Alfred James Munnings/CWM/19710261-0443

Exhibition chronicles the last, not-so-glorious days of the war horse

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

It’s unlikely that artist Alfred Munnings grasped the full significance his work would come to take on after Lord Beaverbrook invited him to paint Canadian military forces in France in 1918.

It was, after all, the swan song of the war horse as it had been known for centuries and Munnings, who specialized in equine and landscape art would, over the course of the war’s final months, create a priceless record of the cavalry’s last days serving in a widely integrated role on the battlefield.His moody, exquisitely subtle paintings also provide a rare glimpse into the workings of the Canadian Forestry Corps, which supplied the lumber for trench works, railways and other critical wartime infrastructure.

In its latest exhibition, the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa—home to the 15,000-piece Beaverbrook Collection of War Art—celebrates the work of the British-born painter whose subject matter would move from the fox hunts and refined equestrian ladies of his native England to the mud- and sweat-soaked workhorses and cavalry chargers of the Western Front.

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National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Photo ID: JSC2000-05266.

The first Canadian to go to space heralds the importance of celestial travel

STORY BY SHARON ADAMS

On Nov. 30, 2000, Canadian astronaut Marc Garneau blasted off in the space shuttle Endeavour, beginning his third and final space mission. By the time he returned to Earth on Dec. 11, he had spent more than 677 hours of his career in space.

Garneau started out in Halifax as a naval officer and engineer in 1973. In 1983, he became an instant celebrity in Canada when he was one of six candidates chosen (from nearly 4,300 applicants) to become astronauts.

Space shuttle Challenger took off on Oct. 5, 1984. For the next eight days, Garneau, a payload specialist on the mission, conducted 10 experiments. He studied physical characteristics of Earth’s upper atmosphere and space, as well as human adaptation to space flight.

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Van Landuy et al/Frontiers in Marine Science

Sunken warship sews 80 years of environmental damage

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

Shortly before 4 p.m. on Feb. 12, 1942, Royal Air Force planes attacked and sank V-1302—a German fishing trawler-turned-patrol boat—in Belgian waters of the North Sea.

The vessel formerly known as the John Mahn out of Hamburg was one of six auxiliary ships from the Kriegsmarine’s 13th flotilla that took up fixed positions during Operation Cerberus, more commonly known as The Channel Dash.

In what amounted to a convoy mission, some 200 vessels set out to escort the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen and the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau from Brittany in France through the English Channel to German ports.

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www.canadianletters.com

Life in the trenches

STORY BY SHARON ADAMS

Excerpts from a memoir written by First World War veteran Charles Henry Savage, born in 1892 in Eastman, Que., who served in Messines, Belgium, in 1915-16.

Our first trip in the trenches was a short one for instructional purposes…Although late in October, there had not been a great deal of rain and the front line and communication trenches were in almost perfect condition when compared with those we took over after the rains had begun.

Trenches in this sector were very difficult indeed. The water was so close to the surface that the “trench” really consisted of a built up fortification. To build up a trench of that sort you must have sand in bags, and to get sand into bags requires much labour with a shovel. We only called it sand because it went into sand bags. Actually it was the stickiest of clay in most places.

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