This week, The Great War in Colour, a traveling exhibition of colourized First World War images presented by the Vimy Foundation, opened at the Canadian War Museum.

First created for a book, They Fought in Colour, the images were selected for colourization because the Vimy Foundation found that Canadian young people were having trouble connecting to grainy, monochrome archival photos. With colour, they discovered, Canadian high school students could suddenly see themselves in the images. “It makes people realize that they (Canada’s First World War soldiers) were just regular people in many cases,” said Vimy Foundation executive director Jeremy Diamond.

The Great War in Colour has already made stops in Toronto, Halifax, Winnipeg, Calgary and Cobourg — with more to be announced in 2019 — but the Vimy Foundation has graciously allowed the National Post to publish a selection below.

Canadians at home during the First World War often had only the barest concept of what they had sent their young men to do. Canadians’ experience war up until that point had consisted largely of a few hundred men fighting a pitched battle over the course of an afternoon. Here, at the 1915 Canadian National Exhibition, crowds of well-dressed Torontonians are watching a cartoonishly sanitized demonstration of soldiers “going over the top.” There are no shell bursts, no men incontinent with fear and there certainly aren’t whole columns of soldiers being scythed down by machine gun fire. Less than 10 months after this photo was taken, the Royal Newfoundland Regiment would be almost completely wiped out after going over the top on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

For about 35,000 Canadians, this is what the First World War looked like: They were sent to Europe, handed an axe and ordered to cut down trees until Germany surrendered. The First World War consumed an utterly daunting quantity of wood, and the Canadians were rightly considered to have a knack for felling trees. Service in the Canadian Forestry Corps was a great way to avoid the front lines, but it didn’t make logging any less dangerous. A not-insignificant number of Canadian soldiers would end up receiving their war wounds not from a German shell, but from a stubborn French fir.

In a war filled with never-before-seen horrors, the Battle of Passchendaele would still manage to occupy a uniquely traumatic place in the minds of its survivors. The terrain was so shattered by flooding and shellfire that maintaining recognizable trenches became impossible, leaving whole armies of confused men to kill one another in a chaotic morass of mud and corpses. This photo also deftly captures the cruel, reciprocal mechanics of war. In the foreground, fresh soldiers carry duckboards to the fight. In the background, wounded men and German prisoners stream to the rear. Dead bodies were such a predictable product of the Western Front that work battalions would often start digging graves before a battle on the reasonable expectation that they would shortly be filled.

This was taken in September, 1917 while the Battle of Passchendaele was still underway. The static nature of the front lines during the First World War meant a surreal experience for any soldier being rotated out of the lines: One minute they would be clinging to life in the worst place on earth, a short train ride later and they would be carousing in a picturesque French village untouched by war. These are soldiers preparing for the Maple Leaf Concert Party, one of many comedic revues to entertain front line troops. As with military entertainment on both sides of the Great War, men in drag was a must.

This is a “dressing station”: A first aid post where wounded soldiers could be patched up before being evacuated to hospital or sent back into the fray. Physician John McCrae was famously posted at a Belgian dressing station when he wrote In Flanders Fields, but this particular one was set up for the Battle of Courcelette, in which thousands of Canadians were killed or wounded to capture the ruins of a tiny French farming village. What’s most haunting about this photo is the grinning man at bottom left, who is believed to have been suffering from severe shell shock.

This is among the most quaint-looking image in the Vimy Foundation collection: Men are being churned up by shellfire only a few miles away but these lucky souls are enjoying a narrow-gauge train ride through the French countryside. On board are the wounded, secure in the knowledge that whatever their physical scars, their war may be over. Even in ideal circumstances sending a few million men to camp out along the 700 kilometres of the Western Front would have been a supply nightmare. Throw in bullets, shells and a constant stream of dead and wounded, and the First World War rapidly became the biggest logistical ordeal in all human history. Just behind the lines whole swaths of northern France were littered with depots, supply dumps, traffic jams and, like in this photo, hastily constructed railways.

Black Canadians in the first waves of men attempting to enlist in the Canadian Corps were initially rejected. “I have been fortunate to have secured a very fine class of recruits and I do not think it fair that they should have to mingle with Negroes,” the commanding officer of a New Brunswick battalion wrote in 1915. Only after a pressure campaign by prominent black activists did individual units begin relaxing their enlistment policies and sending black Canadian soldiers into battle alongside their white compatriots (a phenomenon that wouldn’t occur in the U.S. Army until the Korean War). This photo shows three Canadian soldiers posing in a captured German dugout during the Last Hundred Days, a final spasm of Western Front bloodshed that would drive the German army to surrender.

The First World War was a bizarre melding of new and old. It saw the debut of tanks and long-range bombers, but also the revival of maces and war clubs in hand-to-hand trench combat. It saw generals send in machine guns and aircraft-guided artillery, even while still dressed in the feathers and gold braid of the Napoleonic era. And despite fighting a war in the age of radio, telephones and undersea telegraph cables, infantry soldiers still relied heavily on homing pigeons to communicate with their commanders. This cinematic photo shows the men of His Majesty’s Pigeon Service, a unit with the singular task of keeping those pigeons trained, fed and ready for action.

One of the more unbelievable aspects of the First World War is that Commonwealth troops often went into battle against a soundtrack of bagpipe music. Machines guns would be rattling, wounded men would be screaming for stretcher-bearers and amidst it all some guy in a kilt would be belting out the Maple Leaf Forever. Pipers were uniquely vulnerable during battles; they were unarmed, they carried no cutting equipment for barbed wire and they were of course easy targets for German marksmen. A Canadian pipe band is practicing in a corn field in this 1917 photo, right about the time when commanders would start pulling bagpipes from front line service.

Many surviving images of the First World War are staged, and this one is likely no exception. It’s one of several images showing a French newspaper boy selling his wares to smiling Canadian soldiers. The soldier in this photo is Tom Longboat, an Onondaga distance runner still regarded as one of Canada’s greatest athletes. He won the Boston Marathon in 1907, was the star attraction for crowds at Madison Square Garden and set a world record for the 15-mile race in 1912. Longboat abandoned his athletic career to enlist with the Canadian Corps in 1916, where he was tasked as a dispatch runner.

This is one of Diamond’s favourite images in the collection. It depicts a Canadian writing home in May, 1917, one month after the battle of Vimy Ridge. The soldier’s hairstyle, open shirt and scraggly moustache give him an unusually modern appearance, almost as if a 21st century record store employee has time-travelled to the Western Front. “It looks like somebody on Queen West in Toronto,” said Diamond. “The reason they look familiar is because they were kind of like us and we would probably be in a similar situation if we lived a hundred years ago.”

In black and white photos, it can be hard to ascertain why Canadian nurses were nicknamed “bluebirds.” It’s no mystery in this sports day photo from the Manitoba Military Hospital, in which a team of Canadian nursing sisters are in their brilliant blue and white uniforms. The same forces that drove Canadian men into the army also affected many Canadian women: Duty, adventure or simply an opportunity to escape a humdrum provincial existence. More than 2,800 women would serve in the Canadian Army Medical Corps. Not only did these women have a front row seat on the awful consequences of war, but they occasionally got drawn into it themselves. By war end’s, nursing sisters had been bombed, shelled, shot and torpedoed, with 58 never coming home.

The Canadians were not only good at winning First World War battles, but at maintaining a skilled propaganda network to ensure that nobody forgot it. The Canadians “were determined that what Canada did the world should know—and damn all censorship,” wrote British war correspondent Philip Gibbs. This image was helped in large part by British press baron Max Aitken, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, who had been born in Ontario. This photo shows some of those public relations in action. Arthur Currie, commander of the Canadian Corps, is seen in July, 1918 explaining to a pack of visiting journalists how his Canadians took Vimy Ridge.

This is a service in the Cambrai Cathedral less than one month before the end of the war. The final weeks of the Great War would be some of the bloodiest for the Canadian Corps, making it likely that many of the men in this photo would not be getting home to Canada. As the broken chairs in the foreground indicate, the cathedral was badly damaged by fighting, with much of its interior exposed to the open air. This photo was taken just two days after Canadians liberated the town of Cambrai from four years of German occupation.

Among the gift shops and candy stores in Banff, Alta. stands a small cenotaph commemorating the town’s First World War dead. Incredibly, the tiny mountain town lost 52 men, including three brothers. The scale of Canada’s First World War losses were so great that virtually every Canadian neighbourhood, village, company and church counted their dead in the dozens. This photo, taken at a 1918 women’s parade at the Canadian National Exhibition, shows four women who collectively had 28 sons serving at the front.

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