team, like the others in the unit, would be hitched to a limber or wagon; the driver rode the left-side horse (the “saddle horse”), and the right-side horse (the “off-horse”) was riderless. Johnston spent much of his time riding his team to and from the front lines, transporting machine guns, ammunition, and supplies, frequently under intense enemy artillery fire. Through his writings, we witness the bond of respect and affection that grew between him and his two favourite horses, Split Ear and Tuppence. He wrote, “I believe [Split Ear] knew more than I did, and it is one of the reasons why I lasted as long as I did. He took care of me.” After many adventures with his team, including being thrown into trenches and shell holes with them, he came to accept his sergeant’s view that “a horse at this time was of more value to the army than a man.” The War Diary of the 14th Canadian Machine Gun Company shares Johnston’s views. It records the following observations about horse transport during the Battle of Passchendaele at the end of November 1917:
During the operations at Passchendaele we had 3 horses killed. The horses, considering the extremely trying conditions under which they had to work and lack of any shelter cover or standing excepting what a marsh affords, stood up to the work in a remarkable manner. All work had to be done with pack saddles. Each small horse carried 2,000 rounds [of machine gun ammunition] and each large horse 3,000 rounds daily from dump to guns. The route was by mule track under constant shelling throughout the entire distance and in no place on the track was the mud less than 6 inches. The trip of 8 miles took the train 8 hours. When the Company moved away from the area the transport were forced to take long marches averaging 25 miles daily. Owing to the casualties with the horses, loads drawn were heavier than usual. All horses fulfilled their tasks but it was noticeable that when the horses were finally installed in fair stabling, they each one became feverish with high temperature, probably caused by reaction and change.
Through this memoir, we see how a young New Brunswicker answered his country’s call to arms, survived the dangers of trench warfare, and returned home changed forever by his experiences in the Great War.
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James Johnston’s original hand-written memoir remains with his family. This book is based on a transcription undertaken by his family several years ago that subsequently was checked against the original and errors were corrected. Little of the original memoir has been deleted from this edition. Several short sections that were not pertinent to the main story have been removed to maintain the flow of the narrative. A few passages that referred to later events and thus took the reader outside of the First World War time frame were also removed, but the anecdote about Johnston’s chance encounter with the airman he had seen shot down in 1917 is incorporated into this Introduction. In several places, especially in Chapter Five, sections have been rearranged to make them fit chronologically. Other changes include separating the original, continuous narrative into paragraphs and chapters; correcting the spelling, particularly of place names; and making the presentation of dates and times of day consistent. Some dates have been inserted in square brackets to orient the reader chronologically. Finally, dates, times and other details were checked against the war diaries of Johnston’s units and Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914-1919, by G.W.L. Nicholson (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1962), the Official History of the Canadian Corps; corrections were made where discrepancies occurred. Considering that the memoir was written from memory, some fifty years after events occurred, its high degree of accuracy was, at times, astonishing.
BRENT WILSON
University of New Brunswick