Georges Vanier, Solder: The Wartime Letters and Diaries, 1915-1919

Tim Cook is the transport archivist at the Government Archives and
Records Disposition Division, National Archives of Canada. He is the
author of No Place to Run: The Canadian Corps and Gas Warfare in the
First World War.

In 1998, a panel of historians and journalists voted Georges Vanier,
Canada’s first French-Canadian governor general (1959–67), the most
significant individual in Canadian history. As “Canada’s moral
compass,” Vanier was indeed loved. He was also a man of honor and
representative of democracy and at heart a soldier. Deborah Cowley has
greatly added to our understanding of Vanier, the Great War, and the
French-Canadian role during the war by organizing the wartime letters
and diaries of Vanier into a coherent narrative of his actions from 1914
to 1918.

Taking the reader from his enlistment to his leadership of the 22nd
battalion during the last 100 days of battle, the book provides insight
into the formative years of Vanier’s life. The heavy casualties in his
battalion, we learn, weighed heavily on his mind. When the armistice was
struck on November 11, 1918, Vanier, who was in an English hospital
recovering from wounds received in battle, noted that only one of the
original officers was still with the “Van Doos.” Letters and diary
entries written in the mud of Flanders or following a murderous barrage
reach across time and space to convey an image of the Great War and the
generation of Canadians—both ordinary and great—who were shaped by
it. Photographs and extensive footnotes supplement this
thought-provoking work.