It Made You Think of Home: The Haunting Journal of Deward Barnes, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1916–1919

Tim Cook is the World War I historian at the Canadian War Museum. He is
the author of No Place to Run: The Canadian Corps and Gas Warfare in the
First World War and Clio’s Warriors: Canadian Historians and the
Writing of the World Wars.

Corporal Deward Barnes spent much of the First World War writing to
loved ones at home and documenting his experience in the trenches. As an
infantryman with the 19th Battalion, he was fully immersed in the horror
of the Western Front. Friends were constantly killed around him by
shells, snipers, and poison gas. He went “over the top” 14 times
during the war and fought though some of its most bitter battles until
he was shot through the thigh only a month before the Armistice.
Throughout these trials, which left him recounting at the end of the war
that his “nerves [were] gone,” Barnes captured his experience in
print, from the terror of the soldiers’ life in the trenches to their
escapades behind the lines. A disturbing account of his involvement in a
firing squad sheds light on the brutality of the war and the ongoing
struggle to enforce discipline.

After the war, Barnes recopied his diaries into a memoir, and it is
this memoir that editor Bruce Cane has brought to publication. His
expert and detailed commentary provides insight into Barnes’s strange
subterranean world. While Cane might have heeded some editorial advice
of his own in curtailing the length of some of his supporting text, his
explanatory notes will be welcomed by both casual readers and
experienced historians. It Made You Think of Home is a first-class
memoir that provides insight into the terrible experience of Canada’s
Great War veterans.