Royal Canadian Legion Caradoc Branch 251

06/14/2026

06/13/2026

George Beardshaw, 102 years old, has received an honorary degree.
George landed in Normandy in July 1944 with the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada and helped liberate towns from N**i occupation.
As a section leader, he led patrols and formed close bonds with the men under his command, many of whom were killed in action. A month before the war ended, George was captured in the Netherlands and held as a prisoner of war.
He is now the last surviving Queen’s Own Rifles veteran who served in the Second World War.
He is also the last known surviving British Home Child in Canada. The British Home Child program sent more than 100,000 poor and orphaned British children to Canada, where many endured difficult and often exploitative working conditions.
I first interviewed George in 2018, and it has been an honour to visit with him several times since. However, the biggest honour is to call him a friend.
Thank you to Wilfrid Laurier University for recognizing George’s extraordinary life.
Acts like this show it is never too late to show our appreciation to a Second World War veteran.
Photo credit for the first image: Lori Oschefski from the Home Children Canada Research Group.

06/13/2026

06/12/2026

The Crucified Soldier
🪖 He went to war. He never came home. And for a century, no one said his name.
His name was Sergeant Harry Band.
Most people know the story as legend — the Crucified Soldier — a tale so brutal it was raised in Parliament, printed in newspapers, and used to rally a nation to war. Historians called it propaganda. A ghost story dressed in khaki.
But Harry Band was not a ghost. He was a man.
He had a sister named Elizabeth. He had comrades who fought beside him in the mud of Ypres, who watched what happened to him — and who carried that weight home in silence.
It was those men who eventually wrote to Elizabeth. Not to a newspaper. Not to Parliament. To his sister. Because she deserved to know.
What they described was almost too terrible to write. Her brother, they said, had been found crucified on the door of a barn. Five bayonets. After the battle of Ypres.
A nurse recorded the account. A filmmaker uncovered it a century later. And still — most people have never heard the name Harry Band.
The war machine took his life and turned it into a symbol. Into a recruitment tool. Into a debate. Into a myth.
But before all of that — he was someone’s brother. Someone’s comrade. A man who deserved to be remembered as himself, not as a story.
Say his name. 🕯️
Sergeant Harry Band.