Lance Corporal Roderick Bird who was born in Ketton but emigrated to Canada became one of the youngest Rutland soldiers to die in the First World War. He joined the Canadian army aged 15 or 16 and was just 17 when he was killed in a disastrous attack on Vimy Ridge in France in March 1917. According to the census he was born in the spring of 1899 but he was to claim on his official army record that he was born on 18 April 1897. His parents were Francis Charlton Bird and Kathleen Mary Bird who had begun a new life in British Columbia. Roderick was working as a bank clerk when the First World War began. On 5 September 1915 he attested to enlist in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, giving what appears to be a false birth date, and joined the 54th Infantry Battalion. He was presumably with it when the battalion arrived in France on 13 August 1916, becoming part of 11th Brigade 4th Canadian Division. On 1 March 1917, the battalion took part in a "divisional gas attack" on Vimy Ridge aimed at "destroying enemy works and gaining information." Gas was discharged at 3 am but another discharge was cancelled because the wind was in the wrong direction. According to the battalion war diary: "Enemy retaliated as first wave was discharged with heavy machine gun fire and gas shells... First discharge of gas apparently had no effect on the enemy. In the face of heavy rifle and machine gun fire [the] assault was carried out at 5.40 am, but owing to strong wire entanglements before their front line no headway could be made...Artillery barrage was not sufficiently concentrated and caused no slackening of the enemy's fire." Casualties amounted to 83 killed and 144 wounded and missing. The war diary entry for 1 March ends on a poignant note: "At night efforts were made to bring in the wounded from No Man's Land but owing to the alertness of the enemy [the efforts] had to be abandoned." One of the casualties that day was Roderick. He is buried at La Chaudiere Military Cemetery, Vimy, but has a special memorial in Row A.7 because the exact position of his grave is not known.