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In this photo, nearly a year after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the more than a thousand soldiers with the 26th Battalion prepare to ship off to fight the war that the event sparked. The men were eager volunteers from all across New Brunswick, and they were soon to be thrown into the most devastating trials of the Western Front: The drowning mud of Passchendaele, the poison gas of Ypres, the record-breaking casualties of the Battle of the Somme and, of course, the taking of Vimy Ridge. When the battalion returned to Canada four years later, local papers noted the men had “returned to finish the most wonderful experience of their lives,” but shied away from noting just how many had failed to return.

The grainy, poor quality of this photo does not do justice to the grisly scene it portrays; a front line trench strewn with corpses that, according to a photo caption, was “captured by the Germans, retaken two hours later by the Canadians.” Not one German escaped,” the caption adds. One of the ironies of the Great War is that the high technologies of the era, from machine guns to aircraft, reduced soldiers to fighting in underground trenches using medieval, close-quarters weapons. As such, it’s entirely possible that the mangled corpses in this photo met their demise at the end of a sharpened shovel or an improvised hatchet.

It was often hard for Canadians back home to imagine the dehumanizing, continent-spanning battles that characterized the Great War. As a result, the conflict was often portrayed in glorified—even saccharine—terms. This 1919 photo shows a Great War commemoration. Note the men in crisp uniforms, the beautiful women draped in national flags, the children dressed as ballerinas—and no hint of the world-shattering horrors the assemblage was there to commemorate.