An item from the folks at the Legion Magazine.

TV series tells story of Canada’s Black sleeping car porters

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

Despite oppression and discrimination in their day-to-day lives, hundreds of Black men volunteered for service in the Canadian Expeditionary Force between 1914 and 1918, only to be met with another uphill battle simply to go to war.

Most were rejected for service in local fighting units. About 800 eventually ended up in No. 2 Construction Battalion, a segregated support element commanded by mostly white officers. Still others—some 700—managed to join regular infantry units.

Aubrey Cosens and the Victoria Cross

STORY BY SHARON ADAMS

Aubrey Cosens was already a battle-hardened soldier when he earned the Victoria Cross three months shy of his 24th birthday.

He’d had a hard life. He was born in 1921 in remote Porquis Junction in northern Ontario, a town reachable only by train. His father was a railwayman. After his mother died when he was four years old, Aubrey was raised by a neighbour.

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