My paternal grandfather was another WW 1 vet. Came here from Scotland in 1914 and in April 1917 when the U.S. declared war he was in one of those groups of guys who crossed the border and joined the Canadian Army. Spent something like 17 months in France with the Canadian Machine Gun Corps. Saw an awful lot of carnage and got gassed a few times but a shifting breeze spared his unit from the worst of it. He never spoke about any of it until the spring of 1943 when my dad was getting ready to graduate from high school into the middle of WW2. My grandfather had fears of another trench war developing and convinced my dad to join the Navy after relating stuff about the horrors he saw in the mud and trenches. Bottom line was that he didn't want his only son to "die in the mud" and if his son never came home again it would be better to die at sea than in a rat filled mudhole. I've heard that in the 1920's or 30's my grandmother got a few of his wartime memories told to her but she never spoke of them either because that's the way he wanted it. I have some ribbons of his, and his discharge papers and the Canadian government has a web site called "Collections Canada" that produced his enlistment papers and other information for us.
