Bombarding an enemy with heavy artillery seems like a great way to gain the upper hand in battle until it’s your troops being blown to bits by enemy shelling. Digging in with a trench system could be an effective way to hold a line on a battlefield until you’re overrun by opposing soldiers armed with grenades and bayonets fixed on their rifles.
And drawing on the experience of minors to tunnel deep into the ground, traverse beneath an enemy stronghold and use huge amounts of explosives to blow that position to smithereens would have seemed brilliant until the enemy figured out they can run counter-tunnelling operations to hunt you down before you reach them – then those tunnels become a battlefield under the battlefield.
This is the hellish world that Sgt. Sam Glode and his fellow Canadian Engineers endured as the First World War raged in Flanders Fields.
Digging massive tunnels using only pick axes and shovels to remain quiet and avoid being detected by Germans, and filling sandbags to move the earth up to the surface and fortify their trenches was a labour-intensive, tedious process done by candlelight and using canaries as an early warning system for failing air quality.
With fellow soldiers manning listening posts, keeping an ear out for enemy combatants digging towards their tunnels – knowing at any second they could be buried in a collapse, blown apart by explosives, attacked with mustard gas, or find themselves in a knife-fight with a German battling to the death in a tight space – it must have been truly terrifying.
“You can really feel it,” Jeff Purdy, a councillor with Wasoqopa’q-Acadia First Nation, said Thursday of the heaviness in the air as he traced the steps his sapper great-great-grandfather Sgt. Sam Glode took during tunnelling operations along the Ypres Salient in northwestern Belgium between 1916 and 1918.
“Trying to put myself in his shoes, or the shoes of any of the soldiers who went through all of that, it’s just powerful,” the 52-year-old said, adding his ancestor and his fellow combat engineers must have felt they were under “constant threat.”
Purdy is among a group of Indigenous representatives and relatives of First World War soldiers invited by Visit Flanders to participate in Remembrance Day events in honour of the more than 4,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis people who served in the First World War and helped liberate Belgium.
Nearly 425,000 Canadians and Newfoundlanders headed overseas as part of the Canadian Expedition Force after Germany invaded Belgium on Aug. 4, 1914. By the time the Great War ended in 1918, more than 66,000 Canadians had been killed and more than 172,000 wounded.
Some 30,000 of the Canadians killed between 1914 and 1918 met their end in Belgium, so Purdy can’t help but feel fortunate that his great-grandfather made it back to Nova Scotia in one piece.
“I wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t made it home,” he said, adding he’s also extremely proud of his great-great-grandfather’s accomplishments
Glode – a Mi’kmaw lumberjack, hunting and fishing guide, and trapper – was tired of chopping down trees for a living, so he and a friend decided to enlist in the military in 1915 knowing the Canadian army was paying $1.10 a day and the job came with clothes and food.
With some encouragement from a friend who had mining experience, Glode ultimately volunteered to join the Canadian Engineers. And by the summer of 1916 he was serving in Belgium with the 1st Canadian Tunnelling Company.
Glode participated in numerous operations along the Western Front – including the famed Battle of Messines in June 1917, which resulted in the largest man-made explosions the war had ever seen and could be heard as far away as London, England. He helped his fellow combat engineers survive a harrowing tunnel collapse.
But it was bravery after the war ended on Nov. 11, 1918, that earned Glode the Distinguished Conduct Medal – the second highest honour next to the Victoria Cross that a British Commonwealth soldier could be awarded at the time.
As Canadian soldiers advanced toward Germany, his unit was up front searching for mines and other ordinance. Glode showed “great devotion to duty and an utter disregard of personal danger” by personally removing 450 charges on Nov. 19 and 20, 1918.
He returned home to Nova Scotia after the war and died in 1957 at the age of 77.
“It’s one thing even to serve in the uniform and do the things that I’ve done for 36 years, but it’s another thing to actually stand on these grounds where our Indigenous veterans came – and especially the story of Sam Glode,” said Honorary Capt. Debbie Eisan, an elder of the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre and a Royal Canadian Navy veteran.
“To hear the journey that he was on and what he did to save people, using his teachings from his people to keep other men alive, it’s so powerful,” she said. “I can’t describe in words what it means for me to be here and to walk these steps and just honour our fallen veterans.”
The delegation visiting Flanders is led by Eisen, who also led the group in a smudging ceremony at the outset of Thursday’s emotional journey while Mi’kmaw singer Aaron Prosper paid tribute to the fallen with his vocals and drum.
Lest we forget.
– The Toronto Sun’s Chris Doucette, a veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces who served in the Royal Canadian Regiment, is in Belgium and will be visiting memorial sites and attending ceremonies leading up to Remembrance Day.