Second Lieutenant Walter Josiah Pearse
Born on December 17th, 1890, Second Lieutenant Pearse was a member of Z Battery, 5th Brigade, Royal Horse Artillery of the British Army. He died on April 9th, 1917 of mustard gas and wounds sustained at
Vimy Ridge in northern France, near Arras. The son of Ernest Theodore William and May C. Pearse, of Kamloops, British Columbia, Second Lieutenant Pearse was an arts student from 1908 to 1911 at McGill University, Montreal and a McGill Rhodes Scholar to Oxford in 1911. He was commissioned Dec 11, 1914 as 2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Horse Artillery, UK. Buried at
Ecoivres Military Cemetery
, Mont-St. Eloi, he was posthumously awarded the Military Cross in June of 1917.
At a cost of 15,000 soldiers killed or wounded, the Canadians succeeded in capturing Vimy Ridge, where the British and French had failed. The major factors in their success were better planning, previous experience at
The Somme and better communications with individual soldiers, allowing each to make fast battlefield decisions in the event of a lack of superiors.
Sources:
Veterans Canada and
Canadian Great War Project
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