Canada's war is told in files and flesh. It opens in Ottawa, where a short statute with a long reach-the War Measures Act-teaches a country to govern by Order-in-Council while censors slit envelopes and permits become passwords to ordinary life. The tone is legal; the effects are warm to the touch: doors lock, presses fall silent, and "enemy aliens" learn how a list becomes a fence.
From Valcartier's dust to Salisbury Plain's mud, an army climbs off paper and learns by error. The Ross rifle, loved in parliament and loathed in trenches, gives way to the Lee-Enfield without romance. At Second Ypres, men discover chemistry by terror and hold a line with rags and nerve.
Industry stumbles, then runs. The Imperial Munitions Board imposes specifications, cracks scandals, and proves that a ledger can move mountains of steel. The Wartime Prices and Trade Board polices margins and preaches "honour rationing," writing thrift into shop windows and kitchens.
Ports and pilots take their chapters: convoys gather in fog; the Royal Canadian Navy learns the slow heroism of moving grain and men under threat; in the air, maps get sharper and secrecy thinner. Halifax explodes and then rebuilds under a relief commission that turns urgency into administration.
Vimy is presented as orchestration-a model, not a miracle-and the Hundred Days as tempo: deception, clocks, bridges, orders. Victory Loans and new taxes pay the bills; influenza collects its own.
Armistice opens another file. Demobilization breeds riots at Kinmel Park and quiet homecomings on cold platforms. A new bureaucracy learns pensions, hospitals, and training; the Soldier Settlement Act tries to turn policy into soil with uneven mercy.
The book keeps its ledger honest. Black Canadians of No. 2 Construction Battalion earn dignity and return to limits; Indigenous veterans meet pass systems and narrow benefits; women who kept benches and accounts demand wages and rights beyond the shift whistle.
Winnipeg strikes; warrants replace bayonets. In Paris, Canada signs for itself and sits, softly separate, at the League. The Imperial War Graves Commission writes equality in stone; memory becomes administration. What began as an emergency becomes a habit, and a nation steps into the 1920s with new muscles, new debts, and arguments about what "after" means.
