Portraits of Battle

All Canadians are taught about Vimy Ridge. But that celebrated victory was just one battle among many to shape the country’s experience of the First World War.

Portraits of Battle brings together biography, battle accounts, and historiographical analysis to examine the lives of a cross-section of Canadians who served in the war. Contributors to this thoughtful collection consider the range of Canadians touched by war – soldiers and their loved ones, deserters, nurses, Indigenous people, those injured in body or mind – raising fundamental questions about the nature of conflict and memory.

These portraits of the formerly faceless men and women honoured on war memorials fill in what is often missing from accounts of the Great War. In the process, they provide a more nuanced perspective on the complex legacy of that war in Canadian history.

Peter Farrugia is an associate professor in the History and Social and Environmental Justice programs at Wilfrid Laurier University and a fellow of the Laurier Centre for Military, Strategic and Disarmament Studies. He is the editor of The River of History: Trans-national and Trans-disciplinary Perspectives on the Immanence of the Past. Evan J. Habkirk is a lecturer in the Indigenous Studies program at the University of Western Ontario and in the History Department at Wilfrid Laurier University. He is also the co-editor of The Art of Communication: The Unveiling of the Bell Memorial Revisited.

Contributors: Graham Broad, Cynthia Comacchio, Kyle Falcon, Sarah Glassford, Geoffrey Hayes, Gordon L. Heath, Teresa Iacobelli, Jonathan F. Vance, Lee Windsor

"Portraits of Battle presents the past as a complex lived experience: a story of people from a broad range of backgrounds wrestling with their own notions of service, community, and sacrifice."