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Updated: May 19, 2025
He had had a very hard time in the Salient, and in a few days he was back in hospital with influenza. The 50th Division were holding the line in front of Passchendaele Village and a little to the south. Only one brigade was in the line at a time another remaining in support around Ypres and the other back at rest about Brandhoek.
During the first week in December the visit of officers to the line disclosed the new sector to be taken over, which included Passchendaele village, recently captured by the Canadians. A few days later the Battalion entrained at Watten for Brandhoek, where it spent a short time in a hut camp in Divisional reserve.
Some of them touched the piano with a loving touch and said, "Ye gods, a piano again!" and played old melodies or merry ragtime. Before Passchendaele was taken a Canadian boy brought a fiddle with him, and played last of all, after other tunes, "The Long, Long Trail," which his comrades sang. "Come and play to us again," said Madame. "If I come back," said the boy.
Mary was still under fifty, plain, clumsy, and the hardest worker in the village. She lived at the outbreak of war with her father and mother. Her brother had been killed at Passchendaele, and Mary's interest in life had vanished with him. But all through the winter she had nursed her father night and day through a horrible illness.
From there it marched up through Ypres to a camp just west of Potijze Wood, the scene of its first action in April, 1915. After two days there a further move was made to the forward area, into a number of shelters known as the Seine area. The next step was to the front line, which consisted of a series of shell hole positions on the Passchendaele Ridge.
The battles of Flanders ended with the capture of Passchendaele by the Canadians, and that year's fighting on the western front cost us 800,000 casualties, and though we had dealt the enemy heavy blows from which he reeled back, the drain upon our man-power was too great for what was to happen next year, and our men were too sorely tried.
But enforced stagnation inevitably helps the defence, especially when time is the essence of success for the attack. Troops were pouring back from the Russian front; winter was coming to postpone until the spring any hopes of a drier soil, and the land lay low in Belgium all the way beyond the puny ridge of Passchendaele.
At Passchendaele, Corporal Pegahmagabow led his company through an engagement with a single casualty, and subsequently captured three hundred Germans at Mount Sorrell.
The limbs and bodies of the pack-mules lying sometimes in heaps sometimes at intervals all along the route. Of course the nearer you approached to Passchendaele Ridge the drier and firmer was the ground. But that awful swamp behind has probably no parallel in the history of war. How the Engineers overcame it is really a marvel.
He was in all the fighting on the Gallipoli peninsula and was wounded, but returned to duty and was one of the last to embark on the final evacuation of Helles, in January, 1916. It was largely due to him that Gavrelle was taken; and he was awarded a bar to his D.S.O. In October, 1917, in the Battle of Passchendaele the Naval Division were heavily engaged.
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