Private Ben Stevenson
Ben Stevenson was born in Brantford on September 26, 1897, but he spent his formative and teenage years in Paris. Before volunteering for active overseas duty, he served with the 25th Brant Dragoons, a local militia which operated in both Brantford and Paris. He enlisted in Niagara with the 84th Battalion on September 4, 1915. Interestingly, his attestation papers say he was born on May 26, 1897. Clearly, he lied about his age to enlist. Ben was working as a carpenter at the time, perhaps with his brother, the cabinet maker. His mother, who was his next of kin, was still living in Paris.
Ben went overseas with the 84th Battalion in June, 1916 aboard the troopship S.S. Empress of Britain. Following brief training in trench warfare, gas mask drill and rapid fire at military camps in England, he was transferred to the 75th Battalion and crossed the English Channel to the Western Front later that summer, just in time for the 4th Canadian Division to be committed to the Battle of the Somme.
He joined the 75th Battalion in August, 1916 in a relatively quiet sector, but in October his division, the 4th Canadian Division, was ordered south to the Somme valley. By that time the Battle of the Somme had been raging for four months. The entire region was a desolate, treeless wasteland of craters, rotting bodies, and waist-deep mud. By November, winter weather had set in. Stevenson and his comrades faced freezing rain, snow, and severe trench foot while living in open, muddy ditches. The 75th Battalion was ordered to capture a heavily fortified German defensive line north of Courcelette, near the Ancre Heights**.**
On the morning of November 18, 1916, in a blinding mixture of rain and snow, the 75th Battalion attacked the Regina and Desire Trenches. The men had to wade through freezing, knee-deep mud while being torn apart by German machine guns and a wall of artillery fire. Because Ben was killed in the chaotic chaos of a mass infantry charge during a blinding storm, there are no surviving eyewitness statements regarding his final moments. His official military personnel file simply reads "Killed in Action" on November 18, 1916. In the field, this meant he was killed instantly by either direct enemy gunfire or artillery, rather than dying later at a medical aid station.
Despite assaulting through a blinding blizzard of rain, sleet, and knee-deep mud, the 75th Battalion and the rest of the 4th Canadian Division overran the German lines. They successfully drove the German defenders out of Desire Trench and established a new defensive front. Though the Canadians captured their immediate targets, the weather conditions were so atrocious and the troops so utterly exhausted that any plans for a deeper breakthrough toward Grandcourt were abandoned. Field Marshal Douglas Haig used the success of the Ancre operations to officially call a halt to the wider Battle of the Somme. The weather had completely broken, turning the entire landscape into an impassable swamp of mud and water-filled shell craters.
The operation moved the frontline forward by just a few hundred yards. Private Ben Stevenson’s name is engraved on the Vimy Monument dedicated to the 11,000 Canadians who fought in France and who were posted as “missing, presumed dead.” Ben was 19 years old.