Death at Licourt: An Historical and Visual Record of Five Fatalities in the 1st Canadian Motor Machine Gun Brigade, 25 March 1918
Bibliographic record
Abstract
commander of "A" Battery of the 1st Canadian Motor Machine Gun Brigade, waited anxiously at Cizancourt on the west bank of the Somme Canal in France as the sky cleared in the early morning of 25 March 1918.The great "Kaiser's Offensive," by which the German high command hoped it would smash the Allies and win the war, had been battering away at the British Third and Fifth Armies in this region for six days.Battersby had come forward with "A" Battery's four armoured Autocars from the British 24th Brigade Headquarters around at 0400 hours to be in position to support a British counterattack scheduled for 0815 hours.Instead, masses of German attackers were now pouring across the canal.German artillery bombardment had increased in intensity and as the dawn broke and the early morning mists dissipated, Battersby saw clearly that enemy infantry were already well established on his side of the canal and were pressing forward all around him.Meanwhile, parties of nearly panicking British infantry stumbled rearwards towards their lines, making it clear that a British retreat was in process, not an offensive.Battersby had no choice but to order his cars to get out of the area, along the road they had come that morning.One car, which had remained farther back, succeeded in getting away with relatively few difficultuies.But the three others, which had advanced closest to the canal, had no time even to turn around and were forced to back down the road in column.Battersby's car was the last to leave and hence the closest to the enemy assault.Inside were Battersby, 36 years old, from Tavistock, Ontario, sitting in the cab beside his driver, Private Robert Connell 24 years old, from Toronto.Behind them, in the rear of the vehicle, were Sergeant Cyrill Vidal, 26 years old, from Jamaica and two machine gunners, Private John Begin, 26 years old, from Hamilton, Ontario and Private Donald Brooks, 20 years old, of Weymouth, Nova Scotia.They would not make it, their names being added to the seemingly endless list of First World War fatalities.Battlefield death lies at the heart of war.Yet one would not necessarily know it from the visual record.Scenes of actual battlefield death are quite rare, perhaps especially so in the case of Canadian soldiers.To be sure, no nation has been especially zealous about publishing visual depictions of its battlefield casualties while the war was in progess, doubtless for reasons of national morale and the sensibilities of surviving family.Why more have not appeared since, however, when morale is no longer an issue and immediate family members have died, is an interesting question.One might well argue that the relative absence of dead and wounded from the visual record of our wars is a serious omission, which seriously distorts the depiction of our military experience.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
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".