On this morning 90 years ago, George Price was searching for a German machine-gunner in the Belgian village of Ville-sur-Haine.
A private in the 28th Canadian Infantry Battalion, the 25-year-old farm labourer from Moose Jaw, Sask. had been drafted a year earlier.
He arrived in France in May 1918, and already had been gassed by the Germans during the battle of Canal du Nord. Now he and four fellow soldiers, pistols drawn, were kicking open the door of a house from which they had seen a machine-gun firing.
But the Germans had fled.
The house, and one next door, held only their relieved Belgian occupants, who offered the Canadians celebratory drinks.
Moments later, machine-gun fire erupted from a knoll behind the houses. As Price stepped into the street for a look, a single sniper shot rang out, striking him in the chest. He died within minutes. It was 10:58 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918. An armistice ending The War to End All Wars, signed hours earlier, was due to come into effect at 11 a.m. But the news hadn't reached Price's party.
Thus did George Lawrence Price, two minutes from surviving a war that claimed the lives of more than 66,000 of his countrymen, instead earn a hapless distinction – the last Canadian to die during the First World War.
As history recedes, Price's sacrifice, and that of his compatriots, looks more and more incomprehensible.
Ninety years after the great powers of Europe signed that armistice, on a day dedicated to remembrance, it's worth recalling what the end of the Great War meant – and continues to mean – to Canadians.
Most importantly, it meant an end to unthinkable carnage. Almost 50 per cent more Canadians were killed during the First World War than died in the Second World War. But the raw numbers fail to convey the extent of the slaughter.
"I think Canadians today would have a hard time imagining the scale of the loss," says Tim Cook, a First World War historian at the Canadian War Museum.
When the war began, Canada was home to fewer than eight million people. As a proportion of population, the 66,000 who died on Europe's battlefields between 1914 and 1918 is the equivalent of more than 250,000 today.
Another 170,000 were wounded, the modern equivalent of more than 600,000.
Many survivors were permanently scarred in body and mind by the horrors they endured. During the war's final 100 days alone, when Canadian Corps troops breached German lines along some of the most daunting sections of the Western Front, 45,000 of the corps 120,000 or so soldiers were killed or wounded.
"We made our reputation as elite shock troops," says Cook, "but of course we paid a terrible price."
When Britain declared war at midnight on Aug. 4, 1914, Canada – not yet fully a nation in its own right – was automatically at war.
With a regular army of 3,110 men and a two-ship navy, the country was ill-prepared. Within weeks, though, more than 32,000 men had volunteered. Nobody expected the war to last long. Most who signed up viewed it as a grand adventure. As the war ground on, with opposing armies locked into networks of foul and fetid trenches, grim realism set in. Still the volunteers, who were disproportionately British-born, kept coming.
Ultimately, more than 600,000 volunteers and conscripts would serve, about 20 per cent of the pre-war labour force.
Almost everyone, particularly in English-speaking Canada, was affected.
"The war was on the streets," says Ryerson's David MacKenzie, editor of Canada and the First World War. "You had people walking around who were recruiting or who were working in war industries. It was everywhere."
The war also produced a raft of new Canadian heroes.
Daring aviators such as Billy Bishop, W.G. Barker and Raymond Collishaw became household names. No fewer than 70 Canadians won Victoria Crosses for their valour. A Canadian physician, Lieut.-Col. John McCrae, who didn't live to see the war's end, penned a poem while awaiting casualties during the battle of Ypres in 1915. In 15 terse but potent lines his poem, In Flanders Fields, immortalized the sacrifice of soldiers for all time.
John McCrae's poem, the poppy, two minutes of silence, the eleventh hour – all remain potent symbols today. "They all come out of this terrible event that forever changed our country," says Cook.
Some changes were fundamental, accelerating seismic shifts already under way.
One was industrialization.
By 1916, the Imperial Munitions Board had become Canada's largest employer, with 250,000 workers supplying about a third of the shells used by British armies on the Western Front. Maritime shipyards cranked out submarines and more than 100 plants produced airplane parts.
Empowerment of women was another big shift.
By 1916, with hundreds of thousands of men overseas, labour shortages were acute – thus thousands of women left their homes to fill the gap.
Some did so from patriotic motives. But for many others, whose husbands were casualties of the war or were fighting overseas, the motive was practical necessity.
"They went because they needed jobs," MacKenzie says.
When the war ended, most returned to their kitchens as the country struggled to find work for the flood of returning veterans. Nevertheless, says Cook, "there was a change in how society viewed women and what they could do."
The war years saw another historic breakthrough for women. In 1917, the Unionist government of Sir Robert Borden extended the franchise in federal elections to women on active military service and close female relatives of anyone who had served in the military. It was a crass political ploy designed to expand the number of people likely to vote for the government, says MacKenzie.
But it paved the way for the expansion of the franchise in 1919 to all non-Native Canadian women 21 and older.
The Great War also bequeathed another less honoured legacy to Canadians: income taxes.
Incomes taxes were supposed to be temporary. But the war permanently altered Canada's fiscal landscape. After it ended, the federal government was paying more just in soldiers' pensions and interest on wartime debt than the entire pre-war budget.
The introduction of income taxes symbolizes another of the war's enduring legacies – government intervention in the lives of Canadians.
Before 1914, government had little involvement in the day to day lives of citizens.
"The war changes that," Cook says.
That culminated with conscription in 1917 – forcing young men to fight against their will – the ultimate form of government intervention.
In total about 125,000 Canadians were drafted, though only 25,000 saw combat before the war ended. Conscription also sparked one of the nation's most divisive political crises, pitting French Canada against English Canada and obliterating the fortunes of Conservatives in Quebec for two generations.
It's almost a cliche to observe that Canadian nationhood was forged on the battlefields of the First World War.
And there's much truth to that, says Cook. "One of the things that does come out of the war is a new sense of what it means to be Canadian," he says. Through the exploits of the Canadian Corps on the Western Front, "there is a sense that Canada has done something special, that we have finally stepped from Britain's shadow."
But that new patriotism wasn't universally shared.
"French-Canadians didn't buy into that at all," says MacKenzie. Other Canadians whose heritage wasn't British had different perspectives as well. There was a sense, says Cook, "that in this enormous exertion to win this war we had come together like never before. But also, we were nearly torn apart."
When the war finally ended, almost everyone was caught off guard.
Most had expected it to continue for at least another year or two. On the battlefields, there was no celebration, just shocked silence and disbelief the killing was finally over.
The war wasn't done with Canada yet, however.
When soldiers started returning from Europe in early 1919, they brought with them a virulent disease, the Spanish flu. Within a year, it would kill 50,000 Canadians – nearly as many as died during four years of war.
The immediate post-war period was turbulent, as Canada struggled to reintegrate returning soldiers overflowing with a newfound patriotism that often shaded into intolerance for immigrants, French-Canadians, so-called "enemy aliens" and almost anyone else who wasn't of British heritage.
As the economy crashed into a mini-depression and the expected jobs failed to materialize, disillusionment settled over the veterans. In the trenches of Europe, they had been sustained by the belief they would be hailed as heroes in Canada.
They would help rebuild the country in a new mood of solidarity and camaraderie. "Those ideals don't survive job loss and all the other difficulties," says Cook.
For those who lost loved ones, the war was a wound that would never fully heal. The fact that the bodies of the dead remained an ocean away, denying their families the emotional closure of a funeral, only added to their pain. As if to compensate, thousands of cenotaphs, statues, plaques and war memorials rose in a frenzy of collective mourning in cities, towns and villages across Canada.
"There was a need," says Cook, "to make sense of this war."
These sites of memory remain a visible legacy of the Great War. However you view it, the war was a transformative event in our history, says Cook.
"The introduction of income tax, industrialization of the country, a changing sense of who we are – these are monumental changes, for good or for ill. We are never the same afterwards."
With just a single First World War veteran, 108-year-old John Babcock, still alive, we're now on the edge of lived history, Cook says.
"It's a razor blade and we're about to fall into history."
But he's convinced the Great War will remain relevant to Canadians.
"Somehow, this war's still important," says Cook. "And it is, because we've made it important. Canadians have said that this is important to them. It still haunts us."
© Ottawa Citizen 2008
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