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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

16. Un-Romanticizing the Past

Canadian soldiers charging out of their trench to get at the Germans, with one thumbing his nose at the enemy. Veterans Affairs Canada

Canadian War Museum historian Tim Cook has unearthed a full and often un-romanticized picture of Canada’s WWI army. He is clear, however, that modern readers should not condemn the sometimes shocking behavior of WWI Canadian combatants without understanding the shock, stress, and chaos of the First World War’s frontlines. As he put it in an interview, “I’m not passing judgment on these guys 90 years later“. However, he did criticize earlier historians for skipping over and sanitizing the brutality of Canadian soldiers in that war. Especially since many veterans were not shy about it, but were quite open to having their conduct known and remembered.

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.