Wounded In Battle

Nora Groenendyk shares a couple of First World War photos of her father, Daniel Joseph Doyle, who was seriously wounded by shrapnel while serving with the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery. The first photo shows the young soldier (front row, second from left) posing with other men—many of them recovering from wounds—in front of a hospital in France, 1918. The second one is a portrait of the young man in uniform.

Daniel Doyle was stringing communications wire between trenches when he was hit. “While on horseback he was carrying a spinning spool of wire across the battlefield when he was knocked from his horse by a large piece of exploding shrapnel from an artillery shell,” explains Nora. “The shrapnel entered his leg, and doctors could only remove a portion of it because it was too close to a vital artery. As a result, he walked with a limp the rest of his life. He lived in Guelph, Ont., and died on Aug. 1, 1980.”

We thank Nora Groenendyk for sharing this photo and encourage others with wartime or peacetime photos to do the same. Please mail them to Find-Share-Discuss c/o Legion Magazine, 86 Aird Place, Kanata, ON, Canada, K2L 0A1 (photos will not be returned) or by email (large file JPEG) to magazine@legion.ca. Please include your daytime phone number and mailing address along with a description of the photo, its date and the location and the identity of the people (first names and last) and where they are in the photo. Have questions? Call us at 1-613-591-0116.