Nova Scotia/Nunavut Command of The Royal Canadian Legion www.ns.legion.ca 55 A Mi’kmaq Tunneller's Story - Sgt Sam Glode, DCM continued ... Later on, that fall, we were sent into the Wipers (Ypres) salient for a job in the battle towards Passchendaele. We started to dig a sap. I don't know what kind of job it was supposed to be, but you couldn't dig anything deep around there because the ground was all mud and water. I never saw such a mess. Before long we got orders to quit, and we were shifted back out of the salient. After that, our company moved down to Vimy Ridge. We dug a lot of dugouts and such like for the defence system on the ridge. This was during the winter and early spring of 19171918. I had been made a sergeant after that tunnel job at Messines. One day, in a village back of Vimy where we were billeted, the Major called me out in front of the morning parade and pinned on my tunic the ribbon of the Distinguished Conduct Medal. I didn't get the medal itself till quite a long time afterwards; they only give it to NCOs. In the summer of 1918, our company moved down to Amiens with the rest of the Canadian troops, for the big push there. No tunnelling, just ordinary army engineer work, patching up roads and that kind of thing behind the battle. The army kept pushing the Germans back all that summer and fall, and in November it was all over. I got back to Nova Scotia in the spring of 1919. I was 41! I never liked to work indoors, so I went on living like before, living alone in my shack in the woods outside the Potanoc settlement, guiding sports in the fishing and hunting seasons, cutting some pulpwood on my own land in the winters. I joined the Canadian Legion at Liverpool, and used to go down there a lot, talking to the other veterans over a few drinks of beer or rum. Eventually, he was admitted to Camp Hill Hospital, the veterans’ hospital in Halifax. He died there in 1957 at age 77, after an illness of some months. He was buried in Saint Gregory’s Catholic Cemetery in Liverpool, Nova Scotia. Samuel Glode’s DCM Citation reads, “On 19th/20th November 1918, he was in charge of a party searching for mines and demolition charges in the vicinity of St-Pierre. He| showed great devotion to duty and an utter disregard of personal danger, and successfully removed 450 charges." Recorded in London Gazette on 3 Aug 1919 and 11 Mar 1920. The DCM was the second-highest award that could be given to soldiers of the British Empire, exceeded only by the Victoria Cross. Fewer than 2,000 members of the more than 600,000 that served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force received the DCM during the war.
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