Title: C.E.F. [Canadian Expeditionary Force] Grenadier Guards in trenches together at Armentières
Place: Armentières, France.
Date: Feb. 1915.

PHOTOGRAPHER: Brown, Horace, 1897-1919

National Archives of Canada, negative no. PA - 107237

Most Canadian soldier-photographers in the First world war sent their photos back home via the censored mail. Unfortunately, many of the photographs, letters, diaries and memoirs that would document the common soldier's view of the war have not yet come to light. One exception is the collection of photographs taken by John Horace Brown (1896-1919) during the period 1914-1916, and presented to the Public Archives by Horace's brother, Mr. Howard Brown, of Carleton Place, Ontario.

Horace Brown joined the militia when he was 15 or 16, well before World War I. When war was declared in 1914 he immediately joined the second battalion. The Second Battalion fought at Neuve Chapelle; then it moved to Belgium, where it fought at Ypres and Ploegsteert during 1915. It moved back to the Ypres salient in March 1916. On June 13 at Observation Ridge on Hill 60, Horace Brown was wounded. He tripped on a rifle, and the fixed bayonet attached to it drove into his left shoulder, just above the heart.

Invalided out of service, he returned to Canada in the autumn, and was sent to officer training school where the spent several months as an army recruiting officer in his hometown area. In autumn of 1917, he enlisted in the Royal Naval Air Service and returned to England where he complained intermittently about not being at the front.

In October 1918 he had an accident while cycling near an aerodrome; he ran into the shaft of a horse-cart and took the blow full on his chest. From this he developed pneumonia and was in hospital and convalescent homes until just before Christmas. By January he was writing letters home about the possibility of being sent to the Russian front. However, at the end of the month the caught influenza which eventually developed into pneumonia. He died at Eaton Hospital, London, on 18 February 1919, only 22 years old.

We have no written record of how or why Horace Brown started taking photographs. But it seems that, like many others, he simply wanted to document the important things in his life and it was enough that he could get some images properly exposed. These are not propaganda photographs. They were taken in the reality of the trenches and they differ from commissioned war photography in that they show Canadian soldiers from the point of view of one of their own comrades.