Free Brave Battalion by Mark Zuehlke Page A

the battalion history with many intimate details and observations about daily life in the trenches and within the battalion.
    Urquhart’s diary was one of many documents I was able to consult at the University of Victoria’s Special Collections where the Canadian Scottish Regiment has deposited its archival collection. Staff at Special Collections were endlessly helpful in making these documents available for study. Bob Darnell and others at the Canadian Scottish Regiment’s museum in the Bay Street Armoury were also forthcoming with advice and much support for this project.
    Thanks also to Carol Reid and Jane Naisbitt at the Canadian War Museum and to staff at Library and Archives Canada.
    Once again my agent, Carolyn Swayze, stickhandled the contractual negotiations and details with her usual consummate skill.
    Yet again Frances Backhouse provided endless support as I stepped once more into the breach to write another military history.

prologue
    Make Every Sacrifice
    - AUGUST 1914 -
    From the Atlantic to the Pacific the nation simmered under a heat wave that first August weekend of 1914. The Bank Holiday—a time when families traditionally gathered on beaches and picnicked in parks, when lovers strolled arm in arm, when crowds thronged downtown city streets to watch parades of marching bands and club floats and cheered the local teenaged queen. In Victoria, Vancouver, and far to the east in Hamilton, cooling breezes eased the heat while Winnipeg and the rest of the prairies sweltered under temperatures ranging between thirty-four and forty degrees Celsius. A few blamed the heat for the air of distraction that noticeably diminished the appetite for the festivities, but most recognized a far graver reason was responsible. For this was the first August weekend of 1914. Canada and the world teetered on the edge of a precipice.
    War. That was what waited in the void beyond. A war that, no matter how many European diplomats and rulers professed a desire to prevent its outbreak, had drawn inexorably closer through this long summer of disquietude. “One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans,” Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had predicted toward the end of the nineteenth century.
    That foolish thing had come on June 28 in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo—the troublesome Balkan province occupied for thirty years before its formal and forced annexation by Austria in 1908. Bosnia was the cause célèbre of Serbian nationalists, whose expansionist ambitions the annexation frustrated. On June 28, a Serb terror organization called the Black Hand struck during a royal procession through the streets of Sarajevo by Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie. In a matter of seconds a young man named Gavrilo Princip jumped on the running board of their limousine and fired two shots from a small pistol. Ferdinand and Sophie each took a bullet. “Don’t die, Sophie,” Ferdinand sobbed. But their collective lifeblood drained away in minutes. With breathtaking rapidity, two hurriedly fired bullets unravelled the intricate spider’s web of treaties and agreements between European nations that had been intended to ensure decades of peace.
    Having long considered Serbia an irritating source of the instability that plagued its Balkan provinces, the Austrians decided the assassination provided the pretext to expunge the problem entirely. On July 23, the Austro-Hungarian Empire issued an ultimatum that effectively demanded an end to Serbia’s independence and reduced it to a vassal state. Granted forty-eight hours to accede or face invasion, Serb diplomats frantically tried to negotiate a conciliatory compromise. Austria responded by breaking off diplomatic relations on July 28 and declaring war.
    The Dual Monarchy had hoped against all reason to localize the war, but the web of treaties ensured its rapid escalation to engulf the entire continent. Russia