MEMORY LANE: The mystery of the 14-year-old Canadian soldier
When he volunteered in March 1916 he swore he was aged 18-and-a-half, but when he died almost exactly three years later his grave at Buxton Cemetery recorded him as being only 17.
So was he really only 14-years-old when he joined up?
We’ll probably never know for certain. His enlistment papers do show that despite being a farmer he was only a slight lad of five foot six and nine-and-a-half stone.
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Hide AdComing from a small rural community in Nova Scotia, Canada, to a Europe consumed in such a terrible war must have been a tremendous shock for him.
A second mystery is that he died five months after the armistice.
Was he a victim of the great Spanish flu epidemic that swept the world, or did he lose a long struggle with wounds sustained in battle?