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The Not-So-Nice Canadians of World War I

Khalid Elhassan December 9, 2024 15 min

Canadian - A WWI Canadian recruitment poster — A WWI Canadian recruitment poster. Library and Archives, Canada

1. A War “Without Chivalry and Magnanimity, and Sometimes Without Mercy“

Canada’s last surviving WWI veteran, 107-year-old John Babcock. Edmonton Journal

In 1919, Canadian Corps commander Arthur Currie bluntly described how it had been: “War is simply the curse of butchery, and the men who have gone through, who have seen war stripped of all its trappings, are the last men that will want to see another war“. Canadians had gone to France to win and end a war, and it was conventional wisdom at the time that it would do nobody any good to fight with half measures, instead of go all out in order to finish the job as quickly as possible. Canadian Victoria Cross winner Cy Peck put it most succinctly: “The Great War was one of ferocity, without chivalry and magnanimity, and sometimes without mercy“.

107-year-old John Babcock, Canada’s last surviving WWI veteran. Edmonton Journal

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Cook, Tim – At the Sharp End, Volume One: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1914-1916 (2016)

Cook, Tim – No Place to Run: The Canadian Corps and Gas Warfare in the First World War (1999)

Heritage of the Great War – The Unproven Story of the Crucified Canadian

History Collection – 16 Forgotten or Lesser Known WWI Facts

Journal of Military History, Volume 70, Number 3, July 2006 – The Politics of Surrender: Canadian Soldiers and the Killing of Prisoners in the Great War

National Post, November 12^th, 2018 – The Forgotten Ruthlessness of Canada’s Great War Soldiers

Ponsonby, Arthur – Falsehood in War Time: Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War (2005)

Roads to the Great War – Canada’s Golgotha or the Legend of the Crucified Soldier

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.