Widow Janice Agnes (née Sloan) of Stonewall, Manitoba, lost two of their sons during the war. Her other son, Alexander (Lex) Bayne Rutherford, was responsible for bearing the news.

“Oh mother of mine, I would give the world to be with you now. It’s so hard to say anything that would be of a comfort to you in a letter,” he wrote on June 2, 1917, after the death of Tomas Victor (Tod) Rutherford. “You surely have paid the penalty of your great love for us all and are still paying.”

Tod, sergeant of the 72nd Battalion, was hit with shrapnel during the Battle of Vimy Ridge while sending reinforcements. He refused to be taken out of the fight until the reinforcements were up. He died shortly after.

Lex found out that his brother David John Rutherford died when he visited David’s camp while on leave. The brothers had planned to visit Scotland over the weekend but when he arrived at the camp, the commanding officer told Lex that David was dead. “I little thought that the leave I was to take would be for the purpose of seeing his grave,” Lex wrote. David, a gunner for the Canadian Field Artillery, died of typhoid on January 18, 1918.

Lex enlisted on October 26, 1914, at age twenty and served as a corporal with the 27th Battalion in Belgium. In 1918, he chose to revert back to a private.

Lex was shot and the family story is that because he was a runner and in good physical shape, the bullet that went through his chest missed his heart. Also according to family lore, he was left for dead. Luckily someone saw him move and he was resuscitated then sent to England to recuperate.

After the war, the Saskatchewan-born man lived in Virden, Manitoba. He married Kathleen Murdock and they had two daughters—Janet and Margaret. Lex was so used to sleeping in the army barracks that after the war, he found beds too soft and would sleep on the floor. His family saw and in the morning screamed, “The poor laddie’s dead!” He wasn’t dead, though.

He continued the law school education he had started before enlisting, gardened and sang in a choir. He died January 21, 1963, in Virden, Manitoba.

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.