His name was Alec John Kitto. In 1916, he was a successful lawyer in Vancouver, working with Sir Charles Tupper in the firm of Tupper, Kitto and Wightman. Still in his 30s, it seemed his best years were yet to come.
But the Great War, the war to end all wars, was raging on, a stalemate in France and Belgium. There was no end in sight.
So Kitto answered the call, and crossed the Atlantic so he could join the fighting.
Kitto had arrived in Victoria with his family in the 1890s. His father, Francis Bowyer Kitto, had been a successful merchant in Slough, Buckinghamshire, but wanted to give his children a different life.
In Victoria, Francis and his wife, Lavinia Mary, quickly became part of the community, and their six children started to make a difference. The daughters became teachers at private schools, one son sold real estate and Alec studied law. By the time Francis died in 1906, his family was well established here.
Alec worked at first in Victoria, then moved to Vancouver for his partnership with Tupper.
In early 1916, Kitto’s heart was no longer in law — not when his countrymen were dying on the fields of Europe. He signed up to join the fighting overseas, and was soon promoted to lieutenant.
On Sept. 15, 1916, Canadians captured the French village of Courcelette on the Somme. The next day, Kitto was called in to relieve the artillery liaison officer, and as one of his friends wrote later, “he seemed to feel that he was going to his death.”
Kitto was shot by a sniper. The bullet entered his heart under his left arm. He died where he fell.
News of his death reached Victoria a week later, but the full details of what happened had to wait until his family members received letters from other members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force.
Those letters arrived in early November, and excerpts were published in the Daily Colonist and the Victoria Daily Times on Nov. 11, 1916 — 100 years ago today.
On the same date two years later, the guns would fall silent. But in 1916, the end could not be seen, despite the guarded optimism expressed in the Colonist editorial on Nov. 11, 1916.
“While the reports from the Western front are meagre in point of details, they leave upon the mind the impression that steady progress is being maintained by the Allies, although just at present it is not notably rapid,” the Colonist said.
“One conclusion seems to emerge from the news and it is that the enemy is powerless to resume the offensive in that quarter, and the same observation applies substantially to all the battlefronts.”
That could be little consolation to Alec John Kitto’s mother, brother and sisters as they read the letters from Major George H. Cook and a Capt. Biggar.
“As the battle continued no effort could be made to recover his body,” Cook wrote. “However, the following night I selected four men from among the volunteers to make an attempt.”
Cook wrote that because of the heavy fighting the four men were unable to bring the body out, but recovered all of Kitto’s belongings, except for his pistol and belt, which had been taken from him. They buried his remains in a trench under an elm tree.
Later, two men returned to place a cross on the grave. “We hope to be able to recover the body, but since Courcelette has been, and is yet, under very heavy fire day and night, I decided in favour of a deep grave to protect it from shell fire.
“Your son rests here among a numerous and most heroic company, most fitting for the brave and honorable man that he was. I hope the just pride you may rightly feel for the heroic manner in which he faced his ordeal will help you in your sorrow,” Cook said.
Biggar agreed. “His epitaph should read, ‘Here lies a very gallant gentleman,’ ” he wrote.
Kitto was, Biggar said, “a very perfect gentleman in the truest sense of the word. I shall never meet again a man so nearly perfect.”
When the fighting subsided, Kitto’s body was recovered and placed in a proper grave. Today he rests in Bapaume Post Military Cemetery near Albert on the Somme.
Kitto was one of 65,000 Canadians who died in the Great War. Another 170,000 were injured, and almost every family in Canada was touched by the tragedy and the horror of the war.
Today, we pause for a few moments to think of those heroes — those men just like Alec John Kitto, from Victoria.
