When Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, Canada, as part of the British Empire, was at war too. The army it sent was made of volunteers until 1917. The first of them were gathered that August at a camp built in a few weeks at Valcartier, near Quebec City, and some thirty thousand sailed for England at the beginning of October.
For a village on Prince Edward Island, the war was a set of distant names that arrived by telegraph and newspaper, usually days late: Ypres in 1915, where the Canadians met poison gas; Courcelette in September 1916, on the Somme; Vimy Ridge in April 1917. Every one of those names meant a list, printed in the paper, of the men killed, wounded or missing, and a family somewhere reading it before anyone else could reach them.
At home, the war was work. Women and girls knitted socks by the thousand, rolled bandages, packed boxes for the men overseas, and raised money through Red Cross societies, some of them run by girls in their teens. Letters were the whole of the connection, and a family might wait weeks for one, and then receive three at once, all written before something they already knew.
About sixty thousand Canadians died in the war, out of a country of about eight million people. Very few villages were spared. The Armistice came on 11 November 1918; the men came home through the following year, a few at a time, and not one of them came back unchanged.
