The Second Battle of Ypres came unexpectedly for Harry James Murney of Toronto. “April 20th was a peach of a day. We had a baseball game in the morning and football in the afternoon, and that evening there was a guard called quite unexpectedly,” he wrote in a letter to his parents on May 5, 1915. Murney, a private at the time with the 13th Battalion, was called to guard a bridge across the canal at Ypres. Two days later, Murney and the rest of the B Company were back at the billets singing and dancing to music from a piano they found in their “home.” The fun soon ended.
“About 4 o’clock we discovered green and yellow clouds rising from the trenches to our left but suspected nothing other than the fact that the French were getting gas but about ten minutes later a shower of shells hit the town and we beat it for the dugouts.” Murney and fellow soldier Don Sinclair were assigned duty as dispatch runners. “While crossing the fields we experienced for the first time the great power of the ‘Big Willies or coalboxes.’ They kept breaking from 50 to 100 yds. from us and threw tons of earth high in the air,” he wrote. “We watched the Germans advancing like a swarm of bees and nothing but a few scattered Algerian soldiers and our Brigade bomb throwers (who had dug themselves in about 300 yrds. in front of headquarters) to stop them.”
As the Germans showered them with bullets, Murney helped carry the fallen soldiers back to the headquarters. “I’ll never forget the first night along that road, the stray bullets from the continued attacks swept the road and got what the shells missed, the road was strewn with horses, limbers, ammunition wagons, dead and wounded,” he wrote. “It is impossible to describe war to anyone who has not seen it.”
Murney survived the battle at Ypres and was promoted to lance corporal. Sadly, he was hit with shrapnel during a June 1916 attack on a German position and died at age twenty-three.
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