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Friday, August 29, 2014 Vol. 7 • Issue 18 See story on page 3
See story on Page 19
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New book traces paths of Kootenay Lake soldiers GREG NESTEROFF First in a series marking the centennial of the First World War n August 28, 1914, thousands of people converged on Nelson to send 175 volunteers — the first Kootenay contingent — off to war. Three-quarters were going to fight for their homelands. But others said they enlisted for “glory and satisfaction” and one man admitted his motives weren’t purely patriotic: “Part of it was the love of adventure, and a desire to see the world.”
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At the same time, Rev. Father John Althoff was disturbed at “the intoxication of praise and the glory of war” and warned of its “soberness and gravity.” Even those who listened to Althoff ’s admonitions wouldn’t have anticipated the horrors to come over the next four years. Many who departed that day didn’t return. In her new book, Names on a Cenotaph: Kootenay Lake Men in World War I, Sylvia Crooks takes a closer look at the local men who died on European battlefields in
what was supposed to be the war to end all wars. She previously wrote Homefront and Battlefront: Nelson BC in World War II and during her research on that book was intrigued by the fact that even though similar numbers enlisted locally in both wars — about 1,300 — nearly four times as many men from the earlier conflict appear on the Nelson cenotaph. “That was pretty overpowering,” Crooks says, attributing the difference partly to strategy. “They were using
Victorian military strategy with more modern weapons. These men were walking into wave after wave of machine gun fire.” It wasn’t unusual for 1,000 or more to die in a single battle, many from blood poisoning. Another stark statistic: one-third of the names on the Nelson cenotaph have no known resting place. As the battleground was repeatedly churned up, makeshift graves were blown apart. Crooks, a Nelson native and retired Continued on Page 5
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This photo shows high school boys of Nelson serving with the 54th Kootenay Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Forces. It was taken in Vernon in 1915. Courtesy Sylvia Crooks/Granville Island Publishing
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