Anyhow, I come home and went in and went upstairs. My mother and father didn ’t hear me come in, Iguess, and he come up the next day looking for me. I was supposed to go back but I didn’t want to go back. My mother thought I should, so she called my father in. And he asked me what happened and I told him, and he told me to go back to bed and told the minister to go home.

I went to school then for quite a while. I guess I went to Roseberry School. Nellie Hubley — that’d be from Eldon — she was the first teacher there. I went to her school for a while... . I went to Merton Blake’s school and then I went to Marion MacKenzie. I quit school in ’15, 1915.

I went to work for Davey MacRae. He was a nice person. I worked there, 17 dollars a month... . And then I worked that summer; I farmed and fished both. And that fall I went home and I was digging mussel mud down on the Pinette River... . I fell in the hole in the ice where we got digging the mud and got all wet and I froze up. My clothes were froze on before I got home. And I never went back. I went to Charlottetown and joined the army.

World War I

[I started with the] 105th [Battalion], from the Island. We trained in Valcartier [Quebec]. I was in the hospital with the mumps when they sailed. I went over later and I joined them back in England.

Then I was sent to France. I went to the 26th Battalion in France. I was there a while and then I was transferred to the 11th Engineers. I was in France about 14 months, I guess. I was 18 when I got to France.

Oh yes, I was in the front lines. It was kinda muddy at times. Didn ’t know enough to be lonely. It was pretty rough, all right, but...there was a lot of fellas from around home, like Archie MacLean and Damon Ross.

I was in the same [company] with Archie MacLean. Damon was in a different company, but I seen him every day. And Sinclair MacKenzie. He was in the same outfit as me in France. Sinclair. He was killed in France about a month before the Armistice. I was in the hospital at the time...with a sore knee: I got hit in the knee. That was back in supports, a bomb landed, and there was quite a few killed in that raid. But I just got hit in the knee with a piece of lumber or something.

I went to the hospital, oh, it’d be in ’18 sometime. I forget just when. I was in a Canadian hospital. I was the only Canadian in there. It was all Canadian nurses and they’d all come to see a Canadian.

Everett MacEachern 223