Grief Amidst the Guns: Death in the Canadian Expeditionary Force on the Western Front
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines how Canadian soldiers of the First World War dealt with death on the Western Front. Members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force risked death, witnessed it and lived alongside it while serving in the trenches. Circumstances of death in the frontlines differed from those in civilian life; death of the very young by disease was replaced by violent death of adult men. Even conflicts of the preceding fifty years provided little indication of what soldiers would face during the First World War. Canada’s death rate during the First World War was nearly three times that of the South African War and the vast majority of those deaths were due to enemy action. This dissertation argues that the scale and violence of death on the Western Front pushed soldiers to develop multiple means of coping and grieving. Reactions varied; emotional reserve, sadness, communal grieving and gravesite rituals appear in men’s writings alongside anger and dark humour in response to the deaths of comrades. Even as the Western Front presented new and challenging circumstances, the men of the Canadian Expeditionary Force often turned to and adapted their civilian death customs to manage their emotions and experiences with the dead.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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".