So long, Matthew Fisher, Canada’s most-travelled warco 

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

He could be blunt, bombastic and cringingly irreverent. He was also smart, generous, and always, always interesting.

Like virtually all of the most talented, committed and absorbing people I’ve known, Matthew Fisher was a human full of quirks and contradictions. He died in Ottawa on April 10 after a short battle with liver disease. He was 66.

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With the guns in the Second Battle of Ypres

Story by Sharon Adams

In 1915, Canadian troops moved to the Ypres Salient in Belgium. The Germans wanted very much to get rid of the bulge into their territory, and used a new weapon hoping to dislodge British, Canadian and French troops.

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Frank Hurley: Adventurer and war photographer 

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

You may not know the name Frank Hurley but you almost certainly know at least some of his pictures.

Hurley was an Australian who left school at age 12, escaped the drudgery and hardship of a working-class life at the dawn of the 20th century, and turned his gift of gab and passion for photography into a lifetime of adventure and renown.

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Canadian summer in Apeldoorn

Story by Sharon Adams

In five weeks of bloody battles to boot the Germans out of the Scheldt Estuary in October and November of 1944, the Allies suffered about 13,000 casualties, including about 6,300 Canadians. And the fighting was expected to be just as stiff to liberate the rest of the Netherlands.

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Art of the war horse 

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

Mercifully, the First World War was the last major confrontation in which horses played a major role.

British cavalry were among the first units to see action in WW I, but they didn’t last. The war’s most impactful weapon—the machine gun—along with the mud and barbed wire of trench warfare would ultimately spell the end for equine-borne military.
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Witnessing genocide

Story by Sharon Adams

In late 1993, Canadian General Roméo Dallaire was tasked to head a force of 2,500 United Nations peacekeepers sent to Rwanda to help implement a peace accord to end three years of civil war between the Hutus and Tutsis, a minority ethnic group.

The mission was a disaster.

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