John “Jack” Earl Hayden was marching in single file along a road at Vimy Ridge on April 17, 1917, when a high explosive shell sent ten pieces of shrapnel into the flesh of his legs and arm. He was the lucky one. The two men marching in front of him from his hometown of Huron County, Ontario died.

By June Hayden’s flesh wounds healed but his foot was still stiff. “I hope it is stiff enough to keep me from crossing the channel again,” he wrote in a letter to his brother on June 12, 1917. “I had been at the front since the middle of December…I did not care for all old Fritz could throw over, but once a fellow gets wounded it spoils his nerve.”

He enlisted to the 161st Battalion from Wroxeter, Ontario on May 6, 1916 and on arrival in France, he was transferred to the 58th Battalion and served as a private. He spent the rest of his time during the war at a hospital in England before returning to Canada in 1919. He later revealed to his family that he had been gassed during the war.

Once he returned, he worked for British American Brewing Co. in Windsor, Ontario until he retired. He then lived in his sister Margaret’s house in Lucknow, Ontario from April to October 1980 until he was too weak to climb the stairs.

He was born in Grey Township, Ontario on October 3, 1893 and died at Wingham and District Hospital in 1981. He remained single his entire life.

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