212991 2nd Lt. William Milton Skilling British Army 180th Brigade Royal Field Artillery from:Teeswater, Ontario, Canada Bill Skilling was my husband's maternal uncle and after graduating from the University of Toronto in 1915, joined the C.E.F. then trained as an officer at Oxford and was commissioned in the British Army as a 2nd Lieutenant. He went to France in January 1917 as a Forward Observing Officer in the Royal Artillery and as part of the 180th Brigade served at Messines, Wytschaete, and after the 3rd Battle of Ypres was invalided back to England. He later returned to Germany in 1919 with the British Army of the Rhine and returned to Canada in April 1920.
I have been posting his letters from WW1 on a blog. On August 22, 1917 Bill wrote a detailed letter to his family about the bloody battles he'd just been in. You might be interested in this one in particular.
After Bill returned to Canada, he had trouble adjusting to civilian life and died prematurely in November 1933 at the age of 44. His sister Agnes Norma Skilling Jackson (my mother-in-law) wrote about him in her memoirs which I have posted at: www.skillingfamilymemories.blogspot.com
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