At the age of forty-five, William George Ward was older than most men standing in the enlistment line at Winnipeg that June morning in 1915. He looked it, too – the Irish-born man was weathered from ranch work on the prairies, lean, and with a scar across his nose that gave him a slightly battered air. Years of such work as well as time in the active militia with the 106th Regiment had kept him fit enough, but he still carried himself like a man who had lived a whole life before the war reached him. Soon he was mobilized and among the first draft the 106th provided to the newly raised 61st Battalion.

He sailed from Montreal three months later aboard the S.S. Metagama, joining the surge of recruits pouring into Britain. He passed briefly through the 17th Reserve Battalion, just one of the units where the Canadian training system sorted and reassigned its manpower. The Engineers needed mature, reliable men, and Ward – being a rancher, militia veteran, and practical by nature – was transferred to the Canadian Engineers before crossing to France in April 1916.

He officially took on strength with the 1st Canadian Divisional Signal Company on May 10th.  In the vast machine of the Army, the company was a small and indispensable group working along the thin edge of the line. Their world was one of wires, mud and the elements.  They climbed shattered trees to string lines, laid cable across ground swept by artillery, and kept communications alive for the brigades of the 1st Division. The work was relentless and often solitary and they quickly found each day to be a test of endurance more than heroics.

After nine months in the field, illness finally pulled him out of the line on January 29th, 1917 when trench fever sent him to hospital.  He rejoined the Signal Company in early February after only a week of recovery, but it was not enough and his health never fully recovered. He made it through the year, but by December he was evacuated from France entirely and admitted to the vast military camp and hospital system at Curragh, County Kildare – a return to Ireland he could never have imagined when he left Monkstown decades earlier. His hospital admissions trace the slow decline of a man worn down by exposure.  Entries of myalgia, influenza, and sciatica leading to general debility made for a record of strain rather than wounds. From the Curragh he was sent on to Beauly Wood and then Seaford, passing through the quiet backwaters of wartime Britain while younger men took his place at the front. 

He was on his way to recovery by 1918 and was classified for light duties.  Like so many older volunteers, he finished the war in uniform but far behind the fighting, performing the necessary work that kept the great war machine running.  When he was finally discharged, Ward went back to Canada with the quiet record of a man who had given all he had. His medal entitlement – now broken and surviving only in part – reflects that truth. It is less a record of battles than of time spent under hard weather and harder conditions, followed by the long grey convalescence that marked the war for thousands of men who served without spectacle.