The Rats in the Walls: The Role of Rodents on the Western Front
Mud-filled warrens littered with dung, detritus, and the dead may sound like a less than hospitable environment, but to the myriad millions that scurried along the trenches of the Western Front, these very conditions provided the fuel for explosive individual and population growth. Of course, I’m not talking about the soldiers that suffered in the […]
The New Normal: Gas-Etiquette and the Canadian Expeditionary Force
The face of war changed forever when, on April 22nd, 1915, the Germans threw caution—and roughly 150 tons of chlorine—to the wind, gassing two French Colonial divisions along the Ypres front. Since then, the Great War has become inextricably linked to ominously coloured and suffocating gas clouds. Equally iconic are the ghoulish masks designed to […]
“On Roads Muddy and Gray”: The Passchendaele Centenary
The quote in the title comes from a poem written by Alexander Sinclair, a Driver with the Canadian Field Artillery. Sinclair fought at Passchendaele with the Canadian Corps in November 1917, when the battle was winding down. But Passchendaele, a gigantic battle with hundreds of thousands of casualties, began much earlier than the official Canadian […]
