Out of a Clear Sky: The Mobilization of the Newfoundland Regiment, 1914-1915
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IT CAME, AS ONE OBSERVER NOTED, “out of a clear sky.” 1 At 9:25 p.m. on 4 August 1914, the people of Newfoundland, then a self-governing colony of the British Empire, 2 were notified officially that they were at war with Germany and AustriaHungary. With a population of slightly less than 250,000 people, 32,000 of them in the city of St. John’s, Newfoundland hardly counted as a major player on the world stage, and appeared quite unlikely to have any significant impact on the war in Europe. Most of the colony’s workforce was involved in the fishery, with smaller numbers employed in the mining and forestry sectors, as there was little in the way of manufacturing or other industry. 3 Its government, led by Prime Minister Sir Edward Morris, was considered to be perilously weak, presiding over a polity sharply divided along regional, sectarian, and class lines. 4 In terms of being a potential participant in an armed conflict, Newfoundland was, according to one source, “as complete an example of unpreparedness and pacifism as could be found in the world.” 5 By the end of 1915, however, the 1st Newfoundland Regiment, an infantry unit composed entirely of Newfoundlanders, was in action at Gallipoli, and large numbers of Newfoundlanders were serving on warships of the Royal Navy. Before the war ended, the Newfoundland Regiment would serve with distinction in some of the conflict’s most savage battles, earning, in the words of one recent writer, “a reputation second-to-none as a battalion that could be entirely depended upon whatever the cost.” 6 It was a remarkable and entirely unexpected accomplishment for a country with, as one British politician noted, “a population half that of Wandsworth.” 7
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".