Always the first one to know

From the Legion Magazine.

“Sometimes it’s going to be a smell. Sometimes it’s going to be a sound,”
says Hélène LeScelleur. “And then it reminds me of the horror that we’ve been through.”

Story and photography by Stephen J. Thorne
“Seeing people decapitated, it’s not that usual for anyone,” says former army medic Hélène LeScelleur. “I saw a lot.”

It wasn’t an image she had contemplated when she signed up for the militia and fell in love with the military.

LeScelleur had challenged authority her entire youth, so when military brass told the newly minted lieutenant and by then 12-year army veteran that she was “too junior” to carry out her duties in Afghanistan, she went on the offensive.

Fierce fighting at Reichswald Forest

On Feb. 19, 1945, midway through Operation Veritable, the Allied plan to surge into Germany, the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry and Essex Scottish were in a tight spot.

They were part of a pincer movement launched on Feb. 8 and wrapped up in March, in which the British XXX Corps and 3rd Canadian Division in the north and U.S. 9th Army in the south intended to destroy German forces west of the Rhine River.

However, the Americans had been delayed by flooding, allowing the Germans to focus their efforts on the Canadian advance.