Brave Battalion: The Remarkable Saga of the 16th Battalion (Canadian Scottish) in the First World War.

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

In the shadow of Tim Cook’s recent and justly acclaimed 1,300-page, 2-volume history of Canadians in the 1914–18 war—At the Sharp End (2007) and Shock Troops (2008)—Brave Battalion is a small book, but it takes in many of the same battles, the Somme, Ypres, Vimy, Passchendaele, and Amiens among them. This absorbing volume from prolific military historian Mark Zuehlke has a relatively narrow focus; using published material and unpublished diaries and records, he follows one battalion (approximately 1,000 men) from its awkward creation in 1914 to its disbandment in May 1919. The 16th Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force was cobbled together from four communities: Vancouver (the Seaforth Highlanders); Victoria (the Gordon Highlanders); Winnipeg (the Cameron Highlanders); and Hamilton (the Canadian Highlanders). They came to be known as “the Canadian Scottish.” They arrived at the Western Front in February 1915, and were among the troops in occupied Germany at war’s end. Again and again, we are reminded of the slaughterhouse that was the Western Front; Zuehlke refers several times to “the butcher’s bill” of this or that battle. His account of the taking of Vimy, especially of the lengthy and detailed planning that went into the assault, is concise, lucid, and riveting. Of special interest is the truly incredible role played by pipers at Vimy and other bloody battles; at the Somme, one young piper “marched back and forth … playing the pipes while a storm of fire swirled past him on either side” and inspired troops to launch a fierce and successful assault. Sadly, but not surprisingly, his Victoria Cross was posthumous.

By focusing on the one battalion, Zuehlke enables us to follow several individual soldiers, although it would have been interesting (if depressing) to know how many of those who sailed from Canada in 1914 lived to see the Armistice; by early May 1915, Zuehlke writes, “The Canadian Scottish had been effectively cut in half.” There are illustrations and maps, but in light of the inconceivable horrors these men lived through and died in, and considering their extraordinary courage and accomplishment, including several Victoria Crosses, the word brave in the book’s title seems somehow an anemic and inadequate description of the soldiers who made up the Canadian Scottish in the nightmare that was the Western Front during this war to end all wars.