Ormie Stitt (Ormond M. Stitt)

A friend Robertson mentions repeatedly through the summer of 1917: dropping by, sharing a picnic tea at the Army Horse Show that June "in fond mem'ry of 'stand to.'" Captain Ormond Montgomery Stitt, M.C., born in Ottawa on June 15, 1884, was a McGill Science graduate (Class of 1908) and, before the war, a noted athlete: captain of McGill's intermediate football team in 1905, a member of the senior team that won the intercollegiate championship in 1906–07, and stroke of the Britannia Boating Club war canoe crew that won the C.C.A. championship in 1902. He later worked as a Dominion and British Columbia land surveyor and on the Geodetic Survey of Canada. Serving as field engineer in charge of water supply on the staff of Brigadier-General W.B. Lindsay, Chief Engineer of the Canadian Corps, Stitt was awarded the Military Cross for his work during the 1917 operations and died of wounds on August 16, 1918, aged 34: struck by a shell while overseeing water-supply work near Rosiers by motor car during the Corps' advance that began August 8. He was rushed through a casualty clearing station to a base hospital, where General Sir Arthur Currie was among those who visited him, but died roughly twenty-four hours later of shock and blood loss. He is buried in Villers-Bretonneux Military Cemetery; the diary records the burial the next day: “Another of God’s own gentlemen gone west.” His death was reported in the McGill Daily that October, in a letter from Lindsay to Stitt's father, Samuel, describing him as irreplaceable on his staff: "We will never get the equal of Ormie Stitt again."