Riding Into War: The Memoir of a Horse Transport Driver, 1916-1919

By James Robert Johnston

On the ghastly battlefields of the First World War, Jimmie Johnston drove teams or pack horses carrying ammunition and hauling guns to the front lines. One night, Johnston was hauling guns back from the front line. Suddenly, in the darkness and pouring rain, he, his team, the wagon, and the guns pitched into an old trench. After disentangling the horses from their harness, Johnston found a trenching tool, dug away the side of the trench, and led the horses out of what had become a sea of mud. Then he harnessed them again, took them back to camp, cleaned them up, and returned to the trench to find the wagon blown to bits by German fire.

Jimmie Johnston, the farm boy, endured nearly three years under constant artillery fire. Two decades after the war ended, he wrote this memoir of his wartime experiences on a trip back to Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele. In Riding into War, Johnston marvels at how jokes and pranks and the funny side of even the most terrible events have stuck in his mind. Yet, even in the face of horror and suffering, his sense of humour rarely deserted him. The scenes he relates destroyed many men's sanity, but Johnston's ability to laugh and the practical need to care for his horses no doubt contributed to his recovery. After the war, he says, "my nerves were not too good, and I remember a lot of nights I would get up when no one else was around and have to go for a long walk." But, he concludes, "After some time, this seemed to wear off and soon back to a new life again."

Riding Into War is volume 4 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
• Release date: Sep 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9780864925848

James Robert Johnston

James Robert Johnston (1898-1976) grew up on a farm at Notre Dame, New Brunswick. Knowing nothing about the army, he enlisted in April 1916, when he was 18, and was posted to the transport section of the Canadian machine gun corps. Johnston served at Vimy, at Hill 70, Lens, Ypres, Valenciennes, and other places, and finally at Passchendaele. He was gassed, watched Billy Bishop give a flying demonstration, and saw the bodies of 200 young soldiers in a neat line, killed to a man as they went "over the top." By chance, Johnston arrived in London on leave on November 11, 1918. After the war, back home in Moncton, Johnston spent most of his postwar career working for the Canadian National Railway and as an independent surveyor. In 1964, he toured the battlefields he remembered so vividly. The memoir he wrote during that tour has become Riding into War, his unique tribute to the dependence and affection between men and horses, heroic partners in the War to End All Wars.

Book preview

Riding into War

The Memoir of a Horse Transport Driver, 1916-1919

Riding into War

The Memoir of a Horse Transport Driver, 1916-1919

by JAMES ROBERT JOHNSTON

The New Brunswick Military Heritage Series, Volume 4

Copyright © Estate of James Robert Johnston, 2004.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

Edited by Brent Wilson.

Cover illustrations: Front – detailed from Pack horses transporting ammunition to the 20th Battery, Canadian Field Artillery. W.I. Castle/National Archives of Canada/PA-001231;

Back – Entering Ypres at Dawn by Cyril H. Barraud, AN19710261-0936, Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, Canadian War Museum.

Cover and book design by Julie Scriver.

Printed in Canada by Transcontinental.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Johnston, James Robert, 1897-1976

        Riding into war: the memoir of a horse transport driver, 1916-1919 / James Robert Johnston.

(New Brunswick military heritage series; 4)

Includes index.

Co-published by New Brunswick Military Heritage Project.

ISBN 0-86492-412-7

1. Johnston, James Robert, 1897-1976. 2. Canada. Canadian Army. Canadian Machine Gun Corps — Biography. 3. World War, 1914-1918 — Transportation. 4. World War, 1914-1918 — Personal narratives, Canadian. I. New Brunswick Military Heritage Project II. Title. III. Series.

D640.J55 2004      940.4’8171      C2004-904454-0

Published with the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program, the New Brunswick Culture and Sports Secretariat, the Canadian War Museum, and the Military and Strategic Studies Program at the University of New Brunswick.

GOOSE LANE EDITIONS

Suite 330, 500 Beaverbrook Court

Fredericton, New Brunswick

CANADA E3B 5X4

www.gooselane.com

NEW BRUNSWICK MILITARY HERITAGE PROJECT

Military and Strategic Studies Program

Department of History, University of New Brunswick

PO Box 4400

Fredericton, New Brunswick

CANADA E3C 1M4

www.unb.ca/nbmhp

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

Joining Up and Going Overseas

April 1916 – November 1916

Chapter Two

To the Front

November 1916 – April 1917

Chapter Three

From Vimy to Passchendaele

April 1917 – November 1917

Chapter Four

On the Move

November 1917– July 1918

Chapter Five

Victory and Homecoming

July 1918 – June 1919

Acknowledgements

Index

Horse transport moving through the ruins of Bourlon, October 1918. NAC/PA-003332

Introduction

In March 1917, Private James Robert Johnston of the 14th Canadian Machine Gun Company entered the trenches of the Western Front for the first time below Vimy Ridge. Within a few weeks, he was transporting supplies and equipment across the ridge to newly captured German dugouts, after having participated in the Canadian Corps’ greatest victory to date. Over the next year and a half, Johnston fought in many of the Corps’ other major battles, including Hill 70, Passchendaele, Amiens, Bourlon Wood, and Valenciennes. After five months in garrison in Belgium following the Armistice, he finally returned home to New Brunswick in June 1919. Twenty-one years old, a three-year veteran of the First World War, he was filled with experiences that remained vivid in his memory for the rest of his life.

James Johnston was born in Boston on Christmas Day, 1897, after his parents moved from the Moncton area to Massachusetts. When Jimmie was five years old, they returned to New Brunswick, settling in Notre Dame, near Moncton. There he attended school until grade eight. After leaving school, he worked mostly in the woods because his father ran a logging camp. In the off-season, he held a variety of farm jobs.

In April 1916, he felt restless working in the lumber woods in Nova Scotia with his father, and at age eighteen he decided to enlist in the Canadian Army. He joined the 145th Battalion at Moncton; after several months of training at Sackville, southeast of Moncton, his unit moved to Camp Valcartier, near Quebec City, the main training camp for Canadian troops preparing to deploy overseas. They arrived in England in October, and by early November, only seven months after joining up, he was in France with the 26th New Brunswick Battalion. This battalion had been raised in New Brunswick in November 1914, and it served with the 2nd Canadian Division in France between 1915 and 1918. Popularly known as The Fighting 26th, it was one of only two infantry battalions from New Brunswick to see active service at the front.

Johnston’s first grade class, Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1903. Johnston stands in the back row, third from the right. JFC

In January 1917, Johnston volunteered for the Canadian Machine Gun Corps, and in April he went into action in the Battle of Vimy Ridge as a member of the transport section of the 14th Canadian Machine Gun Company. Later in the year, he was drawn into Hell — the Battle of Passchendaele. Following a period of leave in London, he returned to the front, where he contracted the mumps and then a fever, which caused him to spend several weeks in hospital.

On March 21, 1918, the Canadian Machine Gun Corps amalgamated its companies to form large battalions. The 14th joined the 4th, 5th, and 6th Companies to form the 2nd Canadian Machine Gun Battalion. Johnston served with the 2nd until he was transferred to the 4th C.M.G. Battalion on June 18, 1918, and there he finished out the war. When the end of the fighting finally came on November 11, he was at Le Havre on leave. After the Armistice, he spent the winter in Belgium, near the battlefield of Waterloo. It was not until April 1919 that he left for Canada; he reached Saint John in June, where he was discharged, and he returned to Notre Dame.

Following the war, Johnston lived with his family and worked at various jobs, including at Lockhart’s sawmill. In 1922, he moved to Boston and became a steam fitter in Bethlehem’s and other shipyards. He married Edith Geddes of Gladeside, New Brunswick, in 1929, and in 1932 their daughter Anna was born. When the shipyards closed during the Depression, the family returned to Notre Dame, where Johnston found employment at Taylor’s General Store. Around 1935, he began working for K.C. Irving, scaling lumber in Kent County and installing fuel tanks, until he was hired by the Canadian National Railway in 1940 as a steam fitter. Two sons, Don and Ralph, were born in Moncton in 1941 and 1944. Apart from a year in Newfoundland in 1954-1955, Johnston remained with C.N. in Moncton until he retired in 1962, and then he worked as a commissionaire until he was seventy-two years old. He died on August 28, 1976, at age seventy-eight, and was buried at Fairhaven Cemetery in Moncton; Edith passed away in July 2000.

Like many Great War veterans, Johnston never forgot his experiences in France and Flanders, although he lost touch with many of his wartime comrades when he was separated from them, both during and after the war. After he went to hospital in March 1918, he never again saw one of his closest friends, Bill (Guy) Barkley. However, chance meetings kept memories of the war alive for him. About 1922, he met another close friend, Danny (Nick) Nicholson, in Boston. At the same time, in a strange coincidence, Johnston was at work in a Boston shipyard when a new pipe fitter came up to him, and they started talking. Johnston told him he had better put his cap on, because he was getting oil in his hair. The man said that he could not wear a cap. He had a silver plate in his head, and wearing a cap bothered him; he had been shot down over France while in the Royal Flying Corps. Questioning him, Johnston found out that the man was the flyer he had seen shot down over Ypres in November 1917. In later years, Johnston renewed old wartime friendships as an active member of the 145th Battalion Veterans’ Association.

The fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War One rekindled Johnston’s interest in his wartime experiences. In the summer of 1964, he returned to the European battlefields, touring the Ypres and Vimy areas for a few weeks with members of his family. Among other sites, he visited war graves and memorials including the Menin Gate at Ypres and the Vimy Memorial in search of names provided by the families of deceased soldiers. During the trip, he kept a journal recording his wartime recollections from almost fifty years earlier, which he entitled, "My Ten

Reviews for Riding Into War

[nkmunn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

the interminable suffering and destruction we can cause one another is embodied in the trench warfare stories of WWI - what is remarkable here (as in some of the best survivors' stories from any memoir?) is the memoirist's ability to recall touchstones of humor, comfort and absurdity and best if all the unselfconscious way he marvels at beating the odds.