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experienced a miracle escape when an “army hut [which Despain occupied] was blown up by<br />
the enemy. Every one of his 12 companions were killed but Joe escaped without a scratch.” He<br />
asked Grover to place several souvenirs he had collected—a German cap with bloodstains from<br />
its dead owner, a number of shoulder straps, and buttons from German soldiers—on display<br />
at Griggs Grocery Store in Pendleton, where Grover was employed. 10<br />
Source: http://theywerethere.canalblog.com<br />
The first Canadian platoon to enter Valenciennes from the west, advancing towards the Canal<br />
The same edition contained, in a second story, another letter to Grover in which Despain<br />
expresses his luck in a recent battle he had come through almost unscathed: “I had a bullet<br />
through my water bottle, one through my gas mask and a lovely black and blue bruise on my<br />
knee from a piece of shrapnel, all in the short time of about ten seconds…an awful scrap in<br />
one town with Fritz. Regular old house to house fighting, but the good old Canadian bomb<br />
and bayonet method of fighting soon won out and what Fritzes couldn’t get away beat it<br />
‘tout suite’…we took a bunch of villages, a good many thousand prisoners, quite a lot of<br />
artillery and dozens and dozens of machine guns…burying parties have to work overtime to<br />
bury the dead…mostly Fritzes.” 11<br />
A week later, Grover revealed that “one of [Joe’s] ears is almost deaf from shell shock.” In time<br />
he would recover his hearing, his doctors told him. He had also suffered as a result of a slight<br />
gas attack but “consider[ed] himself unusually lucky, for out of the 180 men who came to France<br />
with him, he and his ‘pal’ are the only two survivors…we have been through some hard<br />
110 THE CANADIAN ARMY JOURNAL VOLUME 16.2 2016
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