The Applications

Field Marshal Douglas Haig visiting Newfoundland, then a British colony separate from Canada, in 1924.  Haig, known as "Master of the Field" to some and "Butcher," to others, was a driving force behind the unification of First World War veterans advocacy groups which led to the establishment of the Canadian Legion of the British Empire Service League, later the Royal Canadian Legion.

In my hands, I held two documents completed by Alf Leonard more than fifty years ago. Both were membership documents for the Legion -- of which I had, in a moment of desperation, been elected vice president and poppy chairman and which was supporting my efforts to ensure that Leonard’s dilapidated headboard was replaced with a permanent stone marker -- though they were completed nearly twenty years apart.
The first document, a wallet size card worn and stained with time and dated 10 June 1946, was an “Application for Membership [in] The Canadian Legion of the British Empire Service League” (BESL). The Canadian Legion was one of fifteen organizations representing Great War veterans in Canada by the end of that conflict.  Along with various regimental associations, each advocating for their own former comrades in arms, the efforts of this multitude of organization and fragmentary and inefficient at best.  

A visit to Canada in 1925 by Field Marshall Douglas Haig, the commander of the British forces (including the 418,052 troops of the Canadian Corps) on the Western Front for most of World War I, included an appeal for unity among groups advocating for veterans.  Haig, whose “epic but costly offensives at the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917) have become,” according to the Canadian War Museum, “nearly synonymous with the carnage and futility of First World War battles,” dedicated the remainder of his life after leaving military service to the welfare of veterans.  He was a driving force in the foundation of the British Legion in 1921, surprisingly egalitarian in his refusal to accept a separate organization solely for officers, and established both the Haig Fund to provide financial support to ex-servicemen and Haig Homes to ensure that they were properly sheltered.  Both of these organizations still exist today and Haig Homes which still provides veterans in need with access to over 1 300 properties in the United Kingdom.  Cynics would say that Haig was trying to atone for the over two million British and Imperial casualties that were suffered under his command; ex-servicemen who relied on his charity would not have cared.

Haig seemed to have a soft spot for Canadian troops, calling them “really fine disciplined soldiers… and so smart and clean" compared to Australians, as WWI historian Gary Sheffield recalls in his 2011 book The Chief: Douglas Haig and the British Army, and he was troubled by the discord that he witnessed among the various advocacy groups in Canada.  In an address to assembled veterans, as reported by The Globe on 29 June 1925, Haig urged them to “pay tribute anew to that sense of unity, of mutual loyalty and common allegiance which rallied the British Commonwealth of Nations as a single people to meet and overcome a common danger” by joining together into a singlorganization.  Later that year, the Dominion Veterans Alliance was created for this purpose, and by 1926, Canadian Legion of the British Empire Service League had been incorporated by a special act of parliament.  Thirty four year later, its numbers having swelled by the influx of Second World War veterans, the organization was self-supporting and was rebranded as the Royal Canadian Legion.
Leonard’s initial application to join the Legion, written almost entirely in block letters, records his name as simply “A. LEONARD.”  He attests that he enlisted at North Adams, Massachusetts, just five miles to the east of his hometown of Williamstown, on Christmas Day 1917.  Having served as a private in Troop A of the 15th Cavalry in the United States as well as Mexico and France for just under a year and a half, Leonard was, according to the BESL application, discharged at Camp Devins -- now Fort Devins, it had been established forty miles northwest of Boston for the purpose of training troops during World War I -- in June of 1919.
The second document, dated May of 1965, however, told a different story.

A comparison of Leonard's 1946 (left) and 1965
(right) applications.  Note the inconsistency of his rank.

It is not known at the present time why Leonard re-submitted an application two decades after the first: it may be that, for whatever reason, Leonard had let his membership status lapse. Applications to join the Legion -- by 1965 independent from the BESL and celebrating HM the Queen’s patronage as the Royal Canadian Legion -- had changed since 1946. So too, apparently, had some key information.  His date of discharge, for example, was five days earlier: 19 June 1919, rather than 24 June. Confusingly, his enlistment date is stated on his 1965 application to be “Jan 20, 1917,” 340 days earlier than the information on his 1946 application.  While the weather on 20 January and 25 December are likely to be similar, it is difficult to imagine that he would have confused Christmas Day with any other day of the year.  
The curiosities continue: his “Rank on Discharge” on the 1965 application is Sergeant, three grades higher than the rank of private indicated in 1946. No mention is made of any deployment in Mexico or stateside: his service states simply “U. S. Expeditionary Force -- France.”  Born in Williamstown, Massachusetts, Leonard would have been a natural-born citizen of the United States, courtesy of jus soli citizenship enshrined in the 14th Amendment.  He may, alternately, have become a Canadian citizen (Canadian citizenship came into force on 1 January 1947; prior to that, Canadian nationals were a subcategory of British subjecthood) by 1965.  However,  under “Nationality” on his application, Leonard wrote “Irish.” It is possible, though unlikely, that Leonard was referring to Irish heritage, but there is no evidence at this time to support that theory. Even his name was inconsistent: rather than stating his name as “A. Leonard” as on his 1946 application, in 1965 he wrote “Leonard, Thomas Alfred” before signing “A. T. Leonard.”

The curious reference to Irish nationality.  Leonard may have
been referring to Irish heritage, but there is no evidence
at this time that indicates that this was true.

As I stood in the record room of the Legion, the two very different applications dated nineteen years apart illuminated by the single lightbulb hanging from a cord, I wondered again, “Who was this man?”  With the sinking realization that obtaining a permanent marker for Leonard would be neither so easy nor so straightforward as I had hoped, I committed myself to a course of action that would be as uncharacteristic of me as it would be difficult: I was going to have to ask for help.