Acknowledgments

This has been an extraordinary journey.A decade ago and just shortly before his death, my father (a volunteer who flew a tour of bomber operations with the Royal Air Force in the Second World War) handed over to me for safekeeping a handful of letters that his own father, a conscript, had written from France and England nearly ninety years earlier.The gift of letters was an unexpected surprise.Although I knew of these treasured heirlooms, written in French and English, at the time I still had no idea what a rich and important story they told, i.e., that my grandfather's experience during the Great War had embraced a much larger narrative, one that involved tens of thousands of other conscripts, and one that in time has touched hundreds of thousands of Canadian lives -in short, an important and genuine piece of undocumented Canadian history.Resolving to more fully explore this fascinating story, I subsequently published "A Canadian Conscript Goes to War -August 1918, " Canadian Military History 18, 1 (Winter 2009) which, as it turned out, raised more questions than it answered.Principal among these was the great contradiction revealed regarding the apparent importance of conscripts in the final campaign of the Great War, and the lack of documented history supporting that observation.Nevertheless, this story might have ended there had my research not revealed two more important facts of which my own father may not have been aware.First, the day that my grandfather was conscripted so too was his first cousin, Leo Dennis, who later served with the 1st Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), and was killed in action.Second, in a somewhat more stunning revelation, I learned that I had two other distant cousins who had met similar fates -the Caza brothers, William and Theodore.Suddenly I realized that I had four blood relatives, all conscripts and all of whom had been in action at some critical point during the Hundred Days.Three had been killed in action and a fourth had nearly died after sustaining a severe bullet wound.Needless to say, this was a very small sample size, but it certainly confirmed one preliminary finding -four conscripts and four casualties was a curious statistic that was not entirely consistent with what appeared to be the great majority of Canadian historiography on this subject.And so began my own journey, a search to answer two fundamental questions: what did Canadian conscripts really contribute to the Hundred Days, and what price did they ultimately pay?Thus was born Reluctant Warriors.

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