Faith, Hope and Love: The Wartime Motivations of Lance Corporal Frederick Spratlin, MM and Bar, 3rd Battalion, CEF
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In an attempt to understand the motivations that drive soldiers in war, historians often seek to capture the experience of an individual soldier through his letters, diaries and other personal accounts. But what of the artifacts that are left behind? The personal effects that arrive home to a family after a soldier’s death, neatly labeled and wrapped in yellowed paper. These also have a story to tell. Lance Corporal Spratlin, from Toronto, was killed during the Battle of Amiens in 1918. Today his remains lie in the Toronto Cemetery in France, but following his death one of his most treasured possessions was returned to his family—a small pocket-sized Bible. The condition of the Bible alone suggests something about the man who owned it. A gift from his daughter before he left for war, the Bible is worn, the leather is soft, the pages are so curled they stick together and the words New Testament are faded almost beyond recognition. To this day, 90 years after it was issued, the Bible is permanently bowed, an indication of its place in a soldier’s breast pocket. It is inside the back cover that we gain a clear insight into how a man endures the horrors of war. Penned in Spratlin’s clear, unmistakable handwriting are references to many biblical passages, 11 of them with a corresponding facet of war beside it.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.003 |
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".