The Last of the Doughboys

by RICHARD RUBIN

  John Babcock was born on July 23, 1900, he told me, “twenty miles north of Kingston, in Ontario”; his service records list the specific town as Holleford, which is actually a bit farther away. Kingston, a picturesque old city that is home to both the Royal Military College of Canada and what seems like every prison in the country, sits at the spot where Lake Ontario empties into the St. Lawrence River. It was originally settled by Loyalist refugees, who named it for George III. Later, it became the capital of the Province of Canada, which eventually grew to become just Canada. John Babcock’s mother, Anne, was born in Ottawa, the current national capital; his father, James T. Babcock, grew up in the same area as his son John, who was born on the family farm. “What kind of farm was it?” I asked him.

  “There was three hundred and fifty acres,” he recalled, “and there was about a hundred acres that was farm. It was patches and all. And most of it had timber on it. There was a small lake on it.” His father, he said, “had this farm, and he had a sawmill on it. He was doing very well.” Then one day, he explained, “he was getting out timber, and they were felling a tree, and he took the young man’s place at the saw, and”—he raised his hand and then swatted it down—“tree fell, and it hit a cedar tree, a dead cedar tree that was leaning diagonally across the path of that tree they were felling, and it broke off and come down and hit my father on the shoulder.” He touched his own right shoulder. “And he lived for two hours. They brought him in on a sleigh, one of the sleighs and a horse blanket. He lived for two hours,” he repeated, staring straight ahead and starting to rock in his chair. “He died.”

  James Babcock was forty-three years old. His son John, not yet six, was the eighth of ten children left behind; his father’s first wife had died in childbirth, one of those things that, like deadly farm accidents, happened a lot back then. James’s death was a real hardship to his second wife, Anne. “The in-laws didn’t like my mother, because she had a high school education, and very few people had that much of an education at the time,” her son explained. “And the half brother and sisters, they drifted away. And finally just we five of the second family was on the farm. So my mother milked thirteen cows, night and morning.” Eventually she put the farm up for sale. “And my half brother bought it for twenty-one hundred dollars.” John continued to live there for about a year, until, one night—well, I’ll let him tell it.

  “I was in a little town called Perth Road,” he recalled. “And there was a lieutenant and a sergeant came. And we were having a kind of a dance in the upstairs of the house, and they were trying to get people to enlist. And they asked me if I wouldn’t like to.” He laughed, an unusual variation on “Ha!” that started silently but then suddenly burst forth with great volume, like a sonic boom. “And I, of course, said, ‘Why, yes!’”

  “At fifteen and a half!” his wife declared.

  “And they—you didn’t lie about your age?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “They didn’t ask your age?” I asked.

  “Yeah, they did,” he replied. But it seemed they didn’t care; Canada needed soldiers, and recruiters have quotas. “They were hard up for men,” he told me. “Very hard up.” He laughed again. “They had to be, to [take me],” he explained. For him, though, it seemed like a good deal: He had dropped out years earlier—“I didn’t care about school,” he explained—and was working as a laborer on the farm that now belonged to his brother. He didn’t particularly enjoy the work; the war seemed like an adventure. Why not go?

  According to his attestation paper—the Canadian version of an enlistment form—young Mr. Babcock joined up on February 1, 1916, and did, indeed, offer his real birth date. (Interesting: At that time, the standard Canadian attestation paper did not record the enlistee’s weight, though it did note two chest measurements—“girth when fully expanded” and “range of expansion.”) After he enlisted, he recalled, “I went to Sydenham the next following Monday morning. It was about fifteen miles; I walked.” He was assigned to the 146th Over-Seas Battalion, and sent to Kingston. “We drilled there for a few weeks,” he said, “and then they sent us to Sydenham and we spent the winter there. And men kept enlisting—we had about thirty-five or forty men there.” Come spring, they were sent to Valcartier, Quebec, where the Canadian Army had just built a large training camp. And it was there, as the 146th was preparing to ship across, that John Babcock’s youth first emerged as an issue.

  “Before they went overseas,” he recalled, “everyone got a physical. And I was turned down. ‘A-4.’ I was physically fit but underage.”

  He had never, to that point, tried to fudge the matter; and yet, the Army had had no problem enlisting him, training him, clothing and feeding him, and moving him around as it suited them. At one point, his mother, unhappy that John had enlisted, even wrote his colonel asking that her son be discharged on account of his age; but John demurred, and the colonel dropped the matter. Again: “They were pretty damn hard up for men, let me tell you,” as he put it. So I don’t know why, suddenly, his age became a problem for the CEF. Perhaps there was a change in policy, or personnel; perhaps the wrong person just happened to get a look at his records at the wrong time. Whatever the reason, he was pulled from the corps. Resourceful fellow that he was, though, he quickly found a loophole, of sorts. “For some reason or other, my name wasn’t published with the guys that were turned down,” he explained. “So I put my pack on, and got on the train and went to Halifax. And the company commander knew my status, so when I went to get on the boat, he made me step aside, and sent me up to Wellington Barracks. That was a peacetime barracks, in Halifax. And they put me on a truck, wrassling freight there, and I didn’t care for that.”

  He bided his time, waiting for an opportunity to make a move; and one soon presented itself. “They called for a draft of thirty or forty men to go to the RCRs,” he told me. “That was the Royal Canadian Reserves, that was peacetime reserves. I volunteered. They asked me how old I was, and I said, ‘Eighteen.’ And went—got to England, went over on the old California. That’s a cattle boat; they converted it.” He confessed, “I did a lot of vomiting.” Still, he was relatively fortunate: A year later, the German U-22 torpedoed the California, sank it.

  John Babcock finally got across in October of 1916, which by then was looking like an even worse year for Canadians in that war than 1915 had been. On July 1, the Newfoundland Regiment had suffered a casualty rate of 90 percent in the first few hours of the Battle of the Somme. If you think that’s bad, then I won’t tell you that their officer corps suffered a casualty rate of 100 percent. But it did. The Canadian Expeditionary Force, which entered the battle a few months later, would take more than twenty thousand casualties at the Somme that fall. It’s enough to make you wonder why young John Babcock kept trying so hard to get into it all. I asked him: “Were you eager to get overseas?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I wanted to go over there.”

  “You were eager to go fight?”

  He laughed. “Well, I didn’t want to get killed.”

  “But you wanted to get into the action.”

  “Yeah, I did,” he said. When he first arrived in Liverpool, though, he was given a six-day leave, which he spent in London. It was full of soldiers, he told me—not just British, but Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians on leave. There was a lot of rivalry among them, too. “Everybody thought they were the best,” he told me. “The Canadians and Australians thought they were the best. And the English knew they were the best,” he said, laughing. “The English people have great self-confidence.” He saw that in their civilians, too, who, he recalled, simply “went on with their work,” undisturbed by the war, except for the occasional zeppelin. “Seemed to me,” he recalled, “they had an air raid while I was there. And I think we went into these places, you know . . . these air-raid shelters.” There would be a lot more of that sort of thing there the next time around. Young Babcock spent much of his time in the city at a train depot; “They ha
d a free lunch in the Victoria Station. That’s where I did most of my eating,” he said with a laugh. “I only had two pounds. That was equivalent to ten dollars. When I got back to camp I had two shillings in the pocket; that was equivalent to fifty cents.”

  Later, to his surprise, he discovered that he had family in the area. “My half brother had gone with the outfit,” he told me. “With the 146th Battalion. And he was stationed just a few miles from where I was.”

  “In England,” Dorothy clarified.

  “England,” he agreed. “I went down to see him, and he asked how the hell I ever got over there.” Later, Mr. Babcock said, his brother—Albert Manly Babcock, eight years John’s senior—transferred to the engineers, where he was made a sapper: “The people [who] would tunnel under the enemy lines, and put a lot of explosives there and blow them up,” he explained. One time, he told me, his brother “dug into a German sap where some people got—the tunnel had been blown in behind them. They were just sitting there; they were dead.” Sapping was a dirty job in every sense; it wore on his brother terribly. “He had a nervous breakdown,” John Babcock recalled. “He got buried one time up to his waist. They were putting a narrow-gauge railroad across a shell hole, and they were driving the wooden piling down to support this railroad. And they’d just hit a couple of licks and the Heinies zeroed in on that, so they’d hit a couple of licks and have to get back and hide because those three-inch shells—whizz-bangs, they called them—would come over there.” One of these whizz-bangs landed close enough to Albert Manly Babcock to bury him up to his midsection in earth. He was lucky: Plenty of soldiers in France were buried alive entirely by artillery blasts. One day, during the Battle of Verdun, an entire French company disappeared in an instant. They were discovered shortly after the armistice when their bayonets, still fixed to their rifles, poked up through the earth. The bodies were never exhumed, but rather left where they sat, still awaiting orders to go over the top; today the Tranchée des Baionettes is something of a shrine at Verdun.

  Being half-buried was quite enough for Albert Manly Babcock. “He had a nervous breakdown,” his brother reiterated. “They discharged him, sent him back to Canada. And his church got ahold of him, and they sent him to Montreal, to McGill University, a few months after that. And he became a minister.”

  He was lucky.

  John Babcock was lucky, too, in a way, and he knew it. “We lost a lot of fellows that was in the little detachment that I was in, in Sydenham,” he told me. “Quite a few of them got killed.”

  Though they had gone over too late for the carnage of 1916, there was still ample opportunity for Canadians to die in France in 1917. In April of that year, the CEF—all four Canadian divisions, united for the first time in one Canadian Corps—was assigned to take a strate- gic high point at the northern flank of a British offensive that would come to be known as the Battle of Arras, in order to protect nearby British troops from that pesky German enfilade fire. It was a tough assignment; the Germans, aware of the position’s importance, were well fortified. Nevertheless, the Canadians delivered, taking some ten thousand casualties but capturing all of their objectives in four days—including that high ground, which was named for a nearby town: Vimy Ridge.

  Now, here’s another difference between Canada and the United States: If you’re American, it’s likely you’ve never heard of Vimy Ridge. If you’re Canadian, though? Not a chance. Vimy Ridge is to the nation of Canada what Belleau Wood is to the United States Marine Corps. The address of Canada’s very fine national War Museum in Ottawa is 1 Vimy Place. The British general who commanded the Canadian Corps at Vimy, Julian Byng, was appointed governor-general of Canada after the war—a largely ceremonial but high-profile position that comes with lots and lots of juicy perks. The British also made Byng First Viscount of Vimy.

  Canadians who fought at Vimy (which is pronounced “Vimmie”) could dine off that fact back home for the rest of their lives. John Babcock, though, had to remain satisfied with the free lunch at Victoria Station, because he never got out of England. While the CEF was fighting at Vimy—and, later, at Passchendaele, and Amiens, and Cambrai—he was unable to get into the action. The issue, once again, was his youth. At some point before the RCRs were sent on to France, he told me, “my service record came through . . . and they found out I was sixteen.” So he was plucked out of the RCRs and reassigned to the 26th Reserve. Many of the men in the 26th—all Canadians, as he recalled—had already seen action in France, and were recovering from wounds, physical or psychological or both. “Did you get to talk to a lot of them about what they had done and seen?” I asked him.

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “Yeah.”

  “And what kind of stories did you hear?”

  “All kinds of stories . . . I remember, one thing that struck me as rather cruel. When the Canadians would take a bunch of German prisoners, somebody would be detailed to take them back. To the prison area. Most fellows didn’t want to be bothered taking them back, [so] they’d take them into the reserve trenches and they’d shoot them. I thought,” he said, shaking his head, “I thought that was terrible.” He cast his eyes downward. “I think of that to this day. But when you get in the Army and fighting, you get pretty damn callous, I guess. And shooting somebody”—he looked back up at me—“of course, the Germans, they were just as cruel as our guys were.”

  “You think that was pretty common?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

  There were a great many stories told, he added, that he didn’t get to hear. “We had what was called a ‘wet canteen’ in the area. And the men would go there and drink beer at night. And some of them would drink as many as eight or nine of those imperial pints of beer, and they would talk about their experiences.”

  “What else would they talk about?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t go to the wet canteen.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “I didn’t care for beer.” Very unusual for a Canadian, in my experience. Even an expatriate.

  This is not to say that he didn’t enjoy other pursuits. “I got acquainted with one of the WAACs when I was in Edinburgh, in Scotland,” he said—the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, founded in Britain in 1917. He was drawn to one in particular, a Scottish sixteen-year-old with the unusual name of, as he recalled it, Isabel Hailstones. He met her, he told me, “one evening on Prince’s Street, in Edinburgh.”

  “Did she show you around?” I asked.

  “Oh . . . not really,” he said.

  And then Dorothy said to her husband: “Tell him the story.”

  “What story?” he asked her. She offered just a bit of guidance; “Oh!” he exclaimed, and looked incredulously at his wife, then let loose that sonic boom of a laugh and turned to me. “We were going to have sex,” he said. “And I had, I was in this little cul-de-sac, and I had my overcoat down [on the ground] and she was on it, and we were going to have sexual intercourse. And a policeman walked in. And that kind of stopped that.” He laughed again; we all did. “So I came home a virgin,” he said, in summary.

  “I thought you told me,” Dorothy prodded him, “she was the one that had the bloomers on, and you couldn’t get her bloomers down or something?”

  “Oh, they had bloomers and long johns,” he said. “And I got her bloomers down around her ankles—I couldn’t get her legs apart. So I came home a virgin.” He laughed again, and so did Dorothy and I, though I will confess to you now that I’m pretty sure my laugh was a good bit more awkward than theirs.

  Things improved on that front once he came home to Canada after the war and returned to school. “The girls that I had gone to school with, they learned about the birds and the bees,” he explained. “So I got taken care of then.”

  I once had a Canadian woman—a professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, as it happens—tell me that Canadians are much more sexually liberated than Americans. At the time, I thought she was just coming on to me.


  After six months in the 26th Reserve, Mr. Babcock told me, “they rounded up everybody in the Canadian Army that was underage and put us in one outfit. There were thirteen hundred of us. And we were at Bexhill-on-Sea; that was in Sussex. And they drilled us eight hours a day. And when you became nineteen, you went into D Company, and you went from there to France.” This new unit, he recalled, was known as a Young Soldiers Battalion, and its formation was a curious byproduct of the war. The British, it seems, did not discharge an underage soldier from their army (or from the armies of their dominions) once his true age became known; rather, they transferred him to one of these Young Soldiers Battalions and kept him there, in the service, until he came of age, at which point he would be sent to some front-line unit as a replacement. If it were discovered that you were, in fact, underage in the Army, you would be plucked out of your unit and transferred to a Young Soldiers Battalion immediately—no matter where you happened to be at the time, even if that should be a fire trench in Flanders.

  In his battalion, John Babcock told me, “about a third of them had [already] been to France . . . We had one kid who had won the DCM—the Distinguished Conduct Medal,” a British decoration for extreme bravery, second in prestige only to the Victoria Cross. The brave boy soldier’s name was Kinley; he was sixteen years old and, according to John Babcock, “wilder than a March hare.” There was also, he recalled, “an Iroquois Indian that had been to France, and he came back—they took him out of the trenches and sent him to this Young Soldiers Battalion when I was there. His brother got killed. And his father, who was also in the Canadian Army, he got wounded.”