[1914 - 1918] Canada in the First World War
In the simmering heat of August 1914, the world tipped into chaos. When Great Britain declared war on Germany, the decision echoed across the Atlantic to a vast, young country of fewer than eight million people. Without a vote, without a debate in its own Parliament, Canada was at war. A wave of patriotic excitement, a sense of imperial duty, swept the Dominion. From the fishing villages of Nova Scotia to the prairies of Saskatchewan and the logging towns of British Columbia, men flocked to enlist. They were promised adventure and a quick victory, home by Christmas. In a matter of weeks, a sprawling training camp at Valcartier, Quebec, materialized from farmland, a bustling city of tents and drilling soldiers, all part of the new Canadian Expeditionary Force, or CEF. They were issued the Canadian-made Ross rifle, a source of national pride that would soon prove dangerously unreliable in the muck of the trenches.
The romantic notions of war, painted in posters and sung in patriotic anthems, dissolved almost immediately upon their arrival in Europe. The Western Front was not a field of glory; it was a scar of mud, wire, and death carved across Belgium and France. Soldiers lived in a troglodytic world of trenches, navigating a maze of dugouts and communication lines. The air was thick with the stench of rot, disinfectant, and cordite. Rain turned the clay soil into a viscous, greedy muck that could swallow a man whole. Days were a monotonous cycle of dread, punctuated by the shriek of incoming artillery shells and the crack of sniper fire. Nights offered no reprieve, only the terror of raids across No Man's Land, a spectral landscape of craters and skeletal trees.
It was in this nightmare that the Canadians would first truly be tested. On April 22, 1915, near the ancient Belgian city of Ypres, German artillery shells began falling on the Allied line. But these were different. They released a sinister, greenish-yellow cloud that drifted silently with the wind. It was chlorine gas, the first large-scale chemical weapon attack in history. The French colonial troops on the Canadians' flank, their lungs burning, broke and fled, leaving a four-mile gap in the line. The Germans advanced, expecting a complete collapse. But the Canadians, choking, their eyes streaming, did not break. They were ordered to hold the line at all costs. Without proper gas masks, they improvised, pressing urine-soaked handkerchiefs and rags to their faces, the ammonia offering a crude but life-saving filter against the chlorine. For two days, they fought viciously, counter-attacking and refusing to yield ground. Their stand at the Second Battle of Ypres was horrifyingly costly—over 6,000 Canadian casualties—but it stopped the German advance and earned the untested colonials a fearsome reputation as tough, resilient soldiers.
Amidst the carnage of Ypres, a Canadian military doctor named Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, grieving the death of a close friend, scribbled a few lines in a notebook. His poem, "In Flanders Fields," with its haunting imagery of poppies growing between crosses, row on row, would become the most enduring elegy of the war, a testament to the sacrifice that now defined this foreign landscape for a generation of Canadians. It captured a profound sense of duty to the fallen, a promise not to break faith with those who now slept beneath the blood-red flowers.
The war ground on. 1916 brought the Battle of the Somme, a campaign that has become synonymous with industrial-scale slaughter. On the opening day, July 1st, the Newfoundland Regiment, not yet part of Canada, was ordered to advance at Beaumont-Hamel. They moved forward into a storm of German machine-gun fire. Within thirty minutes, of the 801 men who went over the top, only 68 were able to answer roll call the next morning. It was a tragedy that scarred the soul of Newfoundland for generations. The Canadians would join the battle later, fighting for months in a hellscape of mud and craters, gaining little ground for a terrible price.
While men fought and died overseas, the war reached across the ocean to the home front in the most devastating way imaginable. On the morning of December 6, 1917, in the bustling port of Halifax, Nova Scotia, the French munitions ship SS Mont-Blanc, laden with over 2,900 tons of explosives, collided with the Norwegian vessel SS Imo. The resulting fire ignited the cargo, unleashing the largest man-made explosion the world had ever seen before the atomic age. The blast flattened the city's north end, killing nearly 2,000 people, injuring 9,000 more, and leaving thousands homeless just as a blizzard descended. It was a brutal reminder that no corner of the country was truly safe from the war's reach.
By 1917, after years of fighting, the Canadian forces had evolved. They were no longer just a collection of battalions but a unified, formidable army: the Canadian Corps. Their greatest test, and their defining moment, came in April of that year at Vimy Ridge. The Ridge was a heavily fortified German stronghold, a seven-kilometer-long escarpment that dominated the surrounding plains. Both British and French armies had tried and failed to capture it, suffering over 150,000 casualties. It was considered impregnable. Now, it was the Canadians' turn.
Under the command of British General Julian Byng and his brilliant Canadian subordinate, Arthur Currie, the assault on Vimy was planned with unprecedented precision. For the first time, all four Canadian divisions would fight together. Every soldier was given a detailed map and knew their exact objective. Extensive tunnels were dug to move troops secretly and safely to the front lines. Most critically, the artillery was perfected into a devastatingly accurate science. The Canadians rehearsed a tactic called the "creeping barrage," where a curtain of explosive shells would move forward just ahead of the advancing infantry, providing a shield of death and destruction for the soldiers following closely behind.
At 5:30 a.m. on Easter Monday, April 9, 1917, in the midst of a driving sleet and snow storm, the battle began. The ground shook as nearly one thousand Allied guns opened fire simultaneously. Out of the trenches surged 15,000 Canadian soldiers in the first wave, advancing behind the wall of explosions. They moved with discipline and courage, overwhelming the shocked German defenders. By noon, they had captured most of the ridge. Within three days, the entire position was in Canadian hands. The victory was a tactical masterpiece, but it came at a familiar, brutal cost: 10,602 casualties, with 3,598 killed. Yet, something profound had happened on that ridge. As one senior officer, Brigadier-General A.E. Ross, later declared, "in those few minutes I witnessed the birth of a nation."
This burgeoning sense of national pride was tested back home by the Conscription Crisis of 1917. The relentless fighting had depleted the ranks of volunteers. Prime Minister Robert Borden, believing conscription was necessary to maintain Canada's contribution to the war, pushed through the Military Service Act. The policy created a deep, bitter chasm in the country. English-speaking Canada, driven by a strong sense of British identity, largely supported it. But in Quebec, many French-Canadians felt little connection to what they saw as a British imperial war and fiercely resisted being forced to fight in it. The crisis left a political and cultural wound that would take decades to heal.
In the final year of the war, the Canadian Corps, now led by General Currie—the first Canadian to hold the command—was recognized as one of the most effective fighting formations on the Western Front. They were the shock troops of the British Empire, spearheading the Allied offensive in the period known as the "Last Hundred Days." From the Battle of Amiens on August 8, 1918, which a German general called "the black day of the German Army," through the breaking of the formidable Hindenburg Line, the Canadians won a string of punishing but decisive victories that helped hasten the end of the war.
When the guns finally fell silent on November 11, 1918, the cost to Canada was staggering. From a nation of under eight million, some 620,000 had served in uniform. Nearly 67,000 were killed, and more than 172,000 were wounded. The war had transformed the country. Its industries had matured, women had entered the workforce in new numbers and won the right to vote, and the government had imposed its first income tax to pay for the war effort. For its immense sacrifice, Canada was no longer seen as a mere colony. It demanded, and received, its own signature on the Treaty of Versailles and a seat at the newly formed League of Nations. The young Dominion that went to war automatically in 1914 had emerged four years later from the mud and fire of the Western Front, having paid in blood for its place on the world stage.