And the Men Returned: Canadian Veterans and the Aftermath of the Great War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Great War was a formative event for men who came of age between 1914 and 1918. They believed the experience forged them into a distinct generation. This collective identification more than shaped a sense of self; it influenced understanding of the conflict’s meaning. Canadian historians, however, have overlooked the war’s generational impact, partly because they reject notions of a disillusioned Lost Generation. Unlike European or American youths, it is argued that Canadian veterans did not suffer postwar disillusionment. Rather, they embraced the war alongside a renewed Canadian nationalism. This generation was proud of their nation’s wartime achievements, notably those of the Canadian Corps, but the conflict’s meaning was rooted in more than battlefield history. Its validity was inseparable from the postwar life that veterans believed they had fought. Yet, despite hopes to return home to a ‘square deal’, economic and international instability marred life in interwar Canada, dashing the generation’s confidence in the future.\nThis discontent is obscured by histories heavily focused on memory and a corresponding reliance on cultural sources, such as war books, to explain the conflict’s social history. While an important part of the war’s legacy, retrospective focus on commemoration is a poor guide to the lived realities of the postwar present. In the war’s aftermath many young veterans struggled to find work. Combined with the prospect of renewed war in Europe, their unemployment added to a growing list of postwar grievances, including failure to secure adequate assistance for wounded and traumatized veterans. These unresolved complaints about the pension system, the soldier settlement schemes, and the mishandling of postwar canteen funds (particularly in Ontario) more than undermined the war generation’s belief in the war, it left them deeply disillusioned with its meaning.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.057 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".