From
The Almonte Gazette
The
Volunteer
…… by John Dunn
The figure on the war memorial is a
man in the service dress uniform of a lieutenant of Canadian Infantry in World
War 1, which for a time in our
generation we knew simply as The Great War, until a new cataclysm erupted in
Europe and we too were swept up in war.
It’s called “The Volunteer”.
The name is carved on the monument in
stone.
But that is not all.
“To the Men of Almonte Who Fell for Freedom.” are the words that reach across the top from one side to the other. And down below is an explanation for the memorial :
“Erected to carry out a bequest of the late Lieut. Alexander
George Rosamond, PPCLI.”
For fifty years now The Volunteer has stood on this pie-shaped piece of
ground beside the town hall in the very heart of Almonte, flanked on two sides
by the main line of the Canadian Pacific railway and the Mississippi River, the
two modes of transportation, river and rail, water power and steam power which
accompanied the town of Almonte from its birth as a pioneer settlement beside a
falls in the Mississippi through nearly a century of woolen industry and into
its present stature and growth.
On a burning hot August afternoon in 1859 the rail-laying gang building
the Brockville and Ottawa railway reached Almonte and near the pie-shaped piece
of ground they hammered in the last spikes to hold the rails of what later came
to be part of the main line of the Canadian pacific railway, an enterprise known
to dreamers as “ a ribbon of steel” which
they intended would tie together the scattered parts of a new nation, binding
the parts securely each to the other and all together from sea unto shining sea.
A few months, however, before the rails reached their terminus here, James Rosamond, a director of the company, and a local entrepreneur, resolved to venture additional capital to erect a woolen mill on a site beside No. 2 Falls. It was a stone structure, five stories in height, and was the start of the Rosamond Woollen Company. Only a few years later it gave way to the great undertaking called No.1, the head office and manufacturing center for the next ninety years of the Rosamond Woollen Company at the end of Coleman’s Island.
And all during those years Almonte was known to travelers on the trains as The Woollen Town, because the Rosamond Woollen Company, the Old Red Knitting Company, the Penman Woollen Mill, Campbell’s Woollen Mill, the Yorkshire Wool Stock Mill and Wm. Thoburn’s Woollen Mills all made the flat metallic clacking of the looms as familiar a sound of Almonte as the whistle of the CPR steam locomotive.
Down on Coleman’s Island, right at the end where the island
abuts against the No. 1 Falls of the river, Alex Rosamond, a son of Almonte, and
scion of one of the largest woolen manufacturing firms, succeeded to the office
of managing Director of No. 1. It was a big undertaking, and his
responsibilities affected the lives and the livelihoods of hundreds of working
men and women in the town. For throughout the town, on Mill Street, in the post
office, at the drive sheds outside West’s Store, the talk was always No.1. No.
1, timeless and unchanging.
Any day, Alex Rosamond could look out his window in the front office and watch Tom Leishman’s team of big chestnut horses, glistening with health and light perspiration, their harness all polished leather marvelously offset by gleaming brass buckles and hame fittings, bringing yet another wagon load of bales of raw Australian wool down the hill to the loading ramp at the back of the mill. Tom held a steady hand on the lines, but the team seemed to know what was to be expected of them.
Steadiness. That’s what it was. Everyone called it a steady town of 2200 people, spinners, weavers, dyers, loom-fixers, millwrights, carpenters, masons, stationary engineers, and all the rest.
Take Mick McKevitt for example, way down there in the boiler room beside the loading ramp. When it came to feeding steam to the big turbine power wheel resting there in its cradle as finely balanced as the works of a fine Swiss watch, Mick was like a master magician, feeling rather than knowing the right moment and the correct amount of steam to give the wheel. Steady. That was Mick all right. Real steady with live steam.
On the way back to the freight sheds Tom Leishman’s team pulled a load of bales of another kind, and usually the full of the wagon, all wrapped in heavy kraft paper, addressed to places in the Old Country, to be shipped by CPR to Montreal and forwarding to England. And all of them bore the label:
Rosamond Woollen Company
Almonte, Ontario
Makers of Fine Woollens
And Worsteds
And then it came to pass that in the early months of the summer of 1914 Alex Rosamond had to say good-bye to his wife and girls and go down to Montreal and take passage on a steamer to Liverpool, en route to a number of business conferences for the firm.
In late July, while Alex was still in London, lightning struck from a clear sky at a small Serbian town called Sarajevo. An assassin’s bullet struck down the young Archduke Ferdinand, scion of the noble House of Hapsburg. Before a week had passed, war clouds thundered out all over Europe and the dogs of war barked and howled. The Kaiser’s armies rolled into action following the strategy and tight scheduling of the Stiffen Plan, to overrun Belgium, and bite through the Low Countries, and race around the French flank from Flanders to the Atlantic ports.
Suddenly another duty loomed up in Alex Rosamond’s path like a ship coming out of fog, irresistible and inescapable. Caught up in the drive of patriotic duty, he was like the turbine wheel in the boiler house of No. 1, pushed and driven by a fierce sense of loyalty to home and to the nation. His resolve was firm and immediate: he, a mature man of forty, enlisted in the British Army as a private soldier.
And back in Almonte, the same sense of duty drove spinners and weavers from No. 1 and from all the other mills into the recruiting offices where they exchanged their working clothes for the coarse woolen khaki uniforms, heavy boots, and woolen puttees of the Canadian soldier.
In 1915 Alex Rosamond left the British Army to transfer to the newly-formed Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry with a commission as a lieutenant and platoon commander.
The year 1916 was one that began with ominous foreboding. On February 21st the German armies launched a fierce attack against the French at Verdun, and Marshal Petain’s troops fought back with desperation, shouting “Ils ne passeront pas!” Nor did the Germans pass.
Months later, after a hundred thousand dead, wounded and missing on both sides, this place of incalculable horror called Verdun was nothing but a torture chamber and a tomb.
On July 1st, General Haig pressed forward on the Somme front with British armies against the German armies that held a series of ridges from which they commanded the British positions. In the first three days of fighting British losses amounted to 50,000 men, including – oh, the shock of it – almost the entire Royal Newfoundland Regiment of 1,000 men, as well as 15,000 men of the Australian corps.
Knowing the terrible price of attack at dawn, that many a man who stepped over the parapet would never leave that frightful bullet-swept plain by the Somme, Lieut. Alexander Rosamond felt the close comradeship of soldiers growing stronger the more they suffered and survived together, and though they grew up poles apart in the social structure of Almonte, they shared in common the joy of memories of diving into the mill flume from the railroad bridge, fishing in Gleeson’s Bay, and drinking from cupped hands on a hot day from the cold clear spring in the Spring Bush.
In September the Canadians were thrown in on the Somme. Alex Rosamond, a mature man of forty, could not help the premonition that he and many others might not survive. Accordingly he devised a bequest, expressing a wish that a memorial might be erected in Almonte after the cessation of hostilities, as he put it, to the memory of the men of Almonte Who Fell for Freedom.
Premonitions are frequently well-founded. At Courcelette on the Somme, September 16th, 1916, Lieutenant Alexander George Rosamond PPCLI fell.
Two years later, on a grey and cheerless morning, the morning of November 11th, 1918, a hoarse cry was shouted along the Canadian lines, “Cease fire!” Men staggered up out of trenches and threw down their tools for killing, and threw their caps in the air, and looked around unbelieving at one another, scarce comprehending that the ordeal of war was at an end.
In Almonte it was midnight, and suddenly the bells started ringing from all the churches and the mills. Whistles too. And people came running out of their houses on the way to the town hall, in the centre of town, but it was a cold and cheerless night, and many of them had not dressed properly for the cold night, and they milled about wondering if it could really be true. Yet the telegram said that it was.
A few years later Tait McKenzie unveiled the memorial called “The Volunteer” in the central place in Almonte, between the CPR tracks and the Mississippi River.
The Volunteer is a figure strangely similar to another of Tait McKenzie’s sculptures, “The Call”, which was unveiled fifty years ago this year in Prince’s Street Gardens in Edinburgh. The figure in Edinburgh is that a young Scottish soldier, perhaps nineteen or twenty years of age, bareheaded, curly-haired, dressed in the uniform of a kilted Highland regiment with his hands resting on a Lee-Enfield rifle laid across his knees. The figure is seated on a stone pedestal flanked by twin friezes, the one showing a representative of each of the Scottish regiments, the other a representative of each of the crafts and trades of Scotland. From both friezes the figures face inward to the central figure of the young soldier, who leans slightly forward, with an air of quiet composure, confident, calm, ready to endure everything which might come. It is “The Call”.
The figure In Almonte is that of a mature man, an officer of the PPCLI, a man of forty, with a full moustache on the upper lip, wearing service dress with forage hat, but without any weapons. He too sits on a stone plinth, flanked by flat stone friezes on which are carved the names of the Almonte’s dead from two world wars. The figure leans forward slightly with the air, calm, confident, ready. It is “The Volunteer”.
And like a banner emblazoned above the roll call of the names carved in stone are the very words which Lieutenant Alexander Rosamond used before he fell on the Somme salient, and which stand out below the bronze Volunteer in equally imperishable stone,
To the men of Almonte
Who Fell for Freedom.
