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

Twelve days past his 21st birthday, a Winnipeg pilot named Harry V. Smith was shot down over occupied Siam with four secret agents aboard, on the last mission of his tour in May 1945.

What followed involves a jungle crash-landing borrowed from bush pilots, a resistance movement run by an entire government in secret, a getaway flown by the head of the Thai air force, and a hiding place no one would believe: the Regent's own palace.

This is the true story of my cousin Harry Smith, DFC — from his 388-page service file, his own memoir, and one unforgettable family telegram.

Features archival interview audio from two Canadian Burma veterans, Frederick Sproule and Dick Sharpe.

Four hundred and fifty rounds a minute. Seven and a half rounds every second. One London inventor built the Maxim machine gun in 1884 after a friend joked he should help Europeans "cut each other's throats with greater facility."

Thirty years later, that joke had built the Western Front.

This episode traces the machine gun from Hiram Maxim's workshop to the beaten zones of the Somme to the Canadian Corps' own mastery of the weapon by 1918, when the same gun that built the trenches helped tear them open again.

Featuring Raymond Brutinel, the Edmonton newspaperman who talked his way into commanding Canada's first mechanized fighting force, the war diary of the 49th Battalion (Edmonton Regiment) and five Canadian veterans in their own voices: Charles Skeates, Leonard Wood, Colin Bond, Allan "Spike" Smith, and James MacLeod.

On July 1st, 1916, the First Battalion of the Newfoundland Regiment went forward at Beaumont-Hamel. Of 801 men, there were 710 casualties in thirty minutes. Every officer down.

In this 110th anniversary episode, we follow two brothers — Harry and Alfred Hynes of F Company — from a railway town on the Gander River to the worst morning of the First World War.

One never came home. The other was wounded three times and carried a piece of German shrapnel for the rest of his life.

This is their story, and it's been a long time coming.

A thousand men in eight days. A parade square turned into a suburb with four little lakes. A bronze general on a horse that nobody who lives there can name.

His name was Griesbach. Edmonton's youngest-ever mayor, son of Canada's first Mountie, and the officer who raised the 49th Battalion in a single frozen week of 1915.

The north-Edmonton neighbourhood built on his old army base is now one of the city's most sought-after addresses, and almost nobody there knows what's buried beneath the front porches.

So we dig.

Down through bison country and Treaty 6 homeland; through the Forty-Niners who bled at the Somme and Passchendaele; among them Alex Decoteau, the Cree Olympic runner and Canada's first Indigenous police officer, killed carrying a message through the mud; through the Canadian Airborne Regiment, born on this very ground; the detention barracks nobody put in the brochure; and the village that now remembers its dead one street sign at a time.

Who was the man on the horse? And what does it mean to build your kitchen on a parade square?

Free self-guided walking tour + full sources: www.memoryandvalour.ca

In 1916, a German soldier watched the first tank loom out of the fog and ran for his life, screaming that a crocodile was crawling into the trenches.

This is the story of the tank on the Western Front, and it's a Canadian story from beginning to end. Canadians were there at the machine's terrifying combat debut at Courcelette in September 1916; the day before Chip Kerr of the 49th Battalion won his VC on the same ground, and Canadians were the spearhead at Amiens in August 1918, the "black day of the German Army," where the tank finally succeeded.

We climb inside the steel oven the crews actually fought in, sort the legend from the record, and hear from the men who were there, from the first British tank crews to a private of the 24th Battalion who rode the tanks forward at Amiens.

Memory and Valour — Where Memory Endures, Valour Lives On.