One hundred years ago Sunday, while 15,000 Canadian infantrymen were preparing to storm Vimy Ridge, 45-year-old Torontonian Joseph Bradshaw was counting artillery shells.

As a director of ordnance for the 126th Battalion, Bradshaw was one of the men in charge of protecting his fellow soldiers, shielding them with a moving curtain of explosions as they advanced towards the German machine-gun nests on the French hilltop. They were going to need a lot of shells.

More than 10,000 Canadians would be killed or wounded in the four days that it took to finally wrest Vimy Ridge from the Germans in a battle many historians say helped define Canada as a country. Bradshaw survived the ordeal, but died on Dec. 25, 1919, of shrapnel wounds and mustard gas poisoning.

On Saturday, Bradshaw’s great-grandson, 8-year-old Benjamin Farrar, carried Bradshaw’s two medals to Toronto’s Fort York to see a miniature re-enactment of the kind of fighting his great-grandfather was part of.

“That’s why we’re here today,” said Bradshaw’s grandson, Paul Farrar, while another son, 3-year-old Elliott, played on a Canadian Forces G Wagon.

“It’s an important day for us. He left behind a wife and four kids,” Farrar said of his grandfather.

Farrar, his children and their mother, Mary Clarke, joined hundreds of other Torontonians at Fort York to mark the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. Re-enactors dressed in period uniforms — both Canadian and German — showed off the weaponry, tactics and lifestyle of soldiers during the First World War.

More at thestar.com:

The tangled routes of our Vimy oak

Newly discovered photos depict unveiling of Vimy memorial

Trudeau arrives in France to mark 100th anniversary of Vimy Ridge