Ernest Fiset: A French-Canadian Saskatchewan Farmer in WWI (Part 2)
- Karen Inkster Vance
- Nov 10
- 10 min read
One year ago I posted the first half of my great-grandfather's WWI story, from Saskatchewan farmer to soldier newly arrived at Camp Bramshott in the England countryside.
Now, in time for Remembrance Day, it's time to share the rest of his experiences, with gratitude that he returned home when so many others didn't.
Constructed outside of the village on heathland owned by the Ministry of Defense,[1] Camp Bramshott was its own little town, housing 20,000 Canadian soldiers in “row upon row” of temporary wood and corrugated iron huts.[2] There was a post office, wash huts, and a gymnasium. Along its main muddy road were a theatre, café, several YMCA huts, a Catholic Women’s league hut and a bank, collectively known as ‘Tin Town.’
In addition to Ernest’s Saskatchewan regiment, Camp Bramshott housed three reserve battalions from Quebec, one from Alberta, and another from Nova Scotia, all waiting to be called to the Front.[3]
About thirty-five men were assigned to a hut, each under the command of a Corporal. At both ends were a coal-fueled stove where the men heated drinks. The beds were narrow and low – just two feet wide and six inches off the ground.[4] The soldiers were dosed with camphor to avoid lice[5] and the bed boards were scrubbed and disinfected regularly to prevent the spread of disease.[6]
Every morning at 6 a.m. the reveille trumpeted them out of bed; they washed, dressed, and ate breakfast from their mess tins, then fell in for parade duty and inspection. Ernest remembered that he had to polish his uniform buttons and buckles and shine his shoes every day, though he later admitted proudly: “Most of the time I just wiped ‘em with a rag! And I got away with that quite a while.” When asked if he ever got in trouble for cutting corners, he staunchly defended his work-around: “They told me to do it and I done it!”[7]
Although the allies seemed to be pushing back the Germans, at any moment Ernest might be drafted to go to France, so both physical and army training were essential. Keeping the troops busy also kept them well-disciplined and out of trouble.
Early on, Canadian military officials tried to train soldiers in Canada but found this challenging due to inclement climate and the distraction of being close to home with required harvest leaves. It was decided to send troops overseas “as soon as possible after enlistment,” but that meant that recruits landed in England “with practically no military training.”[8]
Ernest’s first few months would be devoted to infantry training: musketry, hand and rifle grenades, bayonet fighting, proficiency on the Lewis machine gun, line formations and assault tactics.[9] He would dig trenches and dugouts, practice shooting, drill with his squad, conduct guard duty, be exposed to the sting of tear gas, and wear gas helmets while walking through an underground smoke-coloured gas chamber.[10] His prairie farming background proved helpful, as Ernest also looked after the horses at Bramshott.[11]
Six-mile route marches were a regular occurrence. As they prepared in the morning there was a “noise and bustle”[12] in the hut as the men cleaned up and got ready for the day, kitted themselves in their Battle Order uniforms and equipment, then packed and filled water bottles. This was a serious business; during both the march and halts there were strict rules against conversing with civilians.[13] The entire battalion got into formation and trooped through the quiet country lanes primarily trafficked by bicycles, horse-drawn dogcarts, and the occasional Ford motorcar.[14]
Life in camp could get boring. Although the men sometimes grumbled about the annoying, repetitive tasks, one Canadian soldier at Bramshott noted, “Such is life in the Army, and [anyway] nobody is working too hard.”[15] Another soldier complained about the monotony of camp life: “We are hardly getting enough to do to keep us in condition. It is worse than lost time, and we are having no fun. Most of the time we are writing, reading, playing cards, or just lying around.”[16]
The YMCA offered a welcome hub for the men, providing a recreation room, canteen, and gathering space with newspapers and magazines.[17] Entertainment could be found at the theatre with several productions a week. Singing was a popular pastime; the YMCA even published a Canadian Soldiers’ Song Book, with patriotic anthems and nostalgic home songs.[18] Since these were all in English, it only made sense for the French Canadians to compile their own collection. Found among Ernest’s keepsakes later in life, were the handwritten lyrics to five French songs; one, dated October 9, 1918, is written on Canadian YMCA letterhead paper.
I picture Ernest seated on a hard bench at a long wooden table, painstakingly transcribing the verses into Quebec French, a few words misspelled. Around him, men are reading newspapers, writing letters, drinking coffee, or discussing when they might get sent to France. The songs suggest that once they were overseas, the French Canadians were just as patriotic as their English-speaking comrades. They are traditional folk songs of leaving, and loved ones, and prayers for a safe return:
Priez, priez pour moi, la belle, | Que je revienne encor
(Pray, pray for me, beautiful one | That I return home again.)
They are newly written songs of politics and war and fighting for a good cause:
L'alemagne il sont toujour en chicane… | La France que est tout puissant voulant toujours etre respeté | Elle a mise tout c'est défense
(Germany is fighting unjustly… | France is all powerful, always respected. | She’s done everything to defend herself)
Ernest even wrote one of the verses himself, all this while waiting to be sent to the battlefields.
Canadian soldiers fighting on the front lines were paid just $1.10 per day – less than manual labourers back home made, while those in England got half-pay, 55 cents a day.[19]
Ernest was frugal, rarely requesting money from his pay except for a £2, £3 or £4 to go on the occasional leave to London or to pay for essentials like brass polish, but he did have an indulgence: cigarettes. One day after throwing his finished butt on the ground, another soldier picked it up “to get one taste of it.” Sixty-four years later he was still indignant over the memory: “And there’s a son of a gun! I don’t see why he didn’t buy it, because we had .55 cents a day to spend!”[20] He also exulted in the free mail service: “Well in the Army, if I make for the mail, didn’t need no stamps. Only had to put soldier’s name. So, I saved quite a bit!”[21]
For many young men, going to war was a bit of an adventure, a chance to see the world. As an elderly man, Ernest downplayed the danger, and – as ever preoccupied with money – boasted that his trip to England “didn’t cost me a thing!”[22]
At the time, however, the grim battlefields of France lay in wait around the corner, though the untried young men from the prairies couldn’t have initially understood how truly horrible war could be. Certainly, training in camp was much easier than fighting in the trenches. One Canadian soldier who had eagerly awaited over a year at Bramshott to be sent to the Front, only to be wounded and returned to England after just a few months, wrote his mother, “You can be sure that I won’t be so anxious to go again as I was the first time. Nobody who has spent any time in France can honestly say that he wants to go back again.”[23]
If he didn’t know specifics of the dangers before he left home, Ernest certainly became aware soon enough. In an interview with his granddaughter, Beverly, he shared the story of two soldiers who were chatting in the trenches. One man sat down and “him that he was talking to was shot,” Ernest explained. “The bullet came right through here,” pointing to his head.[24]
Like most French-Canadian soldiers, when he first arrived in England, Ernest spoke very little English. He once told his daughter, Laura, that whenever he went to a pub or canteen, he always ordered chicken, because that was the only English word he knew![25] It was during the army that, from necessity, he really started to learn the language.[26]
An unexpected danger
While the men knew that they were possibly headed to the killing fields of France, they couldn't know that they were also in the middle of another menace. The Spanish Flu had been circulating to a small extent, but within a month of Ernest’s arrival, Bramshott Military Camp was hit by the epidemic.
On September 24th three cases of illness were reported, with numbers increasing until October 5th when a record 174 cases were reported in one day.[27] In an effort to fight the spread of disease, smoking in huts and spitting were prohibited and every day the soldiers’ temperature was taken while on parade to ensure that sick men reported to the camp hospitals.[28] As illness continued to spread, further restrictions were implemented: numbers of men sharing the same hut were halved, windows were kept open “day and night,” church parades were eliminated, and the communal dining hall was closed.[29] These helped to reduce infection but couldn’t completely eliminate contagion.
Several of the men who had come over with Ernest died, not by war wounds on the battlefield, but of the Spanish Flu.[30] In total, 2,247 cases passed through nearby No. 12 Canadian General Hospital with 163 soldier deaths, accounting for half of the Canadian soldier tombstones in the surrounding small village churchyards. When the Canadians began running the hospital in 1917, they took on the 800 casualties housed there; one year later, by November 30, 1918, those numbers had nearly doubled, with 1,515 casualties admitted to the No. 12 Canadian General Hospital, most suffering with the deadly flu.[31]
There is no indication that Ernest became sick at camp, so it’s possible he had already been exposed on the ship over. Though he had already completed the shortened 10 weeks’ training, and though there was a desperate need for reinforcements at the Front, officials held off on sending men across the Channel for fear of introducing the Flu into their fighting forces. It’s unlikely Ernest knew just how close he was to being sent to the Front; but for the Flu, he would almost certainly have joined the fighting in France.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, on November 11, 1918, an armistice was signed and the war was over.
Return home
Though the war was over, it would take many months to send the 250,000 Canadian soldiers home. With limited ships and a backlog of rail transport, repatriation and demobilization was a long, drawn-out affair, so Ernest and his companions were sent to Ripon in Yorkshire to await orders.
Finally, the men were sent south, and Ernest and 5,300 other Canadian Army soldiers left the port of Southampton aboard the Cunard Line’s R.M.S. Aquitania on Saturday, June 14, 1919. Tugs pulled her off to sea at 7:30 am without the usual public fanfare due to a seaman’s strike that had only just been settled.[32]
They left behind tens of thousands of Canadian soldiers desperate to return home. When the men who had served on the front lines for years found out that conscripts were being sent home sooner than them, their anger boiled over with mutiny, rioting, camp buildings set on fire, and even a local police officer killed.[33]
Aboard ship, those who were lucky to set sail eagerly awaited the first view of their homeland. Six days after leaving England, Ernest disembarked at Halifax and on June 27 he was officially discharged at Quebec.[34] I think it highly likely that he stopped in to visit with aunts, uncles, and cousins at Ste-Christine-de-Portneuf before travelling west. The train would return him to his prairie home at Wood Mountain, ready to carry on with his homestead and plans for the future.
Sources:
[1] Common Land, “Bramshott Common” Retrieved from https://common-land.com/lands/view/584
[2] Overseas Military Forces of Canada. Report of the Ministry Overseas of Canada. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1918), 43.
[3] Overseas Military Forces of Canada. Report of the Ministry Overseas of Canada. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1918), 61.
[4] John McNeill Letter, February 24, 1917.
[5] John Cushnie Letter, May 11, 1917. https://www.canadianletters.ca/document-63065
[6] James Henderson Fargey letter, February 8, 1916 (Canadian Letters)
[7] Ernest Fiset interview with granddaughter, Beverly (Honeyman) Inkster, August 5, 1982 at Lumby, BC.
[8] Overseas Military Forces of Canada. Report of the Ministry Overseas of Canada. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1918), 9. https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/themes/defence/caf/militaryhistory/dhh/official/book-1918-overseas-en.pdf
[9] Overseas Military Forces of Canada. Report of the Ministry Overseas of Canada. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1918), 11.
[10] John Cushnie letter, July 21, 1917. http://www.canadiangreatwarproject.com/transcripts/transcriptDisplay.asp?Type=L&transNo=758
[11] Gerry Fiset interview with author, August 4, 2019 at Barriere, BC.
[12] Herbert Cunliffe letter, July 24th, 1916. https://www.canadianletters.ca/content/document-2851
[13] War Diary, 15th Reserve Battalion. October 24, 1918. Order No. 40 (item 296). RG 9 III D 3, Vol. 4951.
[14] John Cushnie Letter, May 20th, 1917. http://www.canadiangreatwarproject.com/transcripts/transcriptDisplay.asp?Type=L&transNo=977
[15] Victor McDonald Letter, September 18, 1916. https://www.canadianletters.ca/content/document-1825
[16] Shorey Johnson Nevill Letter, January 3rd, 1917. https://www.canadianletters.ca/content/document-8070
[17] Overseas Military Forces of Canada. Report of the Ministry Overseas of Canada. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1918), 497.
[18] The Canadian Soldiers’ Songbook, distributed by the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), c. 1916. https://wartimecanada.ca/sites/default/files/documents/Canadian%20Soldiers%E2%80%99%20Song%20Book%201919.pdf
[19] Ernest Fiset, 276832, Canadian Pay Book for use on Active Service. In possession of May Fiset Muchowski.
[20] Ernest Fiset interview with granddaughter, Beverly (Honeyman) Inkster, August 5, 1982 at Lumby, BC.
[21] Ernest Fiset interview with granddaughter, Beverly (Honeyman) Inkster, August 5, 1982 at Lumby, BC.
[22] Ernest Fiset interview with granddaughter, Beverly (Honeyman) Inkster, August 5, 1982 at Lumby, BC.
[23] John Cushnie letter, October 11, 1918.
[24] Ernest Fiset interview with granddaughter, Beverly (Honeyman) Inkster, August 5, 1982 at Lumby, BC.
[25] As told to Karen Inkster Vance by Ernest’s daughter, Laura (Fiset) Burt
[26] Ernest Fiset interview with granddaughter, Beverly (Honeyman) Inkster, August 5, 1982 at Lumby, BC.
[27] Cooper Cole, C. E. (1919). Preliminary Report on Influenza Epidemic at Bramshott in September – October 1918. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 9(1), 41-48. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1523720/
[28] Humphries, Mark Osborne. (2005). The Horror at Home: The Canadian Military and the “Great” Influenza Pandemic of 1918. Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 16(1), 235-260. DOI: 10.7202/015733ar
[29] Daily Express. Wednesday, 26 February 1919, page 5, “Flu-Fighting in Camp: Military Methods Should Be Emulated.” https://britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0004848/19190226/169/0005
[30] William Walls Mainland, of Maygar, SK, Regimental # 407375, died 11 Jan 1919, HMS Cassandra; William Edward Knaus, of Maneesa, SK, Regimental No. 415496, died 5 Oct 1918, HMS Cassandra; Joseph Bruneau, of Vegreville, AB, Regimental No. 3211648, died 28 Oct 1918, HMS Bellerephon. CEF Personnel Files
[31] Overseas Military Forces of Canada. Report of the Ministry Overseas of Canada. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1918), 398. https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/themes/defence/caf/militaryhistory/dhh/official/book-1918-overseas-en.pdf
[32] Daily News (London), Monday, 16 June 1919, page 8, “Aquitania Sails.”
[33] Hull Daily Mail, Monday, 16 June 1919, page 3, “Demobilisation Protest. Canadian Camp Burnt Down”; Dundee Courier, Wednesday, 18 June 1919, page 5, “Canadians Mutiny at Ripon. Canteen Looted and Hut Set on Fire. Men Want to Know When They Are to Sail.”
[34] Ernest Fiset CEF Personnel File: “Proceedings on Discharge (Demobilization)” form.
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