A Memorial
For Armistice Day
My mother, who spent most of the 1930s in the smallest town in Manitoba, often told me tales of men who, having been gassed in the Great War, wheezed as they sang in church, and stories of her aunt Lucy who, having been widowed in the same conflict, survived her husband by seven decades.
The 4th of August of 1914, the day that Canada declared war on the German Empire, Lucy Baker Hume found herself in Outlook, Saskatchewan, the mother of a toddler named Lucille and the wife of Earle Walter Hume.
On 19 November 1914, my great uncle, who worked as a barrister, accepted a commission in the 27th Light Horse, a two-squadron regiment of the Active Militia. In doing this, he made himself liable for active service within the borders of the Dominion. Soon thereafter, on 1 February 1915, Lieutenant Hume joined the Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force.
On 23 October 1915, the infantry unit that Hume had joined, the 46th (South Saskatchewan) Battalion, sailed for England. However, soon after that outfit landed in Liverpool, someone decided that an able attorney could best serve King and Country in the realm of administration.
After two years of such duty - most of it spent in the British Isles or Canada -and a promotion, Captain Hume requested assignment to a frontline unit. Thus, on 12 February 1918, his name appeared on the muster roll of the 27th (City of Winnipeg) Battalion, a unit that had been raised in his wife’s home province of Manitoba. (As the 27th Battalion already possessed all of the captains that it rated, this transfer required that Hume revert to his former rank.)
On 20 February 1918, Lieutenant Hume reported for duty with his new outfit. A little more than two months later, as he led a party of soldiers towards the front-line trenches, the explosion of several artillery shells sent fragments into his back and abdomen. On the following day, 28 April 1918, he succumbed to these wounds.
News of the death of Earle Walter Hume reached Lucy Baker Hume in Waskada, Manitoba, the tiny town in which several of her seven siblings lived. (One of these was my maternal grandfather.) In the years that followed, she moved to Vancouver.
My great aunt Lucy never remarried. However, in the stories my mother told me, she wore high-heeled shoes long after her contemporaries had switched to age-appropriate flats.
Sources
I would like to thank Dwight Mercer, of Regina, Saskatchewan and the Canadian Expeditionary Force Study Group, for tracking down the records that allowed me to assemble this story.
For Further Reading
God Bless Aunt Lucy, and her heels.