"Little did I think when we were young, and all things around us were gay, that some fine day our monarch would say, it's up to every person to do his duty. After living for so many years in peace and happiness, it was cruel for such a war between so many countries to start. Little did we think that it would mean the calling of so many human beings together to be slaughtered like sheep for the sake of a few individuals who thought they could conquer the world. Alas, they did not consider the individuals in the Colonies who were willing to aid the motherland."
Private Bert Cooke's initiation of his World War I diary encapsulates the importance of the surprising number of Canadian soldiers' diaries that have been receiving their first commercial publication as we lurch through the ninetieth anniversary of the Great War.
For practically all of those ninety years, we have been told the day Canada held the line at Ypres, or advanced on the Somme, Vimy Ridge, or Passchendaele, was the day we truly became a nation. What the diaries of Cooke and Deward Barnes show us is that this clich is absolutely true; and that, moreover, the soldiers who fought at those fronts realized it even as it was happening.
Cooke, Barnes, and others like them either observed or participated in all of the great Canadian battles except Ypres: Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, Hill 70, Lens, Amiens, Arras. All of them entered the Army in 1915-16 as patriotic members of the British Empire. All of them reveal the maturation of national self-awareness that they experienced as the Canadian Expeditionary Force was molded under fire into the elite shock-troops of the Allied Powers.
It is as subtle as Cooke noting with surprise that Belgians did not know how to fry eggs "before the Canadians came into this country"; or as plain as his observation immediately following Vimy that, "The victory at Vimy was a feather in the Canadians' cap [it] will always ring in our ears"; or as sentimental as the doggerel he writes about "Toronto's own the boys that are so well known / Now here's to the land of the Maple Leaf, the place where we long to be" It is Barnes coming to distinguish "the Canadians" from "the Imperials" (i.e., the collective forces of the British Empire). "We went and the Imperials as well, we were all mixed up," he records exactly one month before the ceasefire.

"The Imperials are so much different than us. Their non-commissioned officers kept them in dead straight lines, there must have been six waves of them as far as you could see both ways. (The Canadians may go over in bunches any old way, but they always get there.)"

Not for nothing is Bruce Cane credited as the writer rather than as Barnes's editor; he composed about half of the text in the form of explanatory and background materials. And while his interjections cause difficulty in sustaining narrative flow, the information he imparts is both fascinating and graciously enlightening.
He has certainly done his research. Practically any name Barnes mentions in passing-even if nothing more than a surname or a nameless rank-was tracked down by Cane and given as much of a mini-biography as he can spin out of some very thin records. When Barnes describes an officer as "small", Cane goes to the trouble of finding out the exact height of the officer and reports he was actually "almost half an inch [1 centimetre] taller than Deward." This, 87 years after the fact!
Long marches are a favourite complaint of the diarists, and no wonder: on one occasion, Barnes fought for 36 hours on no sleep after marching six miles through knee-deep mud carrying a 120-pound load, all the while struggling through a poisonous gas cloud that made it difficult to breathe, and then he had to carry a wounded man through confusing and damaged networks of trenches for another 6 hours.
The writers stress the importance of sport and entertainment, such as The Dumbells, away from the trenches. They record endless searches for drinkable water and comfortable sleeping-holes, relentless training on every leave, and the surprising traffic-jams of troops and resources constantly on the move. Each meticulously records names and numbers of deaths around them, determined to preserve the memories of fellow soldiers even if only for themselves (none of them intended their diaries for publication, even posthumously).
All of them have a mordant sense of humour. Cooke reports that the voyage from Canada to England was so rough, seasick soldiers were "feeding fish with scraps of food eaten the day before," and "as the ship rolled, a wave disturbed us causing a few of us to change our underwear."
Each diarist also has tales of horror to tell. Cooke tells of two of his own men picking up a metal bar to use in heating tea; it turns out to be an explosive that "blew them to atoms They found minute body parts of the two men and put them in a small bag and buried them." Barnes, in addition to being part of a firing-squad executing a deserter, observes simply, "No matter how quiet a trip was there was always so many got killed in a battalion."
And perhaps the most poignant similarity the diarists share: all of them confess that, although they survived, the War destroyed their nerves. They never got over it.