Service highlights
- Birth: 20 November 1892, Lincoln, Nebraska
- Service number: 288952
- Unit: Canadian Machine Gun Corps, 4th Canadian Machine Gun Company
- Enlist date: 20 December 1916
- Death: 6 November 1917
- Burial: No known grave, commemorated on the Menin Gate (Ypres) Memorial, Panel 32
A Life and Service Remembered
Edwin Lincoln Gardiner was born in Nebraska in 1892, but his story quickly became one of movement and work across borders. As a boy he returned to Canada with his family and grew up near Kirkton in Usborne Township, learning in the small rural schools and living the kind of steady farm country life that shaped so many from this area.
By 1916 he was in Brandon, Manitoba, working as a railway car checker, a job built on routine, responsibility, and long days. He was the forth of his brothers to enlist, Earl, Robert and William had all enlisted prior. Perhaps thats what drove him. When he enlisted, he tried to add a little extra weight to his past by claiming time with the United States Marine Corps, something that could not be confirmed later, but it reads like a young man wanting to be taken seriously and to belong to something larger than himself.
He enlisted in Winnipeg on 20 December 1916 with the 221st Canadian Infantry Battalion. Within months he was overseas, and the war began shifting him into a role where calm mattered as much as courage. After arriving in England he moved through reserve units and then into machine gun training, finishing both basic and advanced gunnery before being sent to France. By then his family had already been marked by the war. In June 1917, their brother Earl was killed in the 58th Battalion’s fighting near Lens, and his body was carried out that night by a small party that included Private Robert Gardiner.
In early November 1917 he joined the 4th Canadian Machine Gun Company in the trenches near Passchendaele. Not far away, his brother Robert had returned to France only weeks earlier and was serving in the same general sector, another of the Gardiner brothers drawn into the same battlefield.
That battlefield was not only about attacks and counterattacks. It was also about the grinding, exhausting work of keeping men supplied in a landscape that barely functioned. Carrying parties hauled rations, water, spare parts, and heavy ammunition forward through miles of waterlogged trenches, often with little protection from shelling. On 6 November 1917, Edwin was with one of those parties near Passchendaele Ridge. While they were resting in a shell crater, a shell landed among them and killed him.
His comrades buried him near where he fell, but the ground around Passchendaele was torn up again and again. After the war, clearance teams could not locate his remains, and he is now commemorated on the Menin Gate at Ypres. In the places that knew him as a neighbour and not a name on a panel, he is also remembered on a war Memorial in Clearwater Manitoba, beside his brother Earl on the cenotaph in Rannoch, and his family placed memorial wording for him in their church community as the years went on the tablet was moved from the original stone church to the Thames Road United Church.
Major battles and operations
- Battle of Passchendaele (Third Battle of Ypres): 31 July 1917 to 10 November 1917
- Passchendaele Ridge carrying party operations: 6 November 1917
Learn More
https://canadiangreatwarproject.com/person.php?pid=55754
https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/lifestory/5886033
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/177125121/edwin-lincoln-gardiner
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/12045867/edwin-lincoln-gardiner
https://rcl236stmarys.ca/cenotaph/gardiner-private-earl-edward/
https://rcl236stmarys.ca/cenotaph/gardiner-private-robert-lindsay/
https://rcl236stmarys.ca/cenotaph/gardiner-private-william-john/
The Fallen, Richard Holt, Private E.L. Gardiner, Pg 24