British historian Paul Reed on why Canada’s Great War story endures
STORY BY ALEX BOWERS
Books can explain the horrors and hardships of the First World War. Battlefields, however, tell their own stories. To walk the ground of century-old clashes, to see the almost-boundless rows of white grave markers in cemeteries through Belgium and France, is to encounter history in a way that no printed page can ever fully replicate.
While tens of thousands of overseas visitors have embarked on pilgrimages across the former Western Front since the Armistice, few have lived it quite like military historian Paul Reed. For more than a decade, the British tour guide and author of 10 books lived in Courcelette—a community forever intertwined with Canada’s role in the 1916 Battle of the Somme.
Reed’s intimate knowledge of the site, as well as his admiration for the wider wartime contributions of the Canadian Corps, have featured prominently in his Old Front Line podcast. Here, in a Legion Magazine exclusive, he reflects on both.
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Royal Canadian Legion, US Branch #25 