Lloyd Clemett, A Soldier of the Great War

by Sandra Martin

Lloyd Clemett, one of three surviving Canadian veterans of the First World War, died late Wednesday at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. He was 107.

Technically too young to fight for king and country in the war to end all wars, a teenaged Mr. Clemett lied about his age to follow his older brothers to battle, which is why there are actually two First World War veterans named Lloyd Clemett – both were born in Toronto, both have scars in the middle of their foreheads and both enlisted in Peterborough, Ont., in January of 1916 to fight the Germans on behalf of King George V. But one of them didn't really exist. That is because the real Mr. Clemett signed an attestation paper in his copperplate script swearing that he was born Jan. 10, 1898, although his actual birth date was Dec. 10, 1899.

He wasn't the only young man, of the 620,000 Canadians who enlisted in the First World War, who used a ruse to rush to the front.

”In English Canada, the social pressure was to enlist; in Quebec, the social pressure was not to enlist,” military historian J.L. Granatstein said in a telephone interview Thursday morning. ”It was a great adventure, although there were huge casualties, which people knew about because the names were printed in the newspapers, but it was still an adventure and [being wounded or killed] always happened to somebody else...It was empire, king and crown, the evil Hun and all those things, so even simple unsophisticated people were caught up in it,” he said.

Continue reading Sandra Martin's obituary on Lloyd Clemett...

Photo: Lloyd Clemett at 16 after he joined the army as a private in the 109th Battlion. The army made him a bugle boy when he enlisted for the First World War in January, 1916.