Defence Today

The First World War is known for stagnancy and stalemate—trench-bound days of misery and boredom punctuated by periodic terror and wholesale slaughter. Soldiers from both sides lived in 2,490 kilometres of trenchworks winding southward from the North Sea through Belgium and France. For them it was a waiting game—a long, cold, mud-soaked ordeal broken only by the call to go “over the top,” a suicidal charge into a hail of bullets, usually at a whistle’s blow. But for all its frustrating lack of movement and futility, the First World War was, technologically speaking, a turning point, marked more than any conflict before it by advances that changed the nature of war and, in some cases, peace. The machine gun replaced the long gun as the most lethal small weapon on the battlefield; t...

Don’t judge a book by its cover, goes the adage. But magazine readers do it all the time. In the highly competitive periodical industry, the cover is all-important. It’s that hook that can make a publication stand out from all the others on crowded newsstands, inspiring potential readers to pick it up and, hopefully, buy it. The cover, say marketers and editors alike, is the most important page of the magazine. If it doesn’t grab a shopper in three seconds, goes the rule, it won’t grab them at all. The graphic designers at Canvet Publications, publishers of Legion Magazine and the quarterly Canada’s Ultimate Story series of special editions, usually produce up to a dozen cover designs for each issue. If the preferred ideas turn out to be a particularly close call, the top ...

Pierre Gauthier landed on D-Day with his Régiment de la Chaudière and fought through France, Belgium and into the Netherlands before a second wound ended his war. His regiment lost 58 men killed on June 6, 1944, and 248 before the fighting ended 11 months later, but among the most unsettling images that remain burned in the veteran’s mind are those of the people they had liberated turning on each other and on those who had defeated them four or five years earlier. In an interview with Legion Magazine, Gauthier, a Montreal native who enlisted in 1942 at age 17, recalled how criminals posing as French partisans moved in and terrorized liberated towns after the Canadians had left. He described how retribution killings were taken on surrendering occupiers, and how, contrary to the fam...