The Right Course, The Best Course, The Only Course: Voluntary Recruitment in the Newfoundland Regiment, 1914-1918
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“THE RIGHT COURSE, THE BEST COURSE, the only course” was a line used in a 1917 proclamation issued by the Patriotic Association of Newfoundland in an attempt to persuade men to enlist. The phrase unwittingly summarized the history of voluntary recruitment during World War I. In the initial call for men in 1914, the “right course” was to enlist in service to King and Empire. By 1917, as the colony witnessed mounting casualties and a deteriorating economic situation, the “best course” was for men to leave their positions within the intricate sphere of community and family production to enlist. By 1918, an enlistment rate which did not match casualties resulted in the colony’s beloved and distinguished regiment being removed from the frontlines. The “only course” they could now follow was that of conscription. Historians have argued that recruitment was limited by poor communications in a country with an isolated population, 1 or that high returns from the city in the first year of the war lulled city officials in to a false belief that the regiment could be staffed entirely by St. John’s men, 2 or even that high wartime fish prices kept many outport men from enlisting. 3 While there is truth to these arguments, I suggest that the system failed to produce a sufficient number of volunteers to maintain the Newfoundland Regiment at full strength because those responsible for recruitment, chiefly Governor Walter E. Davidson and the Patriotic Association, did not understand the socioeconomic reality of Newfoundland. Between August 1914 and May 1918 the Patriotic Association and Department of Militia faced the increasingly difficult task of drawing volunteers from a geographically diffuse population for the Newfoundland Regiment, Royal Newfoundland Naval Reserve (RNNR), and Newfoundland Forestry Corps. To maintain
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".