I've talked to John on three or four occasions over the past few years, and mark my words, he'll be the last Canadian WWI veteran - he still plays golf a few times a week, he's healthy. Doesn't want a military or a state funeral because he was still in the Boys' Brigade when the war ended and doesn't consider himself a veteran as he never saw combat, and really doesn't consider himself Canadian any more as he moved to America in the 1920s and never returned. He thinks it would be disrespectful to the men who did fight and die if he was given one. He's a class act. Here's something I wrote about him in 2006 (gotta post it all, there's no live link any more):
When one of Canada's last three living veterans of the First World War marched off to war in 1916, he did so down Princess Street.
John Babcock, who was born in Sydenham and enlisted at the tender age of 1511/42, still remembers how his uniform pants did not fit and how his uncle saw him marching down main street with the rest of his new comrades. The uncle did not know Babcock was enlisting, but gave him a silent nod of approval for doing so.
Babcock now lives in Spokane, Wash., and is one of the three men who find themselves at the centre of a debate about how Canada should remember Canadians' service in the Great War when the nation's last living links to the conflict are gone.
A petition being circulated by the Dominion Institute is calling on the federal government to give a state funeral to the last veteran to die if their family so chooses, an honour normally reserved for former governors-general and prime ministers. It is attracting support at the rate of 10,000 signatures a day.
Babcock was too young to fight and was kept out of France. He did his army service, as did thousands of others, in a youth brigade.
He said in an interview that the passing of the veterans who were on the front lines should be marked somehow.
"I'd like to see them remembered, especially the ones who fought," said Babcock, who is remarkably mentally and physically fit at 106 and still plays golf with his second wife, Dot.
He's not planning a state funeral for himself.
"My wife and I plan to be cremated," he said. "I haven't really thought about what will happen to our ashes after that."
But for the students in David Rankine's Grade 6, 7 and 8 class at Frontenac Public School, who have been studying the service records of individual soldiers and who happened upon Babcock's records by chance, there is no question that he should receive all the honours Canada can bestow.
"It's just common respect," Harley Brushey, 11, said.
The students have been studying the lives of ordinary soldiers in the war through war records and other public documents from the National Archives and other sources to get a soldier's-eye view of life in the trenches.
They are piecing together the lives of soldiers who marched off to war and who may not have returned and say what the veterans have been through deserves to be remembered.
"You look at how they lived, what they ate - a soldier got a pound of meat a day and four ounces of bacon and a lot of time it was tainted, and they slept in the trenches," said Saxon Dawson.
Sydenham Legion to honour enduring vet
"A lot of time they had to eat the food raw," Michelle Silva added.
"I wouldn't want to serve in a war."
Rankine said his students connected to the veterans both through the classwork and the realization that 80 years ago, some of those soldiers were walking down the same streets they do today.
"They make a personal connection with these soldiers, some of whom were only four or five years older than they were when they went off to war," he said.
"They list their heights on their attestations, and some of them were the same height as these students."
While the students also study the lives of famous Canadian soldiers such as Frederick Banting or John McCrae, he said it is the ordinary soldiers, and the comprehensive lists of their postings, movements and injuries their service records reveal, that puts them in their boots, so to speak.
The students also recited the oath soldiers such as Babcock took upon entering the Army.
The assignment ends with each student writing a letter to the family in the style of the time. The letters don't leave the class, but the letter that will be written to Babcock will.
"We were going through this, and one of the students said, 'Why don't we send this to him?' And I thought that was a great idea, and we plan to," Rankine said.
Babcock grew up on a farm near Sydenham and lost his father after a tree-cutting accident when he was a young boy.
He enlisted on Feb. 1, 1916, and his attestation papers show that the five-foot-four youth gave his birthday as July 23, 1900. The commanding officer agreed his "apparent age" was 18, and qualified him fit to serve in the 146th Battalion of the Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force.
After training in Sydenham at the Barriefield Army camp and in Valcartier, Que., he arrived in England. Babcock was transferred to the Young Soldier's Battalion, in which he and his comrades trained as they waited to turn 18, the age at which they were allowed to fight.
"They had me wrestling freight off trucks, which I didn't much care for," he said.
The war ended before Babcock was old enough to fight, and he is still rueful his age prevented him from being what he calls a "real soldier," even though he asked to go to the front line.
"I volunteered for it, but they knew I was underage so they wouldn't take me," he said.
During the First World War, 68,260 Canadians were killed in Europe. Another 173,000 of about 620,000 who served were injured, including one of Babcock's brothers, who was a sapper with the engineers and came home haunted by his wartime experiences.
Babcock emigrated to the United States in the 1920s after working in the farm fields of Saskatchewan, noting it only cost $20 to legally enter the country then.
He enlisted for a stint in the U.S. army, and he married his first wife, Elsie, in the U.S. She died in the 1970s and he remarried Dot, a nurse who helped care for his ailing wife.
He remains active, can recite his name in the Morse code he learned in the service and got his private pilot's licence at the age of 65.
Military service continues in his family. One of his grandsons is in the U.S. army and recently did a six-month tour of duty in Iraq.
The Sydenham Legion also wants to do something for Babcock, who never joined any veterans' associations and lost contact with his fellow members of the Young Soldiers Batallion over time.
"There was only one time, and it was in Saskatchewan, I saw another fellow from the batallion standing at a train station," Babcock said. "I didn't go over and speak to him then and I never saw him again. I have kicked myself about that ever since."
Only recently did members of the Sydenham Legion recognize that one of the three remaining veterans was a product of the village and branch president John Pickernell said they hope to honour him.
"We are planning to offer him an honorary membership, and if he has any memorabilia that he would like to donate, we would be proud to display it here at the branch," he said.
Pickernell said it would be an honour for the Sydenham branch to have something to mark the home of one of the few remaining veterans of that conflict.
One of the biggest supporters of commemorating Babcock and the two remaining soldiers - Lloyd Clemett, 106, and Dwight Wilson, 105, both of Toronto - is the Dominion Institute, which launched an online petition last Monday.
The petition now has more than 80,000 signatures, and Jeremy Diamond of the Institute says the response has shown that Canadians do care about remembering the dead and the remaining veterans.
"What people want the government to do is honour them, and it's not so much for these three specific individuals but to mark the sacrifice of that entire generation," he said. "And it's getting a lot of attention because people realize the urgency of it, and that these men won't be around forever."
When the petition closes Dec. 11, Diamond said it will be presented to the federal government, which can decide whether or not to offer a state funeral to the last of the three.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper commented briefly on the surviving First World War veterans at a Remembrance Day service last week.
"There's been a lot of talk this year about the fact there are still three World War I veterans living, and I think we should cherish every moment they're still with us," he said.
So far, the government has not responded to the institute's efforts, but Diamond is hopeful the sheer numbers of people signing will lead to action.
People are allowed to leave brief comments along with their names, and Diamond said many are personal memories.
"One of the reasons I think so many people are interested in it is because of the links people have in their families to people who went off to fight, not just in the First World War but also the second, and those veterans are dying, too," he said.
At Frontenac Public School, the youngsters getting a trench-level view of the conflict have little doubt that the veterans are owed something more.
"They went through a lot and they'd see their friend right next to them get blown up," said Dawson, who would favour state funerals for the remaining old soldiers.
"I think it's a good idea."
