n his preface to The Great War and Its Consequences (dated November 11, 1994), editor Ted Byfield writes that proportionately more Albertans enlisted, fought and died for King and country in the First World War than from any other province. The 50,000 who joined up represented one-eighth of Alberta's total population—and a far greater proportion of its able-bodied male population. An estimated 6,140 perished in the killing fields of Europe, and many of the 20,000 who were wounded bore scars that never healed.
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"As the Alberta Battalion prepared to attack, Lt. G.A. Cunliffe asked, 'How far is it?' A runner replied, 'One thousand yards, sir.' Cunliffe reckoned, 'One thousand deaths.' His own was one of them."
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Volume 4 includes an overview of the war and Canada's role in it, including details on the 24 battalions mustered in Alberta, but it also contains countless stories told by ordinary prairie boys who were plucked off the farm and cast into the bloody bogs of No Man's Land. The photographs accompanying their tales are at once riveting and repulsive, and a host of magnificent paintings from the Canadian War Museum reveals their hellish experience in ways that neither words nor pictures could express.
But this volume is not solely about the Great War. It also chronicles the last half of the decade of the teens from a domestic perspective, witnessing the birth of the Alberta Provincial Police, the end of Liberal hegemony in provincial politics, and the ghastly impact of the Spanish Flu, which killed half again as many Albertans as the war.
