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You can view the winning videos from last year here.

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Ontario Command - Youth Remembrance Video Contest Winners

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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Faites partie de l'Histoire!

À L'assaut est une aventure interactive qui vous permet de faire l'expérience de la vie dans les tranchées pendant la Première Guerre Mondiale.

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À la fin de chacun d'eux, vous devrez faire un choix d'action.

2

Lorsque vous avez décidé de ce que vous allez faire, vous cliquez sur la section de votre choix et lisez ce qui en découle.

3

Une décision moins heureuse pourrait entraîner des problèmes ou, pire encore, vous mènera tout droit au désastre. Cependant, ne vous en faites pas; vous pouvez toujours recommencer!

VOTRE PAYS.
VOTRE HISTOIRE.
VOTRE MUSÉE.

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Causes of The Great War

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World War 1 in 6 Minutes - Manny Man Does History

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WWII

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World War 2 in 7 Minutes - Manny Man Does History

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Article from the Toronto Star

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Katie Daubs and Richard Lautens traced the footsteps of Canadian soldiers in a two month odyssey, following the trenches of Belgium and France.

VIMY RIDGE, FRANCE-

The tourist has just finished lunch near the battlefield, which was pulverized with deep shell holes 97 years ago and is now covered by a soft layer of grass.

Standing up from a bench, she takes the last drags of a cigarette while chatting about war commemoration options for the rest of the day.

"We could go to Ypres, there are lots of cemeteries around there," she says to her companions, guessing the drive will take "about an hour."

It has taken my colleague Richard Lautens and me three weeks to walk the same distance. From our desks in Toronto, we plotted our walk with a simple understanding of this war: mud, glory, slaughter, Passchendaele, Vimy, the Somme.

We are war correspondents, 100 years late to the war. There are no witnesses to interview or photograph, no bullets to worry about. The bomb craters are now lily-pad-covered ponds, the trenches are buried under fields of crops.

The assignment is to walk the Western Front, to understand the landscape where Canadian soldiers once bunkered down in the misery of trench warfare and perhaps, by walking past all these battlefields, to understand even a sliver of the burden carried by that once-youthful generation.

Walking has slowed time. We can feel the dull ache of the land's vastness in our hip sockets, the strategic importance of small ridges by our views, the folly of human plans in the insistent rain.

But more than anything, we can feel the lightness of our burden.

We are trying to feel the brutal legacy of this place while having to contend with an unlikely enemy: the peaceful present.

Ypres

The Ypres Salient jutted into the German lines like a backwards C, and tens of thousands of soldiers died in the dogged struggles to take the higher ground from the Germans.

Winston Churchill wanted Ypres, the site of several major battles, preserved as a rubble heap to testify to British sacrifice, but the locals decided to rebuild, because there comes a point when you have to move on. The war clings to Ypres anyway thanks to a bustling tourism industry: tour the battlefields, drink a Passchendaele beer, buy an edible chocolate helmet, never forget.

There is something vaguely mildewy in Ypres - the smell of old dead flowers and musty basements. I wash my clothes and the odour sinks into my sweater: I can't lose the smell for the rest of the trip.

"As quickly as the rain fell, and it fell often, there exuded from the hotel patios under the ventilated and boarded floors a rank odour of old clay," Toronto naturalist Charles Sauriol, who died in 1995, writes about Ypres in a manuscript that resides at the Toronto Archives. "I have smelled it many times along the Don, and presuppose that what is under the new city has still a long legacy with the war years." Sauriol was too young for the war, but he made a pilgrimage in the 1970s to see the places where his brother had fought and survived. There is something about this city and the cemetery belt that surrounds it that draws people in, a need to see this place, to ascertain that it was real.

"It has taken me all this while to catch up with you on that fateful day of Oct. 30, a matter of almost 60 years to rescue you from oblivion," Sauriol writes to his brother, who was shot in the hand in the months-long Passchendaele campaign that claimed 500,000 casualties on both sides, including 15,654 Canadians. "I am writing these lines out in the country, seated in front of a picture window which commands a view of farm fields, some draped in goldenrod, some newly turned by the plow."

Ypres is busier these days. The coach buses lurch up the gentle rises of Passchendaele, unleashing tourist platoons into cemeteries to hear sad stories of teenage warriors like Valentine Joe Strudwick, dead at 15, his grave now covered with small crosses, the grass nearby replaced with Astroturf because it kept wearing out. At night, the school groups and seniors from Australia, Canada, and all across the world show up at Menin Gate, where volunteers from the local fire brigade play their bugles under the names of the missing, as they have done every night since 1928, with the exception of German occupation during the Second World War.

That first night, all I can see are the backs of thousands of heads, people craning for a good view, with a few sitting on shoulders like this is a concert, stopping for an ice-cream cone afterward.

A few nights later, I arrive an hour early and carve out a little spot near a group of British farmers. We are quiet as the words sung by a quartet swell beneath the 54,000 missing names:

"Faded away like the stars in the morning,
Losing their light in the glorious sun
Thus would we pass from this earth and its toiling,
Only remembered for what we have done."

There is something so aching in the lyrics, something so reverential in the way middle-aged men fumble to turn off their cameras' chirping noises, something that reminds me of Canada in the way the quartet sings in a warm brogue. It is an elegy from another time.

The rising notes of the song rattle around my head for weeks in the solitude of the countryside.

"Only remembered, only remembered, only remembered for what we have done."

sacrifice

The father of three who was a finalist in the egg-and-spoon race on the Atlantic crossing, the Toronto banker who read Robert Service poetry to his friends, the deserter who just wanted a glass of white wine, the Brit who was about to go on Christmas leave to see his fiancée, the Australian with a moustache you could set your watch to, the beloved jockey with the swaggering gait.

Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.

As we walk, impeccably maintained cemeteries show up every day without an appointment.

"In these military cemeteries there is no aging: everything is kept as new," writes Geoff Dyer in The Missing of the Somme. "Time does not exist here, only the seasons."

This type of remembrance stresses not victory or triumph but sacrifice, he writes.

At the Villers-Bretonneux memorial, a dozen sepia photos are nestled in the dirt under the names of Australia's missing men.

These are young men killed by shards of metal whose faces are now protected by cheap plastic frames left by descendants they never met. The wind is brisk and the flags snap to attention outside the monument, a tower pockmarked by Second World War fighting. The men, staring at a photographer 100 years ago, now stare at you, begging for a few seconds of your time: remember me, this is who I was.

In the Belgian countryside, farmers who have grown up beside cemeteries and memorials wonder if we will keep coming back in 10, 20, 30 years.

Every day we meet the great-nephews and great-nieces on the First World War circuit. In 2034, will the great-great-nephews still come?

How many greats will it take to forget the Great War?

pilgrims

In Albert, France, we order lasagna from a hotel snack bar and talk to the other hotel guests, all of us bonding in our marooned state on the outskirts of a sleepy town on a Sunday night.

Ron and Marg Hourigan, from Australia, are sending emails to their children.

Ron has spent five years researching where his great-uncle was killed, "So I could walk and say that's where it was," he says.

For so many of us, place is the only thing left. In Belgium, Toronto Star photographer Richard Lautens stands where his great-uncle helped bring a "lot of tobacco" from a spot near the front line, about a mile back, for a civilian who paid him 20 cents.

In England, I scan the old hospital gate in Hastings, looking for my great-grandfather's name engraved in the brick. There is no trace of him, but it feels good to be here, walking on the same ground, listening to the seagulls screeching for French fries, smelling the same salty air of the English Channel.

The battlefields attract all kinds of tourists, but especially people looking for the closure long denied previous generations. For Australians in the 1920s, the trip to the Western Front was a near impossibility - mourners were sent pamphlets of graveyards instead.

Hourigan relates how he and his wife walked carefully through the cornfield where his great-uncle had died. He picked up some shrapnel and then set it back down in the soil.

"I love your spirit and I love what you're doing," he says, making eye contact with each of us with the gravitas of a man who passes out diplomas at a graduation.

The next day, at Thiepval Memorial, we recognize a group of seniors from our hotel. They are cousins in their 60s, 70s and 80s who have come to lay a wreath for Uncle Geoffrey. Geoffrey Hood was 20 when he died in the Somme in 1916. His name is one of the thousands engraved on the British monument, a collection of red-brick arches and pillars that look like children's building blocks.

The cousins find his name, and they bow grey heads to their eternally youthful uncle.

A Frenchman walking his dog wants to talk about bodies he has discovered around the area in the past few decades. He carries a paper towel to dry his sweaty face, and he talks for so long that eventually Uncle Geoffrey's pilgrims, who don't understand French, say a polite goodbye. The Frenchman walks around and finds someone else to tell his stories to before he gets into his car and drives away. It seems like something he does every day.

People who make this journey say it changes them, seeing so much wasted life, imagining all the could-have-beens. Many of the children don't quite understand the scale of devastation. At Vimy Ridge, where 150,000 British and French men had already been killed or wounded by the time the Canadians successfully took it in 1917 at a cost of 10,600 killed and wounded men, a busload of elementary school students have to be reminded not to laugh and scream. When they are told this is a graveyard, they become so silent that you can hear the metal clips clanking against the flag poles.

I often wonder if there a right way to remember. Of course, you need to respect the enormity of what was lost - the generation robbed of its youth, the descendants who never were. But the men who died aren't the stone tablets we take them for. I don't think they would mind a bit of laughter. In the hotel lobbies of Ypres, you see pamphlets advertising a theme park where a battlefield used to be. This upsets some people.

When the war ended, two British soldiers, Bernard Newman and Harold Arpthorp, returned to La Bassée, France, and wrote a poem about how strange it was to see buses rolling over "sacred, holy ground."

"Yes, I wondered what they'd think of it, those mates of mine who died.

Of those buses rattling over the old pave close beside.

'Carry on! That's why we died!' I could almost hear them say,

To keep those buses always running from Bethune to La Bassée!"

harmonica

The war is very purposely on display on the Western Front - the stone soldiers that watch over the countryside, the graveyards that mark death like a spreadsheet, the trenches lined with cement sandbags that children play in.

The moments that stay with me are the serendipitous ones.

We meet Ingeborg Sohier in a museum in Poperinge, Belgium, a town behind the front lines - a place of respite and sanctuary for Commonwealth soldiers.

She has the wonderful singsong cadence of the Flemish, turning "Yeah" into a three-syllable up-tonal celebration: "Ya-aa-ah, you must try it," she says of a nearby brewery.

Her grandfather was 6 during the war. One day he was playing near a field hospital and a soldier asked him his age.

"(The soldier) said, 'Look, I don't think I'm coming home. My son, his birthday is today. I will give it to you,' " she says, pulling a harmonica from her purse. She scrunches up her face and breathes through its metal slats, and an off-key trill overpowers the museum.

"I have it always with me."

the road

Whenever I think back on the preparations for this walk, one image always gets me: Richard Lautens walking his dogs in the Don Valley, wearing a backpack with a few bricks tossed inside, training for the Western Front.

Our relationship to the backpacks is complicated. We appreciate them enough to name them - mine has the first name Bertha, Richard's has Buford, and both have the last name On-my-back. But we resent their heft, and we're always looking for places to ditch them, always finding a reason to send another piece of clothing home.

Still, life on the road is filled with simple joy. Using things to their absolute lastness, squeezing every bit out of a tube of toothpaste, washing clothes with complimentary hotel shampoo, churning shirts underfoot in the shower.

There is so much happiness in bathtubs and radiators, and living so simply. Sticking socks between the hot slats, cooking them to toasty warm in a few hours, emailing back and forth with Richard about a good supply of hot water.

There are no restaurants in the fields, so we hoard food from the breakfast buffet. Richard packs his stolen lunch in a delicate plastic floral garbage bag from a hotel bathroom in France. He tucks it inside his hidden pocket before we leave the dining room. I pack my pants pockets with apples and buns, turning my hiking pants into jodhpurs.

When it rains and we're lucky enough to be in a small village, we wait out the weather in a café-tabac. These small French variety stores are known for their espresso, lottery tickets and morning beer. We order two petit cafés, and they never ask if they are to go. Nobody ever asks that in France.

Any adversity we face 100 years later is of the negligible sort.

Soldiers didn't like to complain. In their purposefully cheery cadence, they'd dull the horror with language, referring to battles as "shows," bouts of sickness as "quite a spell," the rations as "not so bad" in the letters home.

"The biscuits are as hard as a rock but they seem to fill the bill so far as keeping a fellow in condition goes," Charles Douglas Richardson wrote his mother in 1916.

The online Canadian Letters and Images Project is a constant companion to us, an incredible collection of wartime letters that bring these places to life through the words of men now dead. I can never stop myself from clicking on the link to each man's biography. I need to know if they survived the war. In one of his last letters, Richardson thanked his mother for sending pickles. He was killed at Vimy Ridge.

There are occasional lapses into pessimism in the letters, which cause men to apologize profusely in their next instalments, as if the war could be won with morale alone. I feel that those angry bits of correspondence are necessary for the soldiers and the historical record. They also ease my own self-loathing when I send a negative outburst home.

"This is s---," I say to my boyfriend through the camera I'm holding in front of my face, recording a message on a busy highway outside of Lens, in the fourth day of whipping rain that has soaked my clothing. It is something he can watch immediately; there is no four-week delay in sending my thoughts home.

To appreciate a war in which rain was an enemy combatant, you need to feel uncomfortable and walk in shoes that are not quite dry by morning. See how your mood changes, how long optimism can last.

"It's a long war," military historian J.L. Granatstein tells me in Armentières when I call to talk about the Battle of Neuve Chapelle. "It's a long walk."

loss

More than 600,000 Canadian men enlisted for the war. Canada sent 424,000 troops overseas and of them, nearly 61,000 were killed and 172,000 were wounded.

The statistics don't do justice to the cumulative pain of those left behind. But you can feel bursts of anguish in the inscriptions on the Commonwealth graves, written in a maximum of four lines and 112 letters.

"It is as if the sun had gone out"

"Green sod above lie light, lie light: Goodnight dear husband, goodnight, goodnight"

"This little spot, I'd like to see, it was dearly bought by a near friend to me"

Some of the pain floats in the historical ether, not commemorated in stone.

"To one who knew, the past can never be buried," Charles Sauriol writes of this phenomenon after his visit to the Western Front. "To those who did not know, it has never existed."

Consider Anna Durie. In the 1920s she came to the destroyed mining city of Lens, driven mad by grief. She did not want her son to be buried amid the slag heaps of France - slag heaps we can still see even though the mines closed decades ago. Taller now, they resemble triangle mountains drawn by children. Her indignation simmers in my mind; it has been there since I first read her archival letters in Toronto. She scares me. I am scared of a ghost.

Standing in the peaceful graveyard, we see an extra space where Arthur Durie's grave should be, had she not orchestrated the clandestine grave-robbing. I can picture Anna Durie in this graveyard, destroyed by the war that stole her only son. She is smiling in the darkness. She is stealing him back.

wildflowers

The day Anna Durie's story is published in Toronto, I wake up in Arras with a stiff neck and can't turn my head. A part of me that is prone to dramatic daydreaming, which has grown strong from the isolation and single-minded immersion in the past, thinks maybe Anna has something to do with this. After all, a mysterious scrap of paper in a box at the Toronto Archives reads, "I Anna Durie, who being dead yet speaketh . . . hate and love as in the real world." An osteopath in Arras moves my legs and arms, leans into my spine, and diagnoses the problem as a blocked vertebra, likely caused by the backpack, not the spirit of a woman who died in 1933.

WW1 by the numbers

7.8 million people live in Canada

619,636 Canadians enlist

424,000 serve overseas

6,000 casualties in Canada's first battle at Ypres

10,600 Canadian casualties at Vimy Ridge

15,654 Canadian casualties at Passchendaele

59,544 Canadian Expeditionary Force members killed during the war

172,000 Canadians wounded

1305 Newfoundland soldiers killed

2300 Newfoundland soldiers wounded

Like a silent movie monster, I lurch into the Somme, turning my entire body left and right before crossing the street. Richard carries extra weight for a few days. Leave no man behind.

We stop to eat our cheese sandwiches in the shade of a church on a hot afternoon. I eat my lunch lying down and the feel of the hard ground on my spine is much better than Tylenol.

The yellow and purple wildflowers in the grass remind me of Toronto soldier William Howe. In letters filled with spelling mistakes, he fretted about his wife, his money and his children, but he was also proud of his second-place finish in the egg-and-spoon race on the Atlantic crossing.

Two days before he died at Ypres in 1915, he picked his wife wildflowers and put them in an envelope. The flowers likely arrived in Toronto a few weeks after the telegram that announced his death. Did Ellen Howe keep those flowers for the rest of her life? How did she manage when the war also claimed her son two years later?

Pages of the past

timewarp

In two months on the road, Richard and I have lots of time to talk.

On our last walk, the pollen is floating outside a forest near Mons, and our conversation veers into the fantastical: imagine if this forest was a time portal. Imagine if we walk into the trees and come out the other side, and it's 1918.

We talk rules for this fictional scenario: everything we are wearing would come with us, but nothing else. Richard would have his camera, but no battery charger.

If our historical science fiction is optioned as a screenplay, the futuristic female journalist character will have to save George Price, believed to be the last Canadian to die. Price was born on the east coast but worked as a Saskatchewan farmhand before he was conscripted in 1917. On Nov. 11, he was seven kilometres east of Mons, just on the edge of a village called Ville-sur-Haine. He and the men in his battalion knew about the armistice. They had known since 9 a.m.

"Whatever you do George, promise me you won't take any chances," the female lead will say, holding his face in her hands.

"I promise," he'll reply.

She'll rush out into the street after 11 a.m. on Armistice Day and find him alive. She'll be ever so happy until she sees the dead body of another soldier - let's say, for cinematic purposes, she looks at his identity disc and sees a familiar name. It's her grandfather.

She will learn, too late, that someone always has to be the last to die.

We talk about time travel for so long that it almost seems possible. We keep walking.

360 kilometres

People warned us about walking the Western Front. The roads aren't the same as in Canada. There aren't many trenches. You'll be walking on highways. You need a car. Your plan is madness.

Some days, I'm inclined to agree, especially when two cars pass each other on the narrow road, and I jump into the brush and get stabbed by thistles.

The walking can be impractical, but it is mostly beautiful and useful. We feel the landscape and appreciate the slowness of a soldier's world in a way we would miss in a car.

We linger where the Canadians linger, find too-brief sanctuary in towns behind the lines, and hurry through Cambrai and Valenciennes like the tired Canadians in the last 100 days of the war. We improve with every week, we become a team, we come to know our world. Walking is the best part of our day.

By the end, we have walked about 360 kilometres, and biked 50 kilometres for certain places outside of our range. We rely on trains and taxis to bridge certain gaps - like getting to a hotel at the end of the day. Strangers offer rides. They are puzzled that anyone wants to walk in the rain.

We don't see many people, and so we try to make eye contact with everyone, including the cows. In France, the roadside attraction is poppies, in Belgium, it is the "iron harvest" of old war munitions. Richard always scans the soil for shrapnel and guns, handing them over for a cursory feel. They are warm from the sun. By the time we leave Belgium, I have become impassive to these killing fragments of 1915, 1916. I don't even take photos.

madness

The lead-up to the Great War is a swirling mess in my mind, a high-school history question I can never answer fully: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Wilhelm's jealousy of his cousin King George in Britain, the diplomatic games of chicken, the geopolitics boiling over into a war slated for a neat Christmas completion, the idealism of so many young men and women.

This wasn't an old-fashioned war that old men could control. This was post-industrial misery in which machine guns, poison gas and barbed wire made human life a commodity.

The generation that went to war was "disastrously pure in heart and unsuspicious of elderly self-interest and cynical exploitation," Vera Brittain writes in her stunning memoir Testament of Youth.

A young woman when war was declared, she left Oxford and volunteered as a nurse. Her brother, lover and two close friends enlisted. One by one, they were killed, and her ideals were "trampled into the mud which covered the bodies of those with whom I had shared them."

"Often I wonder, as I grieve in vain,/If when the long, long future years creep slow,/And War and tears alike have ceased to reign,/I ever shall recapture, once again,/The mood of that May morning, long ago," she writes in the poem May Morning, referencing life before the war when "I thought that Spring must last for evermore,/For I was young and loved, and it was May."

"The concluding speculation is answered now - not only for me but for all my generation," she writes in her 1933 memoir, her idealism replaced with bitter cynicism. "We never have recaptured that mood; and we never shall."

Outside of Ypres, we stand in Essex Farm Cemetery, where John McCrae wrote the most famous poem of this war after the death of his friend.

"Take up our quarrel with the foe:/To you from failing hands we throw/The torch; be yours to hold it high./If ye break faith with us who die/We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/In Flanders fields."

Thousands of Canadian schoolchildren have recited this poem in school gymnasiums. Now I see it for what it is. An idealistic call to arms.

As we stand along the banks of the canal, a senior from Australia punctuates the tour with horrified gasps. Susan Reid has been doing this all morning.

When she hears about the rotting smell of rats and human waste: "Ghastly."

When she sees a table of rusted guns and shrapnel in a garage: "Good god."

When she imagines the original burials in this cemetery churned to the surface with constant shellfire: "Bloody awful."

After two months here, I have come to accept these pretty graveyards as normal, as history, as a preordained conclusion. An estimated 9.4 million died in action or from their wounds in this war, an average of 6,000 for every day. Reid's gut reaction is important. This landscape, with its perfect rows of crops, bored cows and languorous canals, was a slaughterhouse where millions of young men died taking up a quarrel with the foe. Statistics can never capture what was lost. This was madness. The Australian senior in the green raincoat hasn't lost sight of that.

Good god.

Thank you

There is a wonderful community dedicated to keeping the memory of the Great War alive. They enriched this project every step of the way.

To the volunteers with the Canadian Expeditionary Force Study Group, thank you for helping me interpret a service record and providing great advice as I began the journey. To Chris Harrington and Crystal Loyst of the Strathroy Library, and Liz Adema of the Parkhill Library, thank you for your enthusiasm, reading suggestions and finding my great grandfather's medals. A special thanks to Robert Butler, a historian of Middlesex County's 135th battalion, for coming to meet me at the Strathroy library. To Gord Beck, maps specialist at the Lloyd Reeds Map Collection at McMaster University, thanks for teaching me how to read First World War maps and for constantly sending maps and photos that were essential to understanding the landscape.

To Matt Lucas, the Western Front Association Historical Information Officer, thank you for making the time to chat with me about the reality of the walk.

To Norm Christie, thank you so much for sharing your incredible knowledge and passion for the war, and helping with all manner of small details - like locating Hill 70.

Thank you to Col. G.W.L. Nicholson, who wrote the official history of Canada's experience in WW1, an excellent read. To the staff of Veterans Affairs and of the Beaumont-Hamel Vimy Ridge monuments, thank you for making time for us.

To the staff at Library and Archives Canada, thank you for taking such good care of the past. To Stephen Davies and the Canadian Letters and Images Project, thank you for providing such an incredible resource to Canadians. Those letters written 100 years ago are the heart of this project.

To Jessica Ehrenworth and the staff at Toronto Archives, and to Andrew Fetherston at Commonwealth War Graves Commission Archives, thank you for your help with the documents regarding the Durie family.

To Astrid Lange and Rick Sznajder in the Toronto Star library, thank you for the steady flow of Toronto Daily Star articles from 100 years ago.

To the staff at CFB Valcartier, thank you for the tour of the base and helping us understand the past, buried under a few feet of snow. To Richard Osgood, senior archeologist with Britain's Ministry of Defence, thank you for driving us around the sprawling Salisbury Plain and showing us the old trenches and trees where Canadian soldiers left their marks.

To the Hastings History Club, a wonderful collection of people who went out of their way to make us feel welcome - we will not forget your hospitality.

Historians J.L. Granatstein, Michel Litalien, Terry Copp, Teresa Iacobelli, Andrew Horrall and Tim Cook, your advice and knowledge was crucial in laying the foundation for the walk.

To Stephen O'Shea - who walked the entire western front in journeys between 1985 and 1995 and wrote an incredible account ( Back to the Front), thanks for your advice about dogs, maps and brochures.

To Carol Reid, Susan Ross and the staff at the Canadian War Museum Research Centre, thank you for your time and constant help throughout the series. What an excellent resource.

To our first friends on the Western Front, Barry Bromley and Debbie Swift - thank you for making us feel at home in Belgium, and for all the cupcakes and scones, and updates about the chickens on the farm.

To Steve Douglas in Ypres, a hardworking guy who is never too busy to bring a couple of Canadian journalists to a negotiation with Belgian pig farmers, thank you for understanding a good story.

To volunteer wardens Jerry Sugg and Barrie Glover at Talbot House - after a couple of weeks on the road, you gave us our first bit of respite in Poperinge, carrying on the fine tradition of Talbot House 100 years later.

To Phillip Robinson, David Hedges and Armand Durier of the Durand Group - thank you for taking us below the earth into one of the most preserved parts of the western front, the Maison Blanche caves. We will never forget the experience.

To Valerie Bince-Stuart, thank you for your tour of the small villages and towns near Vimy Ridge to see the unofficial monuments left behind by Canadians.

Thank you to all of the great-nieces and -nephews and grandsons who shared stories of their relatives with us, from Australians like Kim Blomfield and Scott Arthur to descendants in Canada including David Mitsui and countless Toronto Star readers.

There were dozens of people in England, northern France and Belgium who graciously stopped to talk with us in cemeteries and churches, on country lanes and at strawberry vending machines, and they were always patient with our French and lack of Flemish.

Thanks to Jim Fuller, the grandson of photographer T.L. Fuller, who took thousands of photos of Canadians in Salisbury Plain, and who welcomed us into his home when we showed up unannounced. And to Christian Dumont, the grandson of a French civilian executed by the Germans, who invited us to find the execution spot minutes after meeting us: your openness showed us another side of the war.

Finally, to Marilyne Lahaie, who lives where the last Canadian soldier, George Price, was killed on Nov. 11, 1918, thank you for inviting us into your home, the iced tea and standing at your front gate and waving goodbye until we disappeared from your view.

Reading List

The following includes books and articles Richard Lautens and I read (in some cases partially) to prepare for this project, and while on the road. Many were cited in stories, some served as great background primers, and all were invaluable.

Bird, Will R.: Ghosts Have Warm Hands: A Memoir of the Great War 1916-1919, 1930, Ed. Norm Christie. CEF Books, 2002.

Brittain, Vera: Testament of Youth, 1933. Orion Publishing Group, 2014.

Brown, Martin and Richard Osgood: Digging Up Plugstreet: The Archeology of a Great War Battlefield, Haynes Publishing, 2009.

Butler, Robert J.: The 135th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force "Pride of Middlesex": A Brief Narrative History, 2009.

Christie, Norm: Futility and Sacrifice: The Canadians on the Somme, 1916, CEF Books, 2004.

Gas attack! The Canadians at Ypres, 1915, CEF Books, 2002.

Sacred Places: Canadian Cemeteries of the Great War, Vol. 1, Belgium 1915-18, CEF Books, 2011.

Sacred Places: Canadian Cemeteries of the Great War, Volume II, France A-K, CEF Books, 2012.

The Canadians at Passchendaele, October to November 1917, CEF Books, 2007.

Winning the Ridge: The Canadians at Vimy Ridge, CEF Books, 2004.

Christie, Norm, ed.: Unknown Soldiers, by One of Them, 1959. CEF Books, 2013.

Cook, Tim: At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1914 to 1916, Penguin Group, 2007.

Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917-1918, Penguin Group, 2008.

The Madman and the Butcher: The Sensational Wars of Sam Hughes and General Arthur Currie, Penguin Group, 2010.

"The Politics of Surrender: Canadian Soldiers and the Killing of Prisoners in the Great War," The Journal of Military History. Vol. 70, 2006.

Copp, Terry, Matt Symes and Nick Lachance: Canadian Battlefields, 1915 1918: A Visitor's Guide, LCMSDS Press/Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 20s11.

Cusack, Veronica: The Invisible Soldier: Captain W.A.P. Durie, His Life and Afterlife, McClelland & Stewart, 2004.

Dawson, Mary Jean: I Remember: Memories of Parkhill Ontario, E. Dawson, M. Walsh and L.W. Zuefelt, 2001.

Dyer, Geoff: The Missing of the Somme, Phoenix, 2009.

Durie, Anna: A Canadian Volunteer: Letters from the Front from Captain William Arthur Peel Durie, 58th Battalion C.E.F. and Other Letters. Fonds 1065; Durie family fonds, Series 832; Durie family papers, Toronto Archives, Before 1933.

George, Harry Elwood: For King and Country - Excerpts from Letters Written by Harry Elwood George, 1915-1919

Gilbert, Martin: First World War, HarperCollins, 1994.

Horrall, Andrew: " 'Keep-A-Fighting! Play the Game!' Baseball and the Canadian Forces during the First World War." Canadian Military History, Vol. 10: Issue 2, 2001 (2001). Available online here.

Historical Committee of the Parkhill Centennial Committee: Parkhill and District Centennial, 1860-1960, The Parkhill Centennial Committee, 1960.

Iacobelli, Teresa: Death or Deliverance. Canadian Courts Martial in the Great War, UBC Press, 2013.

Jones, Nigel: The War Walk. A Journey Along the Western Front, 1983. Endeavour Press, 2012.

Nicholson, G.W.L.: Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War: Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1919, Queen's Printer and Controller of Stationery. Available online at here.

North Middlesex Sesquicentennial Committee: North Middlesex: How It Came to Be, Track 21 Graphix, 2010.

O'Shea, Stephen: Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I, 1996. Douglas & McIntryre, 2012.

Sauriol, Charles: Dear Harry. Fonds 4; Charles Sauriol fonds, Series 107, Manuscripts of Charles Sauriol, Toronto Archives, 1976.

Scott, Frederick George: The Great War as I Saw It, F.D. Goodchild, 1922. Available online at here.

Shackleton, Kevin R.: Second to None: The Fighting 58th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, The Dundurn Group, 2002.

Sharpe, Robert J.: The Last Day, The Last Hour: The Currie Libel Trial, 1988. University of Toronto Press, 2009.

Sutherland, T.W.: No. 8 Canadian Stationary Hospital: History of the Formation and Subsequent Activities of No. 8 Canadian Stationary Hospital, Canadian War Museum Library, 1918.

Tuchman, Barabara W.: The Guns of August, 1962. Random House, 2009.

The following websites and archives were also integral to this project:

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Walking the Western Front | World War 1 | Toronto Star

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Katie Daubs and Richard Lautens traced the footsteps of Canadian soldiers in a two month odyssey, following the trenches of Belgium and France. The tourist has just finished lunch near the battlefield, which was pulverized with deep shell holes 97 years ago and is now covered by a soft layer of grass.

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Helping Our Youth to Remember

Legions throughout Ontario Command sponsor youth programs that include sports, cadet corps, scouts, leadership training and remembrance activities. It is our aim to help youth learn an appreciation for teamwork, leadership, duty and most importantly, Remembrance.

Remembrance

Legions believe educating our youth on the high cost of their freedom is one of our most important roles in Ontario today. We must impress upon young people who have never known war, that freedom was won at the cost of many lives; young lives like their own. Our annual poster, literary and essay contests with a Remembrance theme, help focus the attention of the participants on those who gave all for the freedom we enjoy.

Ontario Command participates in the biannual Pilgrimage of Remembrance. This program, organized by our Dominion Command, uses veterans and other Legion dignitaries as guides for tours of WWI and WWII battlefields and cemeteries.

In 2011 Ontario Command signed an accord with the three leagues (Army, Navy & Air Force) to strengthen and further or relationship with Cadets.

The Royal Canadian Legion branches have been a strong supporter of their local cadet units for many years and in turn the cadets units have assisted their branches with Poppy Campaigns and other Remembrance activities. Our branches are proud that since 2011 they have donated $1,337,000.00 to the Cadet Corps in Ontario.

Interested in joining a Cadet Corps? Click on link : Army | Navy | Air Force

Cadet Medal of Excellence

Legions all across Ontario Command, in partnership with local cadet organizations and their sponsors, participate in the Legion Cadet Medal of Excellence Program. The Royal Canadian Legion Cadet Medal of Excellence is awarded annually to the cadet having shown a high degree of participation and leadership in the area of citizenship and in meeting and enhancing the aims and objectives of the cadet organization.
Find Out More About the Cadet Medal of Excellence
Track & Field

The Track and Field program of Ontario Command is unique in that it is the only program of its kind in the province that offers both a summer and winter meet to girls and boys 17 years of age and under. Athletes can compete at two other levels (zone and district) and those that qualify at these levels can progress to the provincial level.
Read More About the Track Meets
The Bursary Program is designed to assist those students who enter a post secondary school of education (including courses and training programs of a technical and vocational nature) and pursue the same course throughout their academic years.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE PROCESS & HOW TO APPLY
Youth Contests

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Helping Our Youth to Remember Legions throughout Ontario Command sponsor youth programs that include sports, cadet corps, scouts, leadership training and remembrance activities. It is our aim to help youth learn an appreciation for teamwork, leadership, duty and most importantly, Remembrance.

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Hollorado is a Canadian Band. This song and video retells the story of one of the band members grandfather's experience with the German occupation of Holland in WWII.

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Due: December 1

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Using this database you can search for anyone that served the Canadian Armed Services in the First World War.

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Search: Personnel Records of the First World War - Library and Archives Canada

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Search: Personnel Records of the First World War - Library and Archives Canada

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Milo

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Beaucoup des infos ici.

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Une bonne exemple pour ceux qui vont créer un vidéo.

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Concours d'art du jour du Souvenir.

Cette année, vous avez la possibilité de participer au concours d'affiches/poèmes/dissertations du jour du Souvenir. Comme depuis quelques années, il y a aussi un concours vidéo.

Le Padlet ci-joint contient toutes les informations du concours. Le babillard à l'extérieur de notre salle de classe contient également les informations nécessaires.

Dans cette classe, vous devez créer une pièce qui pourrait être considérée pour le concours.

****Vous n'êtes pas obligé de participer au concours****

Si vous avez une idée d'œuvre d'art ou d'écriture qui vous intéresse et qui pourrait techniquement ne pas être admissible au concours, veuillez discuter avec moi de ce que vous pourriez faire.

Je vous recommande également fortement de passer du temps à explorer certaines des ressources partagées sur le Padlet pour obtenir des informations, des idées et du contenu à inclure dans votre création.

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Remembrance Day Art Contest.

This year, you have the opportunity to enter the Remembrance Day Poster/Poem/Essay Contest. As has been for the past few years, there is a video contest as well.

The attached Padlet has all the contest information. The bulletin board outside of our classroom also has the necessary information.

In this class, you are required to create one piece that could be considered for the contest.

****You are not required to enter the contest****

If you have an idea for a piece of art or writing that you are interested in making, that might not technically qualify for the contest, please have a discussion with me about what you could do.

I also strongly recommend that you spend some time exploring some of the resources shared on the Padlet to gain some information, ideas and content to include in your creation.

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REMEMBRANCE DAY VIDEO 2022 - FOR STUDENTS AND SCHOOLS - Rare Actual Footage from Vimy to Afghanistan

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Find some inspiration?

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Objects and Photos - Objects and Photos | Canada and the First World War

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Canada's contribution to the First World War led to growing autonomy and international recognition, but at great cost.

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explanation...