On Friday, April 6, 1917, a young artillery officer wrote in his little pocket diary, “Suddenly realized today was Good Friday & I expect all at home are going to church this evening – what I wouldn’t give to be there.” The lieutenant was Warren Skey, and his church was St. Anne’s on Gladstone Avenue in Toronto, across from the chocolate factory. He wrote this note on the eve of the now famous Battle of Vimy Ridge.
Warren was my great uncle, and I discovered his small, faded diary some years ago in the bottom of a portable wooden writing box that my father had passed on to me. The diary was long forgotten, lost really, as often happens to such fragile links to the past—letters and other memorabilia stored away in trunks and desks and attics for seeming safe keeping. These connections to the past are important and indeed valuable, and if I had not found Warren’s diary, I would never have been able to come to know, at least a little, both Warren and his father – my great-grandfather, the Rev. Canon Lawrence Skey, once upon a time the rector of St. Anne’s, a church he made quite famous as he oversaw the construction of the Byzantine Revival building in the early 1900s.
As I transcribed Warren’s diary and struggled to make sense of his often-illegible handwriting, military abbreviations, and names and places that meant nothing to me, I realized that there were stories that I could tell drawing on his day-by-day entries. There is the story of Warren himself, a gunner in the 48th Howitzer Battery of the 2nd Brigade of the Canadian Field Artillery. He was not quite 22 when he arrived in France and almost immediately found himself in “charge of guns” (there were six howitzers in his battery, all horse-drawn). Warren also soon found himself confronted with the reality of war: “Believe me, it’s damn hard to see those fellows dying & feel so powerless to stop it.” It was not only the men he saw wounded or dead, but also the horses.
Integral to an artillery brigade in World War I were the thousands and thousands of horses and mules, a reality not always covered in depth in books on the war yet expressed in an understated way by Warren, who always enjoyed being with the horses away from the guns at the wagon lines or taking them to the watering places. He knew firsthand, however, the inherent dangers and threat of death the equines with their drivers faced as they took ammunition to the gunpits near the front under cover of nighttime darkness. Warren was “packing ammunition to the guns” through November at Passchendaele, where his efforts to rescue both men and pack horses from that hell earned him the Military Cross. “Thank the Lord & am O.K.”, he wrote, then put his diary away for good.
The title of my book is Horses, Howitzers, and Hymns. I have explained very briefly why horses and howitzers, but what of the hymns? Church was important to Warren, and he was always disappointed when he realized that another Sunday had passed him by; there were no Sundays “when in action for there is too much work to do.” But on April 29 he wrote: “Oh! What a day! warm as June – a perfect Sunday – but no church – the bands playing the old familiar hymns made me long for old St. Anne’s again – I think that the only things that make me homesick are those old familiar hymns.” I wish I knew what they may have been.
Church services were but one of the many responsibilities of military chaplains who served in the war, whether in ambulances and hospitals or in the trenches and gunpits. They said prayers for the dying and wrote letters home to the families of the dead. Warren’s father had to do this too when he was in France as a chaplain through the last year of the war. In his letter, Chaplain Skey would explain that he also had a son at the front and so understood a parent’s sorrow. It was perhaps a stroke of luck that he was nearby when one of his own parishioners died, so he conducted the funeral service himself in the Sucrerie Cemetery.
Warren and his father had hoped to spend time together fishing when on leave, but it was month after month of battles—Arras, Amiens, Cambrai. The Rev. Skey was in London when the armistice was declared and back at St. Anne’s in December 1918; Warren returned six months later. Somewhere between 700 and 800 parishioners had originally enlisted, and the church was fierce in its support of the war, so understandably there were celebrations in the parish hall; but not everyone came home. On Sunday, Nov. 14, 1920, two solemn services were held for the unveiling of the memorial window and bronze tablet on the north wall of the church. The Rev. Skey, now a canon, officiated at the morning service, and his friend Canon F.G. Scott, the almost legendary military chaplain, at the evening service. The names of all 84 men engraved on the tablet were read aloud one by one, the congregation standing, the music and hymns specially chosen. Most of these men are buried or commemorated on monuments overseas, but a few rest in Toronto Prospect Cemetery, never having recovered from their wounds, among them Warren’s friend Henry Chedzey.
In writing Warren’s story, I was very conscious that I never knew him or my great-grandparents. I was also conscious that I had read something that Warren most likely never thought would become the essence of a book. I hope, as I wrote in the epilogue, that I have not stepped too intrusively into their lives, nor those of others within. It has been an honour to know them all.
Horses, Howitzers, and Hymns: The Story of Lieut. Skey, MC, and His Father in the Great War, is available from major booksellers.
A summer of joy and challenge