On June 17, 1917, Pte. W.A. Duncan sat at a desk and began typing a letter no one in wartime ever wants to receive.

“Dear Miss Stoddard… I have been going to write you for the last few days and really do not know what to say, for on coming out of the hospital, I learned of Ernie being killed,” Duncan wrote. “I know just how greatly you must suffer on losing such a brother, when any who knew him feel the loss as greatly as if he were a near relative.”

“Ernie” was Corporal Ernest Ellis Stoddard, of Clam Harbour, Nova Scotia. One of elevan children, he worked as a boilermaker before enlisting with the 11th Canadian Mounted Rifles on April 18, 1915, in Vancouver.

He arrived at the Front in France in September 1916, and was killed in action on April 28, 1917, in the weeks following the great Canadian success at Vimy Ridge.

A chaplain’s letter written to Stoddard’s mother said Ernest had been hit by a shell in the head and neck and then buried under falling mud and debris. He was buried at Aubigny Military Cemetery, France.

Do you have an ancestor who served in the Great War? Submit their story and it could be included on this Great War Album website.