Scenes like these in the final days of the war were cited by Canadians as one of their reasons for eschewing the taking of prisoners. Article content A French grave reportedly desecrated by German soldiers. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. When the Canadians started hearing happy shouts of “More! Give us more!” they then let loose with an armload of grenades. Lieutenant Louis Keene described the practice of lobbing tins of corned beef into a neighbouring German trench. In one particularly cruel episode, Canadians even exploited the trust of Germans who had apparently become accustomed to fraternizing with allied units. A Canadian soldier standing over an enemy killed in the Battle of Amiens. “We tried to make his life miserable,” Currie said in 1919. As Canadian Corps commander Arthur Currie would often boast after the war, his troops prided themselves on killing the enemy wherever and whenever they could. There are very few recorded instances of this ever happening with Canadians. By mutual agreement, both sides agreed not to attack the other unless ordered - and would even schedule truces for meals and bathroom breaks. Throughout the war, stretches of the Western Front observed an unofficial “live and let live” policy between Germans and their French or British enemies. “I don’t care for the English, Scotch, French, Australians or Belgians but damn you Canadians, you take no prisoners and you kill our wounded,” the colonel told him.
In the final weeks of the war, Canadian Fred Hamilton would describe being singled out for a beating by a German colonel after he was taken prisoner. Germans developed a special contempt for the Canadian Corps, seeing them as unpredictable savages. In his 1929 bestseller Good-Bye to All That, he wrote “the troops that had the worst reputation for acts of violence against prisoners were the Canadians.” The English poet Robert Graves was less charitable. An unidentified 1916 battlefield after a Canadian charge. “The Canadians fought the Germans with a long, enduring, terrible, skilful patience,” he wrote after the war.
He would single out the Canadians as having been particularly obsessed with killing Germans, calling their war a kind of vendetta. Article contentīritish war correspondent Philip Gibbs had a front row seat on four years of Western Front fighting. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.
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