![]() ![]() These ratios persisted throughout the war. There were relatively few Canadian-born soldiers and fewer still from French-speaking Canada. The officers were mainly Canadian-born, but some two-thirds of the soldiers were recent immigrants from Great Britain. More striking still was the makeup of the First Contingent. When an officer on the ground presses a button, it produces a flash on the board which men on the platform are supposed to spot and take coordinates of. The organizational chaos Hughes created lasted through much of the war.Īrtillery spotting class in a training facility in Canada. Officers were appointed based on whom they knew, and units were jerry-built by combining soldiers from two, three or more militia regiments. There was no camp there, and chaos reigned supreme as one was built. ![]() When the war broke out, Minister of Militia and Defence Sam Hughes scrapped a planned mobilization scheme for an improvised one that took some 35,000 volunteers to Valcartier, Que. There was much enthusiasm among the 50,000 or so militiamen, but little real training, inadequate equipment and almost no staff-trained officers. These victories might well be classed as miraculous, considering where Canada’s army had been four years earlier. The Canadian Corps’s Hundred Days had been extraordinary, a series of the greatest victories ever won in battle by Canadian troops. Then followed the liberation of Cambrai, the enemy’s key supply centre in northern France, the taking of the city of Valenciennes, and the German rout as they were chased out of France and into Belgium. The Canadian Corps, part of the BEF’s First Army, had used its great power to push the Germans to the east, forcing them out of their lines at Amiens in August, out of the Drocourt-Quéant Line near Arras at the beginning of September, and across the Canal du Nord at the end of that month. In 1918, however, the situation had totally reversed. A long retreat began that forced the BEF westward. The units of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) that faced the enemy that August fought gamely but unsuccessfully against the massive weight of the German advance. There was something right about that symbolism. ![]() When the guns ceased firing, the Canadian Corps was in Mons, Belgium, the city where the British had first made contact with the invading Germans in August 1914. on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The Armistice that ended the First World War took effect at 11 a.m. ![]()
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