Charlie Wilcox's Great War

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

This excellently written companion volume to Charlie Wilcox (2000)
serves, in part, as a sequel to the original book, but more
significantly, it fleshes out the details of the three years that
Charlie spent overseas during World War I. The new work begins where
Charlie Wilcox concluded, with Charlie’s return to Brigus,
Newfoundland, in 1919. Shortly thereafter, Claire Guy, now an attractive
young woman but just a girl when Charlie, then 14, involuntarily stowed
away on a Europe-bound troopship, requests of him, “Tell me about the
war.” Much of the rest of the book then becomes Charlie’s response,
which, via dated flashbacks, spans his time in France from 1916 to the
war’s end. While Charlie Wilcox painted the horrors of trench warfare
in broad strokes, the present work elaborates more fully on what Charlie
saw and experienced as a stretcher-bearer at the front and later as an
attendant in field hospitals. The book also brings positive closure to
Charlie’s relationship with Clint Miller and Phil Jackson, the bullies
responsible for Charlie’s being shipped to Europe.

Young-adult readers need not have read Charlie Wilcox in order to enjoy
this volume because McKay provides a catch-up prologue. For readers who
want to know what subsequently happened to the characters, she also
provides an epilogue. Other features not normally associated with
fiction are McKay’s inclusion of a “who’s who” of the book’s
numerous characters, a glossary containing Newfoundland words and
wartime terms, plus a recommended-reading list relating to the Great War
and Newfoundland’s history. Highly recommended.