The Suicide battalion

And every time they took us on a test march like that, we carried pretty well everything we owned. You know, our blankets and our greatcoat, all that was packed in a pack on our back and it weighed about 40 pounds. You didn’t march too far until that started to bother you a little bit. Most of the time it was from twenty to thirty miles. I just took the regular training with the battalion. Because we were in a reserve unit there, there was more than one battalion in that reserve. In fact, we had a double reserve there with four battalions in each one. We didn’t have much choice in the matter. They didn’t ask us if we wanted to go. It was, we were detailed to go to this particular unit. We had four units there, but they chose different ones for different units. Well, I would say in September that they started preparing the draft to go to France and as far as I can recall there was about two hundred of us went at that time to the 46th. Of course, others went to other units at the same time. Passchendaele wasn’t quite finished when we left England. I didn’t know anything about Passchendaele until we got over to, we didn’t join our unit right away either when we got over there, you see. We were put in the camp over there and we worked work parties and what have you. They took us to (inaudible) and from there I went on two special courses before I joined the battalion. One was on musketry and one was on physical training and bayonet fighting and I qualified as an instructor. And that’s how they used me, as an instructor in physical training and bayonet fighting till the close of the war whenever we were out of the line. Corporal was as high as I got. Acting sergeant a lot of the time without pay. If I had had a preference I might have went to the 5th Battalion because I knew a lot of people that was in the 5th Battalion, that went over ahead of me, you know, from around home. But the 46th being a Moose Jaw battalion kind of gave me a little drawing card there, you know. There was something to attract me to it. But I was quite pleased with the 46th. When we found out it was a suicide battalion, it kind of changed our picture a little bit. But it gave us some consolation to feel that we belonged to one of the better units, more famous units, you know, with a famous name like.