Once Well Beloved: Remembering A British Columbia Great War Sacrifice by Michael Sasges (Royal BC Museum $17.95)

Review by Mark Forsythe  9BCBW 20190

ll that remains of Phoenix, a mining town in the mountains between Grand Forks and Greenwood, is a lone cenotaph perched on a hillside. When the Great War ended in 1918, so did demand for copper. The Granby Consolidated Mining company closed its operations one year later. It began to sell buildings for salvage. The pain of losing fifteen local boys in the war was acute. By selling the skating and curling rink, money was raised to build that cenotaph. Today it overlooks an empty townsite.

More than 60,000 Canadians were killed in the Great War. Those numbers are hard to grasp, and the humanity of these individuals fades over time. So retired journalist Michael Sasges has placed the names of twelve Merritt-area soldiers in high relief for his compelling book, Once Well Beloved.

Sasges has searched attestation papers, census documents, battalion diaries and local newspaper accounts for telling details. A letter home from twenty-two-year old Malcom McAuley was published in the Merritt Herald:

“Dear Curley...I got a bullet right through the face...I did not get much of the gas, but I saw lots of them that did and anyone who gets a good dose dies in agony, and anyone who gets a small dose lives in agony. I have seen it both ways and I know.”

Other letters printed were equally frank and graphic. “Canadian military authorities could and did censor letters home,” Sasges writes, “but the continuing publication of letters from valley soldiers through war’s end suggests they couldn’t censor everything.”

Eleven days after Britain declared war on Germany, the first volunteers from the Nicola Valley were boarding trains for Kamloops, and were bound for military training at Valcartier, Quebec. At least 335 men (and two women) from the valley enlisted. The names of 44 killed are etched into the granite of Merritt’s cenotaph.

The volunteers included cowboys, railway workers, coal miners and a drifter or two. Among the first to sign up were Indigenous men with deep roots in a landscape renowned for rich bunchgrasses. Denied land and rights as citizens, they still enlisted at rates comparable to the white population.

George McLean, a man of mixed Indigenous and Scottish descent, was from the Upper Nicola Valley. His “conspicuous gallantry” at Vimy Ridge in 1917 earned him a Distinguished Conduct Medal. Only a Victoria Cross was considered a greater honour. George McLean single-handedly killed 19 of the enemy and captured 40 others and was welcomed home as a hero in Kamloops.

Once Well Beloved portrays a valley in transition: transformed by railways, coal mines, ranches and rules, transformed from traditional Indigenous lands to settler territory. Four years before the Great War, the Nlaka’pamux chiefs and other tribes in the region had demanded action on land treaties —claims that have yet to be settled more than a century later.

The first three men from the Nicola Valley to die in the Great War all faced deadly chlorine attacks. Like many from B.C., they were Britons by birth, a key reason this province had the highest per capita enlistment rate in the country.

• Coal miner Robert Davidson died one day after being gassed on April 25, 1915 at the Second Battle of Ypres.
• John Clyde McGee was “Killed in Action” on May 24th at French Flanders
• Carpenter John Enoch Birch was “shot through the head and instantly killed.”

Four Nicola Valley men died at Vimy, including 23-year-old David Hogg who was killed during a trench raid before the main attack.

“The officers organizing the assault on Vimy were determined to discover what and who was in front of the Canadians and how the Germans might defend themselves during a major assault. There was a cost to the knowledge gained, a blood price, and David Hogg paid it.”

Hogg’s uncle, Alexander Hogg, was also killed in the Vimy battle. The victory came at tremendous human cost with 3,598 Canadians killed, in what the French press called, “Canada’s Easter Gift to France.”

Another name brought back to life is John Nash, born in Britain to a well-heeled family. He ventured to the Nicola Valley in the 1880s, preempted land, served during the Boer War, returned home to play polo and organize a shooting club, and was a well-liked fire and game warden. He married Eleanor Flora Wilson just a few days before leaving for training. Nash was killed before their second anniversary.

Once Well Beloved reminds us of the horrifying human toll from a war that was supposed to be over by Christmas of 1914. Sasges concludes with the Spanish flu pandemic that claimed another 50,000 lives at the end of the war. The Nicola Valley was not spared, with soldiers and settlers succumbing, while the local Indigenous population who faced minimal care lost one-sixth of its population.

“All are remembered firstly as individuals and secondly as the collective creators of legacies that both help and hurt us today—that we might live,” Sasges writes. He dedicates this book to his grandchildren. 9780772672551

Mark Forsythe is co-author with Greg Dickson of From the West Coast to the Western Front (Harbour, 2014)