Shock Army of the British Empire: The Canadian Corps in the Last 100 Days of the Great War

Sidney Allinson is Canadian news correspondent for Britain’s The Army
Quarterly and Defence. He is the author of The Bantams: The Untold Story
of World War I, Jeremy Kane, and Kruger’s Gold: A Novel of the
Anglo-Boer War.

This exceptionally well researched and thoughtful military book is an
operational history of the Canadian Corps in the battles of the final
100 days of World War I. It begins with the battle of Amiens, August 8,
1918, and ends with a clear account of the crucial role of the Canadians
who spearheaded one of the last great Allied offensives, culminating in
the retaking of Mons on November 11, 1918, only hours before the war
ended.

The author brings a keener understanding of his subject than most, as
he is a Canadian army officer serving with the Princess Patricia’s
Canadian Light Infantry in Edmonton, Alberta. This perhaps explains why
he is able to explain so clearly both the complexities of military
organizational command and the significance of the Canadian Corps’
spectacular achievements in the last three months of the Great War.

There are few anecdotes of individual valour on the battlefield in this
book; no mud-and-blood tales from the trenches or sociological musings
about the morality of war. Instead, Schreiber concentrates on explaining
the high-level planning that turned the Canadian Corps into such an
unusually effective fighting machine.

The Corps owed much of its success to the tactical innovations brought
into play by Lt. General Sir Arthur Currie, who introduced a new
commonsense approach to getting things done at minimum cost in blood.
Currie eventually gathered around him a staff of like-minded officers
who meticulously planned tactics intended to avoid the wasteful frontal
attacks employed by most Allied and German commanders. Schreiber well
explains Currie’s conduct of the Battle of Amiens, breaking of the
Drocourt-Queant line, the Canal du Nord and Cambrai, the pursuit to
Valenciennes, the storming of Mount Huoy, and his army’s final
triumphant return to Mons.

This otherwise splendid book is marred by the inclusion of photographs
so wretchedly reproduced they are almost invisible.