Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
A plaque on the wall
August, 1914 - “England has declared war on Germany!
Good God, I can't believe it! It must be a horrible dream. It has come up like a thundercloud. Sometime in June I picked up a Globe and read that a Serbian had shot the Archduke of Austria and his dutchess. The news was of little interest to me- as to most people on this continent. We dreamed not what was to come of it. But verily that was "the shot heard round the world"- to be echoed and re-echoed by the death shriek of millions and the wails of heart-broken women.
It has come. Britain or Germany must fall. But the death-grapple will be awful beyond anything ever known in the world before. Oh, if I could but waken up and find it all a dream! These last four days have seemed like a nightmare. Already Canada is ablaze. Volunteers are being called for Red Cross and patriotic funds are being started. The bottom has fallen out of the world's markets. Civilization stands aghast at the horror that is coming upon it.”
September 1915 - “In especial it was a great thing to have someone to talk over the war with as it came each day. Hitherto I have had no one. Ewan refuses to talk about it. He claims that it unsettles him and he cannot do his work properly. No doubt this is so; but it is rather hard on me, for I have no one else with whom to discuss it. There is absolutely no one around here who seems to realize the war. I believe it is well they do not. If all felt as I do over it the work of the country would certainly suffer. But I feel as if I were stranded on a coast where nobody talked my language. While Frede was here I had the relief of thrashing everything out with her. We flayed the Kaiser every day and told Kitchener what he ought to do.”
May 1916 - “This was quite a day in the annals of our little village. The 116th Battalion which has been training in Uxbridge all winter and to which many of "our boys" belong made a route march through the township and passed here at noon. We had several arches erected for them and treated them all to fruit and read them an address. Poor fellows. I wonder how many of them will ever return.”
January 1917 - “Really, this has been a dreadful day. All day a dreadful and bitter north-east wind blew. This is the only wind that affects us here and when it blows the house is really not fit to live in. All day the kitchen and dining room were literally as cold as a barn and the rest of the house little better. I was all alone from noon until Ewan came home from Zephyr church at ten. Storm outside and gloom and cold within. I put the children to bed after supper to ensure their being warm and then tried to read the evening away but was so blue and lonely I could not fasten my thoughts on my book. It is very seldom I feel as I felt to-night- like some imprisoned soul. I was very thankful when Ewan got home safe for I had been afraid the roads would be blocked. I seemed haunted all the evening by some dismal presentiment of impending evil.
My presentiment came true. This morning word was 'phoned over that Goldwin Lapp had been killed at the front. The news upset me for the day. I could not help crying all the time. The Lapps are especial friends of ours and Goldwin was the first Scott boy to go to the front. He has been in the trenches for a year and four months and went through the Somme offensive without a scratch. Poor boy! We drove over to Lapps' this afternoon. It was bitterly cold and the roads were dreadful. And it was a heart-breaking errand. But is not life a heart-break these days? It seems to me that the very soul of the universe must ache with anguish.”
Most of our readers will recognize the paragraphs above as four entries from the journals of Lucy Maud Montgomery, who spent the years of the First World War in Leaskdale. As I discovered during my research for Maud of Leaskdale, a play I put together for the recent LMM Centennial, Maud had some of her greatest joys, and many of her greatest heartaches, during the 15 years she spent as a minister’s wife in our township. She threw herself into volunteer work to support the local troops during the war years, but as she says above, she felt the anguish of the daily dispatches more than anyone.
If you go to Maud and Ewan’s church today, ask one of the tour guides to show you where Maud used to sit during services. On the south wall of the sanctuary, where she could have touched, there is a memorial as moving as any of the ones discussed elsewhere in these pages today. It is a simple gold plaque in tribute to Goldwin Lapp, that first Scott Township boy to die across the sea. As you look at it, you can almost feel the grief that must have swept through that community - and the shadow that fell on the heart of Lucy Maud Montgomery.
