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You're In the Army Now
By September 4, 42,000 Canadians, many previously unemployed, most white and
about 70 per cent British-born, settled into Valcartier to learn the practicalities
of army life. The fact that along with them were 8,000 horses suggested that
the war Canadian soldiers were being prepared for didn't bear much relation to
the war they were about to discover overseas.
Many of the horses that were being trained and groomed in Valcartier died on
the muddy Salisbury Plain of England, many more in the mire of real battle. Cavalry
units trained in Valcartier saw little action. Soldiers were schooled in the
art of sword play and never used a sword in real combat. Many soldiers marched
with sticks of wood instead of guns.
The trenches used for training were clean, cartoon versions of the septic death-holes
the men would fight and die in. Many of the |
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regiments' leaders were businessmen, lawyers or other professionals who had financed
the regiments but knew little about real battle except what they had read in
training manuals. Hughes had sent Canada's only Permanent Force battalion, the
Royal Canadian Regiment, men who had actual battle-won experience, to Bermuda.
Many of the young would-be soldiers knew no more of real war than they saw in
swashbuckling posters, read in novels or imagined in their flights of derring-do.
For many of them, the real training would begin when they moved on to England.
Valcartier really introduced them to the procedures, endless forms, inoculations,
dull drills and heavy discipline of army life. Many of the young men chaffed
at the strictures, mocking superiors they felt knew little about real battle.
They gained a reputation as rule-bucking roughnecks, a repute they would carry
with them overseas. |
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Visitors to 35th Battalion
trenches
At the Canadian National Exhibition 1915 Canadians toured
antiseptic versions of the trenches Canadians soldiers would soon wallow in. |
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