Francophone Enlistment in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914â1918: The Evidence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Francophone enlistment during the First World War has been estimated in the past between 35,000 and 50,000, including the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and the merchant marine. Information on the language spoken was not recorded at enlistment and those estimates were based on very cautious guesses only. We had suggested in a recent paper (Canadian Historical Review, vol. 96, no. 3) that this participation had been significantly higher, in part due to the contribution of Francophones from outside the province of Quebec. Information have now been extracted from enlistment sheets and one new B database, comprised of 10 percent of all enlistment papers of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), allows to research and analyse personal data from a fairly large corpus of soldiers. This paper offers the first evidence that the actual number of Francophones who joined the CEF, either as volunteers or under the Military Service Act (MSA), most likely exceeded 70,000.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".