The Battle of Mount Sorrel was supposed to be a quiet sector. Instead, on 2 June 1916, the Canadian Corps was hit by one of the most devastating surprise bombardments of the war. Mines erupted beneath their feet, trenches vanished in seconds, and entire units were nearly wiped out as German forces surged across the shattered ridge.
This episode digs into the brutal reality of the fighting around Mount Sorrel, Tor Top (Hill 62), and Sanctuary Wood — the last high ground overlooking Ypres. We follow the chaos of the opening bombardment, the loss of senior Canadian commanders, the desperate early counterattacks, and the meticulously planned assault that finally clawed the ridge back on 13 June.
Through eyewitness accounts, battlefield analysis, and the hard numbers — more than 8,000 Canadian casualties — we uncover how this overlooked battle forged the reputation of the Canadian Corps and reshaped the fight for the Ypres Salient.
By 1918, the Canadian Corps had earned a name across the Western Front: shock troops.
They were sent where the ground was worst. Where the wire was thickest. Where the objective mattered most. British command relied on them. German reports warned about them. After Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, Amiens, and the Hundred Days, a reputation took hold: that Canadians were ruthless.
But was it myth? Was it tactical necessity? Or was it something far more complicated?
Drawing on the scholarship of Dr. Tim Cook and the words of the soldiers themselves, this episode of Memory and Valour examines how that reputation was built, and what it cost.
This is battlefield reality. This is moral reckoning. This is Canada at war.
🎙️ Listen now on Spotify, Apple, and Amazon Music (or wherever you get your podcasts). 🌐 Visit www.memoryandvalour.ca for show notes and more.
**content warning: this podcast episode deals with difficult subjects: War trauma, shell shock and veteran suicide. Listener discretion is advised.
Shell Shock in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (WWI) In this episode of Memory and Valour, we explore shell shock within the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the First World War — long before the condition was understood as PTSD.
As trench warfare intensified across France and Belgium, thousands of Canadian soldiers experienced tremors, paralysis, nightmares, memory loss, and emotional collapse. Military authorities debated whether shell shock was caused by exploding artillery, moral weakness, or psychological trauma. Canadian medical officers struggled to treat it effectively, while stigma and misunderstanding often followed men long after they left the front lines. Drawing on firsthand accounts, Canadian hospital records, and contemporary medical thinking, this episode examines how shell shock was experienced and treated within the CEF — and how those early responses shaped our modern understanding of operational stress injuries.
The wounds were not always visible. But they were real.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio. Full show notes and sources are available at http://www.memoryandvalour.ca�.
The Canadian Cavalry Brigade in the First World War In the early months of the First World War, when the world still imagined the conflict would be fast and mobile, Canada sent a cavalry brigade overseas—horsemen trained for a kind of war that was already slipping into the past. By the time the Canadian Cavalry Brigade reached the Western Front in 1915, the trenches had carved the landscape into a static maze of mud and wire. The brigade’s troopers, drawn from regiments like the Royal Canadian Dragoons and Lord Strathcona’s Horse, found themselves fighting dismounted, rifles in hand, learning the grim arithmetic of trench warfare alongside the infantry.
Yet the cavalry never disappeared. They waited. They trained. They kept their horses ready for the moment the front might break open again. And when those rare opportunities came—during the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line, or in the final months of 1918—the brigade moved with a speed and violence that seemed almost anachronistic amid the industrial slaughter. Their charge at Moreuil Wood in March 1918, often described as one of the last great cavalry charges in history, was a desperate, close-quarters fight that helped blunt a major German offensive. It was the kind of action that felt ripped from another century, yet it unfolded in the shadow of machine guns and poison gas.
As the war shifted in its final hundred days, the brigade finally found the kind of battlefield it had been built for. The front began to move, villages were liberated in rapid succession, and the Canadians captured prisoners, guns, and ground at a pace that would have been unthinkable earlier in the war. They scouted ahead of advancing infantry, exploited breakthroughs, and—when needed—dismounted to fight on foot with the same determination they had shown in the trenches.
The Canadian Cavalry Brigade’s story is one of adaptation in a war that punished tradition. They were relics of an older military age, yet they carved out a place for themselves in the most modern conflict the world had ever seen. Their legacy lives on not only in regimental histories but in the vivid paintings of artists like Alfred Munnings, who captured the grit, exhaustion, and strange beauty of mounted soldiers fighting a mechanized war.
The 107th Battalion — known as The Timberwolves — was one of the most remarkable and overlooked units in Canada’s First World War history. Made up largely of First Nations soldiers, these men brought extraordinary skill, resilience, and cultural strength to a war that demanded everything from them… and then asked for more.
In this episode, we uncover the story Canada rarely tells: how Indigenous soldiers carved roads through the impossible, built the very infrastructure of the Western Front, and fought with a loyalty that was never fully returned at home. Through history, testimony, and truth, we explore who the Timberwolves were, what they endured, and why their legacy matters now more than ever.
This is the story of courage in the shadows — and the fight to bring it into the light.
Trinity Church was built in 1841 to serve the Anglican community of Christieville, later Iberville, and stands today as one of the clearest reminders of the English-speaking Protestant families who helped shape the Richelieu Valley in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alongside the church, the cemetery became the final resting place for generations of parishioners whose lives were bound to the church through worship, work, and family.
Trinity Church, Iberville
Among those families were the Milburns, McCaigs, Chapmans, and Proctors, names woven into both the parish and the burial ground behind it. Trinity was not only a place of faith, but of community continuity where children were baptized, marriages solemnized, and loved ones laid to rest.
One of the most enduring memorials within the church honours my great-grandfather Sapper Alexander Richardson Milburn, a parish member and stonemason by trade, who served with the 1st Canadian Engineers and was killed in action at Hill 70 on August 15, 1917. Though he has no known grave overseas, his memory is powerfully preserved at Trinity. In 1934, his children commissioned three stained-glass windows in the church, dedicating them to their father’s sacrifice.
The inscription urges future generations to remember: “Let those who come after see to it that his name be not forgotten.”
Alexander’s family — including his daughter (my grandmother) Maggie Jane Milburn — is buried in Trinity Church cemetery, anchoring his story firmly to Iberville soil. Together, the windows and the graves link the cost of war abroad with the quiet endurance of family and community at home.
Today, Trinity Church and its cemetery stand not only as heritage landmarks, but as a testament to the families who built, sustained, and remembered — ensuring that names like Milburn, McCaig, Chapman, and Proctor remain part of the living history of Iberville.
