Everywhere John Hatch looked, there was chaos. In front of him, behind him, around him, thousands of men raced across a muddy, blasted landscape. Overhead, the snowy sky erupted with the thunderous blasts of artillery shells that fell as a hail of death on the German lines atop Vimy Ridge.

A year earlier, Hatch had been a greenhorn kid from River John, Nova Scotia, standing in a Pictou County recruiting hall, swearing an oath to fight for Canada and King George V. Just eighteen-years-old, standing nearly five and a half feet and weighing one hundred and fifty pounds, Hatch was keen to carry the fight to the Germans.

But on this day—April 9, 1917—Hatch of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders was simply hoping to make it through the attack alive.

In his later years, Hatch would write of this now-famous battle, of how close he came to death after becoming separated from his chums and surrounded by counterattacking Germans.

“I saw the Germans were getting closer,” he wrote. “I crawled into a culvert to hide, only to discover that there were three German corpses inside it. What a stench there was from those dead bodies! Fortunately, the German soldiers did not notice me and marched right by my hiding place. The dead Germans may have saved my life.”

Honourably Discharged in 1918 at the age of twenty-one, he moved out West, settling in Alberta where he bought a ranch, married a woman from Brooks, and had six children.

He retired to Nova Scotia, just up the shore from his home village of River John, and died in 1987. In his memoirs, he wrote once of visiting a friend from the war. The two spent the afternoon reliving old times. They shared some laughs, and likely some tears, too, for no one who lived through the Great War emerged totally unscathed.

“We both agreed we were lucky to have survived.”

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.