So, as seen in my last few posts, we are currently studying WWI. We have now shifted from studying the big picture of the war, to studying life on the home front of Canada during the war. We have also begun looking into how the war contributed to the growing feeling of Canadian Identity, and have been investigating what it meant to be a Canadian during the Great War.

While Ms. Willemse and Mr. Hughes were away with the Grade 8’s, us Grade 11’s were left with 100,000 different projects to complete for the week (not really that many, more like three, but it felt like a lot more). One of these assignments was a research study of one Canadian soldier who served in the First World War. Our task was to research these men, and examine any primary documents we could find. We had to put ourselves in the shoes of our soldier and imagine what their war story was. What happened to them, how they felt, what they learned, and what their ending was. Once we figured this out, we had to write a diary entry as this soldier at some point from their life: Before, after or during the war. PLUS, we were encouraged to include some sort of Canadian Identity.

I began researching a potential soldier to write about on a website that has the records of pretty much any Canadian soldier that enrolled in ANY of the world wars. I first searched up my last name and found a few soldiers that sounded interesting, but didn’t have a huge amount of primary sources apart from their enlistment forms. So, I did some more digging around some other websites and came across a few letters that were written by soldiers in Valcartier. I looked into which Canadian soldiers wrote them, and found a man named Goldwin McCausland Pirie.

 

It turns out that Goldwin was a 20 year old Bank Clerk from Dundas, Ontario, who enlisted into the First World War August of 1914. He was sent to France, and ended up fighting in the 2nd Battle of Ypres. In the counterattack of the 1st and 4th battalions at Mauser Ridge, he was wounded on the battlefield and left for dead for four days. He was recovered by a medical team and sent to Netley hospital (Royal Victoria Hospital) in Southampton U.K. He ended up passing away two months later due to infections of his wounds.

My entry, written in Goldwin McCausland Pirie’s perspective, was based in the month after he was wounded, during the period of time where he believed he would survive.