At noon on Jan. 17, 1917, a group of comrades were eating a lunch of bully beef and hardtack near Vimy, France, when their dugout was damaged by German shelling. Their work was cut out for them. They needed a new dugout “so we will have a place for the night,” Private Harry Morris wrote home in a letter to his family, published online by the Canadian Letters and Images Project (www.canadianletters.ca). Despite the bombardment, they started a new dugout and repaired the damaged walls of their trench and a destroyed gun pit. “[We] keep plugging along, very busy dodging shells.” At 1:30 p.m., the First World War ended for 36-year-old Morris when a shell exploded nearby. “I heard the explosion after I was hit. Shrapnel travels at a greater velocity than the sound.” His thigh ...

It’s fair to say Harvey Douglas Burns did not know what lay in store when he left the merchant marine and joined the Royal Canadian Navy in 1942. Sailors in the merchant navy had cabins, shared with one shipmate. After joining the crew of HMCS Port Arthur, he asked a shipmate where he was going to sleep. “Do you see them bars up there? That’s where you hang your hammock.” Conditions on the corvette were crowded. “The ship was made for 85 crew, and there was 105 of us aboard. You didn’t have any privacy,” said Burns in a Memory Project interview. In the washrooms, called heads, the men shared three toilets and wash bowls, “so you had to wait your turn. And there was more mealtimes than meals. When the weather was bad in the North Atlantic, they just give you a can of strawberry jam an...