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The Great War had begun only three months earlier when Joseph Aldéric Boucher showed up in Montreal to volunteer for the fight.
Boucher, a labourer, was 21 years old on the Tuesday in October 1914 when he signed his attestation paper, volunteering to serve the King in the new war against Germany. The attached medical report shows Boucher stood 5-foot-6 tall, with blue-grey eyes and auburn hair. He was not married.
Pte. Boucher was among the first in a contingent of francophone volunteers in the 22nd Battalion of the overseas Canadian Expeditionary Force — a unit that would later become Quebec’s famed Van Doos (a corruption of “vingt-deuxième”) regiment.
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Boucher’s name was selected at random on Monday and sent over Twitter from the account WeAreTheDead, a Citizen project that tweets the name of a fallen Canadian Forces member every hour of every day.
Tweeting the names of all Canada’s war dead will take 13 years.
For the past three years, the Citizen has committed to write a profile of whichever soldier’s name was tweeted at 11:11 a.m. on Remembrance Day, with the help of “crowdsourced” volunteers who contributed to the research online. This year, Boucher’s name came up.
Military records suggest that, in an army run by the English, language problems were evident even at Boucher’s enlistment.
Boucher’s attestation paper, written in English in a longhand that does not match his signature, says he was born in 1892 in Sainte-Anne-des-Monts in Quebec’s Gaspésie — Îles-de-la-Madeleine region.
But that conflicts with baptismal records that show a Joseph Aldéric Boucher born on the same date a year earlier in Saint-Alexis-des-Monts, in the Mauricie area.
Those baptismal records list Boucher as the son of a cheesemaker, Pierre Boucher, and his first wife, Exillia Ringuette. Pierre Boucher would later remarry and have another child, one of seven he would father, named Adelard — the same name listed as next of kin on Joseph Boucher’s enlistment.
Boucher appears to have corrected the attestation paper himself by noting that his first and middle names had been reversed.
A week before Boucher signed up, a battalion of francophone volunteers had been formed by prime minister Robert Borden at the request of Montreal businessman Arthur Mignault, who also partially bankrolled its formation.
What happened to Boucher in the following months isn’t clear from military records but he was likely sent to Valcartier to train with his new unit, with more than 1,000 other French-Canadians.
A year later, the 22nd arrived in France via Great Britain and in September 1916 joined the Somme offensive — called “das Blutbad,” the bloodbath, by the Germans — at the Battle of FlersCourcelette.
Boucher survived the major fighting through mid-September as Canadian forces advanced and captured several small villages in the area. The weeklong fight at Courcelette would later become noted as the first significant battle in which tanks were used.
At the end of the month, the 22nd took up headquarters in the village of Courcelette, according to the battalion’s war diaries.
“Fairly quiet,” the diarist recorded that evening.
Then, on Sept. 30: “Work on trenches. 26th Battalion in support under our orders. Reconnaissance work. Patrols. Artillery active.”
That day, Boucher’s battalion received orders to seize a new target, the Regina trench, later named “the ditch of evil memory,” and establish a Lewis gun post in the Courcelette trench.
In a message to the division’s command, an officer wrote to warn how tired his unit had become.
“It is my opinion, that in the present moral and physical state of men of battalions, success of proposed operation is highly problematical,” said the message from the 22nd, sent at 3:15 p.m.
The battles earlier in the month had caused heavy losses of officers and NCOs, and forced the unit to reinforce with new troops with no trench experience, the message explained.
“The very serious grueling and ghastly experience of the last two days particularly have produced the inevitable reaction of physical and moral lassitude,” it concluded.
“If ordered out they will of course obey orders but the spirit of (Sept.) 15th will not be there.”
Sometime that day, Boucher was killed. His casualty report gives no further information beyond “Killed in Action.”
Boucher’s unit fought on at Courcelette into the middle of October, trying unsuccessfully to gain the Regina trench.
They were relieved by another division: “However, despite the almost impenetrable curtain of fire, on November 11, the Division captured Regina Trench only to find it reduced to a mere depression in the chalk,” according to an account on the Department of Veterans Affairs website.
Describing that month in France, the unit’s commanding officer later wrote that the experience at the Somme convinced him further of the importance of discipline and leadership.
“Military knowledge never appeared as necessary as plain common horse-sense coupled with blind and immediate obedience to orders and un-gelatinated backbone.”
Boucher’s remains were buried in a provisional cemetery and listed at the Vimy Memorial at Pas de Calais, France.
He was 23 years old. The names of Canada’s fallen soldiers, from the Boer War to Afghanistan, are recited every hour at Twitter.com/ WeAreTheDead
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