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Ronald MacKinnon wrote home on Good Friday, telling his father he received the laces and the gum and a parcel from Aunt Annie with some socks and handkerchiefs. The letter was sent from France, though MacKinnon didn’t divulge where exactly he was or what he was doing. “By the time you get this you will have read all about it,” he wrote. “Remember me to all at home.”

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Three days later, on April 9, 1917, Private MacKinnon was in the first wave of soldiers in the Canadian Corps’ successful capture of the German-held Vimy Ridge. It was an unequivocal victory in a war, and particularly a year, that seldom saw unequivocal victories.

“The press are giving the Canucks great praise,” Ronald MacKinnon’s dad wrote to his son two weeks after the battle, unaware that Ronald had died in the first or second day of fighting.

There is uneasiness in the letter from father to son. “The casualties are coming in by the thousand every day.” In the four-day battle, there were 10,600 Canadian casualties, nearly 3,600 killed. The Canadian Corps had earned their “place of honour,” as Pte. MacKinnon’s father wrote. “They are paying a price for it.”