Canadian Battlefields 1915-1918: A Visitor's Guide

Most of the world remembers the First World War as a time when, as historian Samuel Hynes put it, “innocent young men, their heads full of high abstractions like Honour, Glory, and England ... were slaughtered in stupid battles planned by stupid Generals.” English-speaking Canadians have for the most part accepted this view and supplemented it with an imaginative version of a war in which their soldiers won great victories and forged a new national identity. Both approaches have served to promote literary, political, and cultural agendas of such power that empirical studies of actual wartime events have had little impact on the historiography. A new generation of scholars has challenged those approaches, however, insisting that the reality of the war and the society that produced it are worthy of study.

This guide to the Canadian battlefields in France and Belgium offers a brief critical history of the war and of Canada’s contribution, drawing attention to the best recent books on the subject. It focuses on the Ypres Salient, Passchendaele, Vimy, and the “Hundred Day”s battles and considers lesser-known battlefields as well. Battle maps, contemporary maps, photographs, war art, and tourist information enhance the reader experience.

Terry Copp is the director of the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies and a professor emeritus at Wilfrid Laurier University. He is the author or co-author of fourteen books and many articles on the Canadian role in the Second World War, including travel guides to the Canadian battlefields. Fields of Fire: The Canadians in Normandy won the 2004 Distinguished Book Award for non-US history from the American Society for Military History.

Matt Symes has worked and taught extensively on the history of war and memory and is co-author of five battlefield guidebooks, including Canadian Battlefields 1915–1918: A Visitor’s Guide. Symes was co-editor (with Geoffrey Hayes and Mike Bechthold) of Canada and the Second World War: Essays in Honour of Terry Copp.

Nick Lachance is a student at Wilfrid Laurier University and a Research Assistant at LCMSDS. Many of his photos appear in this guide. Lachance’s primary responsibility was to use modern satellite images from Google Earth and rework them into the 59 historical and tour maps inside the guide.