Joseph Antoine Louis Valiquette was a good man. He was a good father, grandfather and great-grandfather. He had no vices and no dark moods.
He was content with his life and happy to be alive, and that, perhaps, was largely a result of his experiences overseas on the battlefields of France during the First World War.
Dennis Letourneau, a Canmore resident, said Valiquette, Letourneau’s great-grandfather, came from a tough upbringing. He worked at a young age in lumber camps before enlisting at the age of 23 or 24 to serve overseas as a soldier.
Valiquette, born in 1884, died when Letourneau was in his 20s, which gave Letourneau the opportunity to know his great-grandfather and to talk with him about the war. Letourneau’s father, Roger, had the foresight to interview Valiquette in 1971.
“He was a very positive guy, he was a simple guy,” Letourneau said of his great-grandfather. “I don’t know what education he had, probably not much. He was working up in the lumber camps, basically hauling ties out of the forest on his back.
“He really didn’t have any ambitions to become rich or famous. He took pride in what he did, which was a carpenter. I think he felt fortunate just to be alive. Not only did he make it through a couple of months of World War One and saw enough to realize how lucky he was, he came within 25 feet of being killed. The guy next to him was killed by a shell when he was hit directly.
“He came back with a certain sense of ‘I’m happy because I’m alive.’ ”
Valiquette served with the 22nd Battalion, now known as the Royal 22e Régiment, better known perhaps by its nickname, the Van Doos (taken from vingt-deux, French for 22). He enlisted in Winnipeg in January 1918, eventually reaching France in April.
The soldiers, said Valiquette in his interview with his grandson, Roger, didn’t give much thought as to how the war had started, who was responsible or what to expect.
“Nobody knew what they were up against. They were going to war and that’s all there is to it. The way everybody felt, it seemed that the war was going to be all fun,” he told Roger Letourneau.
Valiquette disembarked at Calais, France on April 5, 1918 and was assigned to the 22nd. Upon leaving Calais, the men of the 22nd marched for miles to reach the Western Front, which lay east of the city, and the closer the soldiers got to the front, the quieter they became.
“The further into the war zone we got, the quieter the boys got. There wasn’t any enthusiasm about their surroundings or their plight. Everybody was starting to think there’s something serious about war,” he said.
“The first night there was a barrage of 75(mm) guns and that was really something. The flashes and the speed they were firing. There were soldiers up front and this artillery was their support and we were in reserve and there was this string of guns, as far as you could see in both ways, a continuous bluish flash; a roar and this continuous flash all the time all along the line on either side. That was really a sight. That was something really extraordinary.”
The Van Doos had built a reputation as “being the toughest, craziest bunch of guys,” Dennis Letourneau said, and as a result the regiment was often held in reserve behind the attacking of defending battalions.
“That reputation had been built earlier in the war. These guys held the line all the time and did impossible feats. So I think what happened is they kept the 22nd in reserve in case they really needed them to help plug a hole because they knew these guys would hold it and that worked in (Valiquette’s) favour.
“But they didn’t need them except on one occasion. He was there for a lot of battles where a lot of guys got killed in the last few days ... And it was just a few days before armistice that he nearly got killed.”
Valiquette told Letourneau that on that day, the soldiers of the 22nd were advancing across an open field with little resistance. The occasional staccato of German machine guns could be heard further down the line, but it was otherwise quiet until German artillery began shelling the 22nd.
“They were using whizz bangs (a light explosive artillery shell) and they were only 20 to 30 feet apart and the fellow on my left was hit directly with this shell. It went right through him and then it exploded on the ground,” he told Letourneau. “That was the closest I saw anybody hit that I could see.”
It was in situations like this, according to Letourneau, that Valiquette’s nature and outlook on life helped him immensely. Unlike the poets who Letourneau pointed out were tormented by what they saw and experienced, Valiquette was able to shrug what he saw off and carry on.
“The simplicity in his logic helped him get through that, because McCrae or Sassoon, these famous war poets who are just analyzing everything, they’re going nuts. They see the waste and the destruction and the death and there’s no point in that. And it is driving them insane. Whereas for (Valiquette), ‘these are my orders for today. I need to go over there and do my job,’ ” Letourneau said.
Valiquette was fortunate, as he was able to escape the crippling fear and shell shock many soldiers felt when faced with the thought of going over the top of a trench and seeing the carnage or experiencing the terrible conditions.
“There wasn’t any time I was scared and I’m asking myself, ‘why? How come?’ It’s a funny thing. It didn’t bother me at all. It didn’t bother me at no time. I still ask myself how come so many of the others were scared?”
He watched one young soldier, who had been with the battalion for some time, beg a sergeant to shoot him, so he would not have to go over the top again.
