John Babcock - World War I

World War I

At the age of fifteen and a half, Babcock was impressed at Perth Road by two recruiting officers, one a lieutenant and one a sergeant, who quoted from the poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade". He was also enticed by the offered salary, which was $1.10 per day, as opposed to the 50 cents he could have made through physical labour. Babcock was recruited in Sydenham, Ontario and joined the 146th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He was then sent to Valcartier, Quebec. There Babcock underwent a physical, where it was discovered that he was underage. He was designated status A-4: physically fit, but underage. At the time, the minimum age for combat was eighteen. Babcock was turned down, but managed to make it all the way to Halifax by train before he was stopped by the company commander.

In Halifax he was sent to Wellington Barracks, the city's peacetime barracks, where he wrestled freight onto large army vehicles and dug ditches. Tired of the work, Babcock took the opportunity to volunteer for the Royal Canadian Regiment when fifty recruits were called on, claiming that his age was 18. Officials quickly discovered that he was only 16, however, and they placed him in a reserve battalion known as the Boys (or Young Soldiers) Battalion in August 1917. Babcock then undertook an ocean voyage to England and, in Liverpool, he was stationed with the 26th Reserve and sent to Bexhill-on-Sea where he trained with about 1,300 others, about a third of whom were veterans from battles in France.

The Young Soldiers Battalion trained the recruits for eight hours a day. In his spare time Babcock went on leave to Scotland, where he met his first girlfriend, a woman from the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. He was also introduced to the pleasures of beer and the horrors of war that some of the older veterans had come across. Babcock asserts that he would have fought in the conflict, given the chance, but the war ended before he could be brought to the front lines. For this reason, Babcock claims that he never felt like "a real soldier" and rarely talked of his experiences until his centenary. He also never joined any veterans associations.