One hundred years ago today, midway through the carnage of the First World War, Canadian servicemen were dying at a rate of about 50 a day. At least seven men from B.C. died on Nov. 12, 1916, one of them a young mechanical engineer from Victoria.
His name was Francis Arthur Malet, 24, who had lived with his parents at 1543 Pearl St. before he signed up.
The son of Herbert Rivers Malet and Violet Emma Matilda Malet, Francis initially enlisted with the 48th Battalion based at Willows Camp in Oak Bay, where forces heading overseas from Vancouver Island congregated, said Jim Kempling, a retired colonel from the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry.
Kempling is now a PhD candidate in history at the University of Victoria, and is also the manager of an upgraded crowd-sourced website, the Canadian Great War Project, at cgwp.uvic.ca, launched Remembrance Day.
Billed as “the largest fully searchable database dedicated to the Canadian men and woman that served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the Great War,” the site was started 10 years ago by Marc Leroux, a Canadian living in Ohio, who wanted to learn more about his grandfather’s war record.
That interest has resulted in an online database with about 170,000 other Canadians who served in what turned out to be the greatest loss of life in human history.
The site, with contributions from close to 7,000 supporters, from sources in communities across Canada, collates personal information from databases of Library and Archives Canada and other government agencies with records, news reports, diaries and other information.
Leroux has never set foot in Victoria, but in 2015 he donated his work to UVic to ensure free access, technological upkeep, academic oversight and the continued involvement of community researchers.
The site includes Malet, the serviceman from Victoria. He was born in Calcutta, where his parents were likely serving in the British Army, Kempling said. He was five feet, 7.5 inches tall and his chest, fully expanded, was 37.5 inches. He had grey eyes and brown hair and belonged to the Church of England.
Malet left the infantry and joined the Royal Naval Air Service on Sept. 14, 1915. He was killed in an air accident 14 months later, one of 198,056 Canadians killed and injured.
Leroux said he was curious about his grandfather, Thomas O’Connor, who died in small-town Quebec when Leroux was nine.
“We knew he was in the war because as kids we’d play with his helmet and bayonet,” he recalled. But when family members asked him about it, which probably was not that often, the answer was never other than ‘Yes, it was a long time ago,’ ” he recalled.
Leroux eventually learned how much gas attacks had affected his grandfather’s entire life.
“His lungs were scarred, so breathing hard was work for him. It was nasty. The guys had basically 10 seconds to get a gas mask on. What they went through, what they endured, was awful. You think of all of the mud, the shell holes and rats. I really can’t imagine what that would have been like.”
After Kempling contacted Leroux, looking for a list of soldiers who had served in the PPCLI, the collaboration was born. Kempling’s respect for Leroux’s dedication to the site, which he calls a “national treasure,” has grown.
The site shows only 25 deaths for Nov. 12, 1916, because not all death records have been entered. Kempling estimates the real number of deaths at 50. Horrific, but less so than Sept. 15, 1916, the first day the Canadian Corps was in action on the Somme, when there were 1,079 recorded deaths.
The project includes entries about more than 176,000 of the 619,636 soldiers, nurses and chaplains from Canada during the First World War.
“It’ll grow,” Leroux said in an interview from Ohio. “Ultimately, the goal I had was to get every single person that served with the Canadian forces during the First World War. I’m hoping we get more people interested and that we do it faster.”
The site gives historians, or anyone with curiosity, the capacity to analyze the mass of data — 20 to 40 pages on each soldier — that is available from Library and Archives Canada. If dear old great-granddad was treated for gonorrhea, and plenty of soldiers stationed in Britain were, it will be there, Kempling said.
The difference between the Library and Archives Canada website and the Canadian Great War Project is the depth of information offered. The Canadian Great War Project site allows full text searching of individual records, names in letters and war diaries, Commonwealth War Graves Commission files and private collections.
The project includes photos, letters, newspaper clippings and transcribed documents. It has more than 18,000 pages of war diaries, nearly 30,000 images and about 500 letters. Each year, the site records about 185,000 visits.
Leroux’s efforts have led to hundreds of people across the country fleshing out the men and women who served their country. They’re transcribing the documents from Library and Archives Canada, collecting letters and photographs, and putting it all in a form that allows researchers to record, as an example, the way that the age of enlistment changed as the war progressed.
Kempling’s grandfather, George Kempling, broke the rules by keeping a diary during the war that he wrote in every day. He suffered a severe concussion when buried by shellfire in the Battle of the Somme.
A website posting from George Kempling’s diary reads: “We swung out of the harbour at 9 a.m. amid the tooting of whistles and sirens. … There are seven thousand of us on board the Olympic, known as the largest ship in the British service…
“It was fairly rough when we set sail. It was misty with heavy gusts of rain. Before we moved off, a torpedo net was opened which floated at the entrance to the inner harbour. A pilot boarded us and took us out of the last headland and left us.
“It was interesting to see a patrol boat come up along side for him to get aboard … with a gun mounted fore and aft. The patrol boat banged into us and wrecked one of her lifeboats and one of ours. After this rather hearty kiss, she bid us farewell with many ringing cheers which we heartily returned.
“During the rest of the afternoon, we either played cards, read or wandered around on deck. We had a good supper of beefsteak, boiled potatoes, bread, butter, marmalade and tea. Then after playing cards for awhile, we fixed our hammocks and all went to sleep.”
The Canadian Great War Project records are available to anyone who wants to learn about the contributions made by people whose names are on local monuments and memorial scrolls.
“It’s important because the First World War still has powerful lessons to teach,” Kempling said.
“Marc has made a monumental personal contribution to preserving the record of sacrifice of so many Canadians during the Great War. It’s remarkable that one person living in the States can make such an impactful difference to Canadian history and we are honoured he chose UVic to be the permanent site host.”
• The Canadian Great War Project website is cgwp.uvic.ca
