1917. Passchendaele earns its reputation.

Three years of shelling had wrecked the drainage in that stretch of Flanders, and when the rain came and didn't stop, the battlefield turned into a swamp of flooded shell craters, deep enough to drown a man, with the only dry ground a few inches of duckboard track that could get you killed just for stepping off it in the dark.

That's the ground six hundred men of the Edmonton Regiment's 49th Battalion were ordered to cross that October, uphill, toward a village already reduced to brick dust on a map.

This episode walks into it with a young 49th Battalion runner named Hughie John McDonald, whose job that day might have been the worst one in the entire First World War, plus Cecil Kinross, Henry Norwest, and Sgt. Chester Owen McGowan, another 49th runner whose own service file held its own hard-won story.

Woven through it all: nineteen real veteran voices pulled from a 1965 CBC broadcast, most of them never named until now. Mud, courage, and a battle that deserves to be more than a word we say once a year.

What killed more First World War soldiers than the machine gun, the flamethrower, and the tank combined? Artillery.

Six in ten battlefield casualties in the First World War were caused by shellfire, according to the British Army's own medical statistics. It is the deadliest weapon of the war, and the one almost nobody today can name.

In this episode of Memory and Valour, five Canadian First World War veterans tell it in their own words, recorded decades later: what a German barrage actually sounded like from underneath, the shell you learn to watch and dodge, the eighty pound dud you carry to a shell hole by hand because otherwise nobody eats supper that night.

Around their voices, we trace the real history of Canadian artillery in the Canadian Expeditionary Force: the shrapnel doctrine of 1914, the shell scandal that handed Canada its largest wartime industrial project, an Alberta gun brigade that could not locate a single German battery across six days of fighting at Saint Eloi, and the same Canadian Corps opening fire with total accuracy at Vimy Ridge, Amiens, and Canal du Nord, without a single ranging shot, two and a half years later.

Full sources, archival references, and corrections at memoryandvalour.ca.

Canada fought a war after the war ended.

Between October 1918 and June 1919, this country sent almost five thousand soldiers to Russia; a nation Canada was not at war with, to fight an enemy Canada had never declared war on, for reasons its own Cabinet could not agree on.

Two forces went, and they had almost opposite wars.

Four thousand two hundred went to Vladivostok. Roughly forty per cent were conscripts. Some were marched to the docks at bayonet point, in the streets of Victoria, six weeks after the Armistice. They arrived to orders forbidding them to fight.

Fewer than five hundred went to Archangel, on the Arctic coast. All volunteers, most already veterans of the Western Front. They fought on frozen rivers against artillery that outranged them. One of the worst days they had was the eleventh of November, 1918.

A mutiny in Victoria. The influenza that reached Alberta on a Siberia-bound troop train. A fifty-seven-ton bank shipped from Vancouver into a revolution. Nineteen names on a stone above Vladivostok, and why the real number is twenty-one.

Twenty-one Canadians died in Siberia. Not one was killed by the enemy they were sent to fight.

This episode exists because a listener wrote in and asked.

Full show notes and sources: memoryandvalour.ca