Bellinger and Fry were the first Canadian soldiers killed in the Great War. They would not be the last. The killing fields of the Western Front would exact a terrible toll on the PPCLI and the 47 other Canadian fighting battalions that would ultimately serve in the war. One hundred years on, Canadians should remember that the Great War marked a pivotal turning point in our nation’s history. For the first time, Canada played an important, and ultimately decisive, role on the world stage and, in doing so, began to develop a national identity at a great cost. The war changed how others viewed Canada and how we viewed ourselves. Sadly, many Canadians have forgotten the Great War and do not realize that it was the greatest and most traumatic chapter in our history. Canada was a small country in 1914, with a population of just over 7.2 million. Most people lived in rural communities and even our largest city, Montreal, had fewer than 500,000 people — with Vancouver just over 100,000. Our pre-war regular army was insignificant by any standard, with just a few thousand trained soldiers, 600 horses and a scattering of militia units across the country. Yet within three years, the small Dominion fielded the four-divisionstrong Canadian Corps, a “national’ army, really, and hailed as one of the best — and perhaps the very best fighting formation on the Western Front. Canada’s first major action was at Ypres in April 1915, when the 18,000 men of the 1st Canadian Division prevented an Allied rout by holding the line against gas and overwhelming numbers at a cost of progress of the battle of the somme between 1 july and 18 november.
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