An American poster invoked Joan of Arc in rallying women to buy savings stamps during the First World War.

Shield maidens, night witches and Joan of Arc: women in combat go way back

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

President-elect Donald Trump’s controversial nominee for defence secretary says women shouldn’t serve in military combat roles, ignoring decades of research and at least three millennia of actual practice.

“I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles,” said Pete Hegseth, a Fox News political commentator and former National Guard officer.

“It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated.”

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John McCrae [Wikimedia]

Remembering Canadian veteran and “In Flanders Field” poet John McCrae

STORY BY ALEX BOWERS

Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae’s views of conflict had changed.

A veteran of the 1899-1902 Boer War, the Guelph, Ont., physician shipped out to South Africa with the imperialistic ideals of poet Rudyard Kipling in his head.

“I shall not pray for peace in our time,” he once wrote to his mother, Janet Simpson Eckford McCrae. “One campaign might cure me—but nothing else ever will.”

A year of overseas service with ‘D’ Battery, Canadian Field Artillery, did, in a sense, cure him. Largely gone were the romanticized beliefs that war was an adventure, replaced by the realities of life and death on South Africa’s unforgiving veldt.

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