At sundown on Nov. 11, communities across Canada marked the Armistice centenary with 100 tolls
They came from small towns and big cities, villages and farms, east and west, north and south—619,636 volunteers and conscripts, two-thirds of whom served overseas during the First World War.
More than 66,000 were killed and 172,000 wounded in places like Ypres, the Somme, Passchendaele, Vimy Ridge. The place names are part of the lexicon of Canadian history, but they also died in faraway Egypt, Palestine, Gallipoli and on the Dvina River in northern Russia. At home, it was a sombre time as sons and brothers and fathers—daughters, sisters and mothers, too—enlisted and served overseas, so many never to return.
Across Great Britain from 1914 to 1918, regulations introduced under the...