Five Brothers

In order to find out more about the owner of the "Victor" watch, my partner's mother directed me to one of her grandchildren, Rebecca. She'd done a report on her great uncles who fought in WWI and then visited the Vimy memorial with her grade eleven class. I phoned Rebecca and found out Herbert Burleigh Douse had four brothers, and three of them lost their lives in the First World War. The oldest brother's body was never found and so his name is inscribed on the Vimy memorial.

Rebecca says: "One of the things I found moving was that when you visit the memorial to Vimy Ridge, you are half way around the world from home and you are on land that France has dedicated to Canada. I tried to find the oldest brother's name on the memorial, but she couldn't locate it, which was upsetting. It was a hot day and there were so many names."

In fact there are 11, 285 souls whose bodies had not been found and identified who are memorialized the the grave of the unknown soldier at Vimy.


To the valour of their
Countrymen in the Great War
And in memory of their sixty
Thousand dead this monument
Is raised by the people of Canada

--inscription on the Vimy Ridge monument (We lost over 66,000 service personnel in WWI.)

So I went online and looked for information about the Douse brothers. I found a copy of Herbert Burleigh's Attestation Paper with his own handwriting. His eyes were grey and his hair, dark brown. He was five feet, five and 3/4 inches. His cheeky sense of humour comes through when he writes beside Complexion: "Fresh". It's poignant that every man had to write down any distinguishing marks on their body. His description reads: 1/2 inch scar on r. knee cap and 1/2 scar on r. forearm.

I looked for information on his brothers and I found something completely unexpected. A newspaper clipping. You can click on the image to enlarge it.

As I read this clipping the impact of imagining the grief of the parents of these boys hit me and the tears started to flow.