Humor kept us going

Oh yeah, we had some good little officers. We had one, Campbell, this Bennett, I told him that, and he says he might have been, he was from Prince Edward Island, he says, he might have been my relative. In 1918, you remember the Germans broke through in March. It looked bad. They were pretty strong. We had to do an awful lot of marching and marching at night. And I remember this night he said, “We’ve got a long distance to go tonight. It’s hard and I’m going to, I’m going to give you a little poem.” This is funny. It didn’t amount to much but we all had a good laugh. He says, “I have a dog, and his name is Tauzer and he is a very smart pup. He will stand upon his hind legs when you hold his front legs up.” And there was a lot of humorous, you know, and that’s what kept you going, and the dumbbells over there. I think they were formed in 1916 from the 3rd division by the name of Al Plunket. He founded them. And that, by golly, I haven’t talked about it for so long, but there was a female impersonator. He was a Hamilton. And then there was Red Newman and he sang his song, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, it’s a lovely war. What do you want with eggs and ham when you got pom and apple jam? Form forward, right, turn. What do you do with the money you earn. Oh, oh, oh, it’s a lovely war.” They’d sing that and they had the greatest singers, you know. They’d sing Roses of Picardy, all these nice songs. You’d think it was a woman. During the winter when we were preparing for Vimy, that was the first time. We saw them many times after that, of course, and always just enjoyed them. A funny thing happened. I remember when we went over in 1916. We went to Neuville-Saint-Vaast and you know the town, the buildings were all blown down and we went down into a basement. That was to be our home. You know, you’re going in there. Your prospects didn’t look so rosy, did it? And so, here again we went in and there was this darky from Halifax. He’d been down to the Somme and he survived and he was a ventriloquist and threw his voices. And that got us all amused you see and that made the night much better. And it’s a funny thing about all these people that were really good at amusing people. They were killed later. He was killed shortly after this.