Never forget.
Posted on 05/08/2004 10:13:45 AM PDT by Mr. Burns
He was the bugle boy who never blew a bugle, who landed in the thick of the bloodiest battles of the Great War before he turned 17, and considered it only luck that he stayed alive -- to marry, mingle with movie stars, shake the hand of a president and see the turn of a new century.
On Tuesday, at the age of 105 and still debating current events until his last day, Clifford Holliday passed away in his home in Gardena, Calif., outside Los Angeles. His death brings the number of Canadian veterans of the First World War still living to eight; Mr. Holliday was the country's last surviving veteran of the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
Mr. Holliday didn't like to talk much about his days in the war, and the "gruesome" memories he brought home. When a doctor discovered his age during a hospital stay, he was just glad to get out. "Who wouldn't be?" he told The Globe and Mail in an interview two years ago. "Anybody who wants war is just a few steps out of the caveman age. Nobody can go through that and wish it on the human race again."
He preferred to focus on the more positive aspects of humanity; asked once to name the most startling thing he had seen in his life, he picked the launching of Sputnik.
Born into a family of 16 in the prairie community of Plumas, Man., Mr. Holliday was working on his father's farm when the war broke out.
He was talked into signing up by a soldier his sister was dating, and was encouraged when many of his friends made the same choice. Recruiters fudged his enlistment with the 43rd Battalion of the Cameron Highlanders in Winnipeg to sign him on in 1914, pencilling him in as a bugle boy. Instead, he spent almost 18 months in the trenches.
He fought at Vimy Ridge, and witnessed the slaughter at Hill 60, when 1,100 men in his battalion joined the fight and only 127 survived. "You realized you got to take care of yourself," he said in the Globe interview. "It's your life. You get the guy before he gets you, and most times you don't even see them."
Like so many of the young Canadian teenagers who lied about their age to go to war, he spent his 17th birthday as if it were "just another day," sleeping on a rubber sheet with the rats and body lice that infested the trenches.
He was injured twice.
One moonlit night in Belgium, about half a kilometre from the front line, he was loading detonators into hand grenades when a bullet sheared through the "meat" of both his calves. "I thought somebody had lashed me," he recalled. After three weeks in a field hospital, he returned to the trenches.
But his second injury -- his jaw was shattered by shrapnel -- landed him in England for surgery. A doctor arranged for him to be sent to the Boys Battalion in Britain for the rest of the war. It was there that he met his future wife, Annie, the mother of his only child, a daughter named Grace Doreen.
Mr. Holliday returned from the war just trying to leave it behind. "When I got back, I just blanked it out of my mind," he said. "I didn't want to relive it."
In peacetime, he left Canada for a better job, and the farm boy from the prairies ended up working in Hollywood. An electrician by trade, he wired the first movie theatres for "talkies," working around celebrities such as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. He enjoyed sharing the tale of how he once finagled an informal lunch with Ingrid Bergman in a studio cafeteria.
Upon his retirement, he became active as a volunteer and spokesman for seniors, heading up state associations and serving as a board member for the National Council of Senior Citizens. The work earned him personal recognition in 1998 from then-president Bill Clinton.
It was one of several honours bestowed on him in his last years: To mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the First World War, he was one of 110 Canadian veterans awarded the French Legion of Honour, France's highest medal. In a ceremony in Los Angeles in August, 1999, he received Canada's John McCrae Medallion, named for the Canadian doctor and poet who wrote In Flanders Fields.
Mr. Holliday liked to say that his secret to a long life was to be a good volunteer and savour the benefits of helping others.
At 89, he was still driving, and claiming, to the Los Angeles Times, that he could do it as well as when he was 25: "Better, in fact. I'm not as daring or adventuresome as I was then."
By the time he turned 100, he had given up his driver's licence, but kept his sense of humour. Asked why he didn't remarry after his wife died in 1976, he quipped that he wasn't short on girlfriends. "And if I marry one, I lose the others."
His grandson, David Goodale, who credits him with teaching him how to wire a house, said: "He was probably the most socially concerned person I have ever known. He was just always very mindful of his community and his family, and being a good provider. He was just a wonderfully unselfish person."
Mr. Holliday leaves his two grandsons, seven great-grandchildren and 11 great-great-grandchildren.
Never forget.
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