Lieutenant Owen William Steele of the Newfoundland Regiment

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.

Lieutenant Owen Steele was one of more than 12,000 Newfoundlanders who
enlisted during World War I to serve king and country. He was also one
of the nearly 4000 who made the ultimate sacrifice. For Newfoundland,
England’s oldest colony, the Great War was a time of glory and
patriotism, underpinned by terrible loss and sacrifice.

Steele’s poignant diaries, which have been brilliantly edited by
David Facey-Crowther, an expert on Newfoundland’s role in the war and
a longtime history professor at Memorial University, provide insight
into the myriad conditions of a war that encompassed moments of terror,
periods of boredom, great friendships, strong beliefs in the justness of
the cause, and the ever-present loss of dead and wounded from the ranks.
From his patriotic enlistment in 1914, as one of the “First 500,” as
they would later be called, to go overseas, through to the difficult
conditions of the Gallipoli campaign, where the Newfoundlanders fought
alongside the British in intensely difficult conditions that included
sweltering heat, shortages of water, a plague of flies, deadeye snipers,
and, bizarrely, a freak flood at the end of the campaign, the reader
receives an intimate view into the experience of war. From Gallipoli,
Steele and the Newfoundlanders went to the Western Front, where the
fighting was even worse, and far more costly. Steele survived the
terrible slaughter of the Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont Hamel on
July 1, 1916, only to be killed six days later by a stray shell. Such
was the precarious and indiscriminate nature of the war.

Steele’s words capture the essence of the war that the infantry knew.
Moreover, Facey-Crowther’s introduction is the single best chapter on
Newfoundland’s part in the Great War, and he admirably covers
Newfoundland’s commitment on land, at sea, and on the patriotic home
front. Both experts and general readers will find this book an
insightful and engrossing read.