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    War Interlude 1916 -1919
    War Interlude 1916 -1919
    War Interlude 1916 -1919
    Ebook141 pages1 hour

    War Interlude 1916 -1919

    By Harold Hesler

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    In 1916, a young bank clerk from the Niagara region joined the Canadian Artillery and was shipped off to France and Belgium. Three and a half years later, he returned to Canada and rejoined the bank, eventually to become one of its most senior officers. This is his own account of that interval, during which he survived the battles of the Somme, Lens, Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, and the Canadian spearhead of the Allied advance during the last one hundred days of the war.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateApr 11, 2011
    ISBN9781462003549
    War Interlude 1916 -1919
    Author

    Harold Hesler

    Harold Hesler was born near Port Colborne, Ontario in 1893. At the age of 16, he was hired by the Royal Bank of Canada as a junior clerk at its branch in Welland, Ontario. In January, 1916 he resigned from his position as accountant at the branch in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and enlisted in the Canadian Artillery as an ammunition driver. He saw action in all the major engagements of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France and Belgium from October 1916 until the end of the First World War. Following his return to Canada in May 1919, he rejoined the bank and remained there until his retirement. By that time, the Royal Bank of Canada had become one of the largest banks in the world, with Hesler serving in various executive positions including General Inspector, Secretary of the Bank, and head of its extensive foreign operations. He died at Montreal in 1982, survived by his wife Edith Aimée Gravel, his son William Hesler, and two grandsons. William Hesler is the author of “Muleskinner: the European War of a Niagara Artilleryman”, published in 2010. He lives in Montreal.

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      Book preview

      War Interlude 1916 -1919 - Harold Hesler

      WAR INTERLUDE

      1916 – 1919

      Harold Hesler

      Edited by William Hesler

      iUniverse, Inc.

      Bloomington
      War Interlude 1916 – 1919

      Copyright © 2011 by Estate Harold Hesler

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

      iUniverse

      1663 Liberty Drive

      Bloomington, IN 47403

      www.iuniverse.com

      1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

      Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

      ISBN: 978-1-4620-0352-5 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4620-0354-9 (ebook)

      ISBN: 978-1-4620-0353-2 (dj)

      Printed in the United States of America

      iUniverse rev. date: 3/31/2011

      Note on the cover illustration

      Included with Harold Hesler’s manuscript of War Interlude is a clipping from the New York Times Magazine of November 10, 1940. It was the illustration for an article by the American journalist and WWI vet Samuel Williamson, with the title "Was it worth it?. It is an etching by the war artist Kerr Eby, with the caption Rough going". Under the drawing appear the words of the article’s author:

      "But in all the filth and stupidities of that experience I saw courage, fortitude, sacrifice"[1]

      Under the clipping, Harold Hesler has written simply:

      The words might almost be mine.

      missing image file

      311,972 Driver Harold Hesler,

      No. 3 Section, 3rd Divisional Ammunition Column

      I also had my photograph taken in Winnipeg which shows me as I felt.

      EDITOR’S NOTE

      Harold Hesler completed work on his War Interlude in the Spring of 1962—more than four decades after he returned to Canada from the First World War. In 2010, I published Muleskinner: The European War of a Niagara Artilleryman. In Muleskinner, I tried to put my father’s experiences in context. I wanted to give the reader an understanding of Canada’s involvement in the conflict, and a sense of what lay behind the generally light-hearted account which he gives in War Interlude.

      The text which follows is exactly as my father wrote it, except for the insertion of accents in French place names, and the section headings. I have also added the illustrations, as well as the extracts from the official Divisional Ammunition Column war diaries.

      As explained in Muleskinner, the title of Harold Hesler’s reminiscences reflects the fact that the three and a half years he spent in the Canadian Artillery were the only moments in his working life when he was not with the Royal Bank of Canada. He retired from the Bank in 1951, and died just before his eighty-ninth birthday in 1982.

      W.H. 24 February 2011

      FOREWORD

      This is an account of my experiences during World War I. It is based principally on diary notes which I jotted down as I moved about in France and Belgium and during periods of leave in Paris, England, Scotland and Ireland. Over the years I had attempted at many times to expand these into a narrative; this was not accomplished until April 1962.

      H. G. Hesler

      Westmount, April l0th, 1962.

      Contents

      Note on the cover illustration

      EDITOR’S NOTE

      FOREWORD

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      APPENDICES

      Extracts from Harold Hesler’s travel diary in 1938

      LEXICON

      CHAPTER ONE

      1916

      Winnipeg

      When war was declared in August 1914 I was approaching my twenty-first birthday and was Accountant at the Chapleau branch of The Royal Bank of Canada, a rather isolated point in northern Ontario, and until I left there in May 1915 I gave only casual consideration to enlisting for service. The movement of troop trains on their way to Valcartier through this divisional point on the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway did nudge my conscience to a degree when at times I thought that I ought to join my lot with these men who were travelling east with so much enthusiasm, but my life up to this time had been so distant from anything bearing on the military that it was not difficult to bury these feelings throughout the severe northern winter. In May 1915 I was transferred to Sault Sainte Marie where the spirit of the times was more evident but I was barely settled there when, in July, I was moved to Winnipeg. This bustling city was alive with troops of one sort or another and the atmosphere made it increasingly apparent to me that my own opinion of my incapacity for military duty was not a valid reason for not attempting to do what was called one’s bit. John Zoller, who had been with me for some time in the bank at Chapleau, was transferred to Winnipeg in the fall and moved into the apartment which I had been sharing with my brother Norman, who left for the east about this time. John and I talked the matter over every night, sometimes after only a light snack as our finances were very slim, and finally in December we decided to take the plunge and to take it in earnest. That is we made up our minds to go in for something out of the ordinary, something super-dangerous and thereby even the balance which in our conscience we felt was against us through our tardiness. After much consideration and investigation we found that a section of the Third Divisional Ammunition Column would be recruited in Winnipeg at the turn of the year and it was represented to us as one of the most spectacular arms of the service since the cavalry had been dismounted. In fact, the Air Force seemed dull in comparison when we were told of all the dashing about that an Ammunition Column did in delivering small arms ammunition to the infantry and shells to the artillery. We did not know that by the time we would arrive at the Front the artillery establishment would be reorganized to change all of this. We knew a little about horses from our boyhood days but neither of us had done much riding. Nothing daunted, we gave the required one month’s notice to the bank and on January 20, 1916 we signed on with No. 3 Section, 3rd Divisional Ammunition Column. John was given number 311,971 and I received 311,972.

      missing image file

      Extract from the Manitoba Free Press

      December 31, 1915

      Our barracks consisted of one floor of an old building on McDermot Avenue just off Main Street and was furnished with a mass of double-decker bunks, with no space to walk, stand or sit except in the narrow aisles between the rows of bunks or on our bunks. On the upper floor was another military outfit recently down from Prince Albert where they had been recruited as the nucleus of an infantry battalion, but falling far short of the establishment were now being transformed into a battery of artillery. What a rough, tough and noisy crowd they were. We had no cooking facilities in our building so three times a day we marched a few cold blocks to a large hall that served as a community kitchen for several units. We had no horses so we marched out to the Exhibition Grounds several times a week and were there introduced to the horses of the 43rd Battery which was to form a part of the Third Divisional Artillery—fortunately there was lots of snow to fall into and not enough horses for everyone to be mounted on every visit. We had no place for foot drill except in the streets or in school yards, but we did occasionally attend lectures and light exercise drills in the old Bank of Hamilton Building on Main Street which had been condemned and otherwise vacated and the floor wavered under every footstep. How Lieut. Miles would swear at us and Sergeant Preston would berate us when we were slow at grasping the elements of mounted drill on foot or for falling off a horse! I developed a charley-horse which the massages of the medical officer could not erase and he finally told me he would have to recommend my discharge. I still thought that I was going to be a modern Crusader so I hid my pain and eventually worked it out of my system. Hardening but not heartening. Fortunately one thing was true—we were not going to spend a long time in training in Canada.

      Our full number was recruited by the end of February. We had group photographs taken, one of the whole section and others of the half-sections. There were a few additions and discharges before we went overseas but most of the men who made the journey are in the photographs. There were also some switches of men from one half-section to the other. My only copies of these photographs were destroyed in a cyclone in Havana in 1926 and I recovered one of our half-section from brother Norman which is part of this record[2]. By that time I could not remember all of the names of the men in my half-section but I had been able

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