But for Clarke's action, Sergeant Nichols could not have erected the permanent block, which was of vital importance to the security of the Canadian position.
Though wounded in the back and the knee, Clarke refused to leave the trench until ordered to do so by Lieutenant Hoey. Next day he returned to his platoon in billets.
[PRIVATE JOHN CHIPMAN KERR, 49TH BATTALION]
The war was no new thing, many Canadians were veteran soldiers and many were in Flanders graves, when Kerr decided that his services were more urgently required on the field of battle than on his own new acres in the Province of Alberta. He had gone north and west shortly before the outbreak of war, from the home of his family in Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, to virgin land on Spirit River, fifty miles from the nearest railway.
Kerr found other "homesteaders" on Spirit River who saw eye to eye with him in this matter—a dozen patriotic adventurers who were determined to exchange safe establishments in life for the prospects of violent deaths. Together they "footed" the fifty miles to the railway. In Edmonton they enlisted in a body in the 66th Battalion.
Early in June, 1916, four hundred officers and other ranks were drafted from the 66th, then training in England, to the 49th, then fighting in France. Private J. C. Kerr was a more or less unconsidered unit in that draft. These reinforcements, with others, reached France shortly after the Battle of Sanctuary Wood, an engagement in which the Germans attacked with so crushing a superiority of men and metal and the Canadians fought so stubbornly as to necessitate the withdrawal of fragments of battalions of a whole division for reorganization. The 49th Battalion was represented by one of these indomitable fragments.
The Canadians marched from the Salient to the Somme in the autumn of that year. The 49th, up to strength once more and with its old spirit renewed, reached Albert on the 13th of September.
Forty hours later it took up a battle position at a point near the Sunken Road, before and to the left of the village of Courcelette, with other battalions of the same brigade.
In the great Canadian advance of September the 15th, in which our morning and evening attacks drove the Germans from the Sugar Refinery, Courcelette, and many more strongholds and intricate systems of defence, the 49th Battalion supported the Princess Patricia's and the 42nd Battalion on the extreme left of our frontage of aggressive operations. These battalions advanced the line to the left of Courcelette, keeping abreast of the units that assaulted and occupied the village and mopped up its crowded dug-outs and fortified houses. Their activities were devoted entirely to the subjection and occupation of strong trenches and trench machine-gun posts. They moved irresistibly forward, cleaning things up as they went. They reached and occupied their final objectives—with the exception of a length of trench about 250 yards in extent, which remained in the hands of the enemy until the following day. But the defenders of that isolated section of trench could not retreat, for the head of their communicating trench was blocked, they dared not attempt a rearward flight on the surface and they were flanked right and left by the Canadians. So the matter rested for the night, with no more stir than an occasional exchange of bombs across the flanking barricades.