Canada's dream shall be of them : Canadian epitaphs of the Great War / Eric McGeer & Steve Douglas.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McGeer, Eric, author.

Douglas, Steve, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Epitaphs--Canada.

Epitaphs.

World War, 1914-1918--Casualties--Canada.

World War, 1914-1918.

Cemeteries--France.

Cemeteries.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (1 online resource.)

Place of Publication:

Waterloo, Ontario : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017.

Summary:

There could be no truer witness to the enormity of the First World War and its terrible cost in lives than the memorials and war cemeteries along the old Western Front. In Canada, no less than in the other dominions of the British Empire, the war left a conflicting legacy of pride and sorrow that endures to this day.The soaring Vimy Memorial, the Brooding Soldier, and the monuments honouring Canada's significant contribution to the Allied victory symbolize the spirit of shared sacrifice and nationhood that emerged from the crucible of the war. But alongside this official commemoration there exists a poignant, strangely overlooked, record of the grief and search for consolation among the Canadian populace in the years after the Armistice. This has come down in the personal inscriptions which the Imperial War Graves Commission invited next of kin to have engraved on the headstones of the fallen. Simple, heartfelt, often gems of compression, these farewells preserve the voice of Canada's bereaved, the parents, the wives, the children, who were left to mourn and to seek meaning and comfort in their loss. This book offers an anthology of epitaphs drawn from the war cemeteries where Canadian soldiers lie buried in Flanders and France. Photographs and war art transport readers to the sites, and each chapter reviews the sources and themes of the epitaphs to establish their place in the national memory of the First World War.

Contents:

Front Matter

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Storied Vimy's Hill

Farewell, Beloved

The Ypres Salient

He Fell at the Somme

Passchendaele

The Hundred Days

He Sleeps not here but in Hearts Across the Seas

Suggestions for Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Chapter-Opener Images, Copyright Acknowledgements, and Abbreviations

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed August 18, 2017).

ISBN:

9781771123112

1771123117

OCLC:

978709007