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The cost in lives was way worse than anything yet seen

The standard image of the First World War is of men leaping out of a muddy trench to seize the muddy trenches of the enemy. And this was indeed the general gist of World War One for most of its duration. But the Last Hundred Days looked more like the Second World War: Troops moving over open French countryside to seize towns, bridges and canals. The stalemate was over, but open warfare was far deadlier than trench warfare. In the Last Hundred Days Canada suffered 45,835 killed, wounded or taken prisoner. It was equivalent to one fifth of Canada’s total casualties for the war, way more than the 10,602 casualties suffered to take Vimy Ridge. More Canadians would be killed in the Last Hundred Days than in Korea or in the Second World War Canadian army from D-Day to VE Day. On September 1, 1918 alone, nearly 1,000 Canadians were killed in action. And these were coming from a largely agrarian country of eight million: 1000 casualties could represent an entire prairie city’s worth of young men.

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Controversially, Canadians kept dying right up until 11 a.m.

A poetic symmetry overlay the end of the First World War. For one, the war ended at the easily remembered 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. And for Canadian soldiers, that war would end by retaking Mons, the Belgian town at which British forces had first encountered German troops in 1914. But both symbols would come at a terrible cost: Even with Canadian commanders knowing that the armistice was signed, troops would continue to be thrown into battle right up into 11 a.m. And while the Canadians’ victory parade through Mons would provide stirring fodder for war artists, it did indeed kill men who would have otherwise returned home if the Canadian Corps had simply taken the morning off. The most notable was Saskatchewan conscript George Price, who was fatally hit by a German sniper at 10:58 a.m., becoming the last British Empire soldier to be killed in combat. “Hell of a note to think that that would happen right when the war’s over,” wrote his company commander. The death of Price and others would prompt postwar accusations that Arthur Currie had deliberately thrown away Canadian lives for the “glories of Mons” — accusations against which Currie would win a 1928 libel suit. “No order by me, verbal or otherwise, ordered an assault on Mons and Mons was never assaulted,” Currie said in 1919. But the acclaimed Nova Scotia memoirist Will Bird would have a different account, describing how in the war’s final hours he had been forced to kill three Germans with a rifle grenade, and witness two of his chums killed. “The war’s over tomorrow and everybody knows it,” was one of the last things Bird heard from fellow soldier Tom Mills before the 23-year-old died from having his stomach ripped open by shell fragments.

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