Foreword

Many years ago when I was teaching courses on the history of Post-Confederation Canada to third-year students at York University, I would devote four or five lectures to the Great War of 1914-18.One of my sessions invariably focused on conscription and how Sir Robert Borden, the Prime Minister, parlayed the Military Service Act, the Wartime Elections Act, and the Military Voters Act into helping him form a Union Government of Conservatives and pro-conscription Liberals.Once the Union took shape, Sir Wilfrid Laurier and the anti-conscriptionist Liberals were doomed, however loudly francophones, farmers, and labour protested against compulsory service; the results of the general election of December 17, 1917, confirmed Borden's victory.The first call-ups under the Military Service Act came in January, 1918, and before long, unhappy recruits were in training.In May the first soldiers reached the front in France and Flanders, and soon there were casualties.But there were some 620,000 men in all enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, there were 425,000 volunteers serving overseas and more in Canada, and 345,000 men and nurses served in France and Flanders, and of those 236,618 officers and other ranks served in the 50 infantry battalions in the Canadian Corps.Yet, as the charts in Colonel G.W.L. Nicholson's official history of the army in the 1914-18 War demonstrate, of the hundred thousand men conscripted in Canada, only 24,132 served in the field with the Corps before the Armistice on November 11, 1918.Only 24,132 soldiers, I told my students, and for that paltry number, French and English Canada, rural and urban Canada, labour and capital, were divided in 1917-18 as they had never been before.I am now forced to admit that I was flatly wrong to argue as I did.In the first place, 24,132 reinforcements numbered more men than were found in any one of the four divisions of the Canadian Corps.That was a substantial number, almost one quarter of the strength of the Corps' ranks.Then too, the war had been expected by the Allied generals and politicians to continue well into 1919; if that had occurred, the full hundred thousand conscripts -and perhaps more, if necessary -would have reached the front.And those conscripts were essential if the Canadian Corps' forty-eight infantry battalions were to keep their ranks at full strength.Understrength battalions suffered more casualties

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