While Isabella is somberly celebrating Christmas and New Years with her newly born daughter and the Dixon family in London Ontario her husband Gordon is stationed long the French Belgian border . For a number of days Gordon and the men of the Royal Canadian Regiment are in working groups in a supporting role. Now , however , they are getting first hand experience in the mud-logged trenches of Ypres, Belgium. It is a cool rainy afternoon. Gordon is in D Company in Trench C.3. At 3:50 pm they are shelled. Gordon is thrown violently across Trench C.3 and knocked unconscious. Five other men are severely wounded that afternoon. One is suffering from shell shock. Five men are killed. They are quickly buried the next day in Dranoutre, Belgium. The War Diary for that day is shown below. Sergeant Gordon Murray Beaton is not listed among the wounded. Why? He wasn’t physically wounded enough. He had suffered shell shock though. Either he doesn’t realize it , or he isn’t ready to admit it yet. As a result Isabella does not get a cable informing her of her husbands injury. Gordon Murray Beaton is never the same man after January 12, 1916. It isn’t until February that Gordon confesses he has shell shock and seeks medical assistance. He will spend the rest of 1916 in hospitals in LeHavre, France and Ramsgate, Kent, England. He tries earnestly to recover from his shell shock. But as we know now, and as we call it now , PTSD isn’t something one ever totally recovers from. And certainly not from the events Gordon Murray Beaton witnessed that afternoon of January 12, 1916.
