In the bloody trenches

Till We Meet Again: A Canadian in the First World War
by Brandon Marriott  

Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 2025
$39.95 / 9781668208236

Reviewed by Ron Verzuh

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Get set to be thrown into the trenches of the First World War and face the dreaded Fritz up close and personal. Our guide is Lance Corporal Robert Lester Harper, sharpshooter on the front lines. He is also historian Brandon Marriott’s main narrator in this novel-like history of trench warfare.

Till We Meet Again is a sentimental, romantic title, but it does little to prepare the reader for the horrors that lie ahead as Marriott follows a young Pouce Coupe, B.C., farm boy turned soldier through the war-torn craters of Hell in Europe. There is no sugar-coating here. It is the raw and savage brutality of men killing men.

From training camp to Vimy Ridge, the Battle for Hill 70, and Passchendaele, “the graveyard of everybody,” we feel the thud of grenades and the “tit-tit-tit-tit” of German machine guns mowing down Canadians. “The travelling fire came and went, a sprinkler watering the soil with bullets,” remembers Harper. “As the rounds pinged off the wires and thumped into the corpses, the living buried themselves into the dead.” 

Harper’s words tell this story but Marriott adds the historian’s tools of archival documents, war histories, and news reports. He provides a section on sources that explains how he knit together the word-images that take readers to the killing fields. Those vivid pictures of warfare on the Western front are often unimaginable.

“The stench was beyond foul,” Harper recounted. “A mixture of death and feces and rotten eggs. . . Maggoty torsos hid across the front, grotesque landmines for unsuspecting soldiers to unearth.” When the battle was over, “when men were blown up by shells, their colleagues gathered the chunks of meat and bone that had rained down upon them.”

There are true-to-life fictional accounts, but Marriott has created something more forceful and jarring by revealing the blood-and-guts reality of Harper’s war. “As the Canucks pushed up the ridge . . . the gunners fired in scything arcs, and the Canadians were cut down like stalks of hay or wheat on the prairies . . . The wounded screamed their lives away.”

Filmmaker Paul Gross made a fine attempt to depict those horrors in his 2008 movie Passchendaele. Novelist Timothy Findley also portrayed the soul-shaking experience of a young soldier in his 1977 novel The Wars. In his classic 1929 WWI novel All Quiet on the Western Front, novelist Erich Maria Remarque tells the story of a group of teenage German soldiers. (It was relived in the Oscar-winning 2022 film of the same name.)

But Marriott accomplishes a similar end by using Harper’s love letters from the front to his wife Mabel and by drawing on her replies. In doing so, Marriott shifts us away from the usual academic wartime history to a more personalized account with the soldiers telling much of their own story. Neither novel nor creative nonfiction, the book borrows from both those writing styles to unfold the daily trauma of bombs, barbed wire, machine gun fire, and sudden death.

Harper arrives on the front line as a strong Methodist. He doesn’t drink or swear. He even cautions others not to do so. His faith may hold this hero together, but he quickly abandons any pledge to not take his daily shot of rum. He also likes to dance with the “girlies” and he tries out his French on the young French women.

Still, he remains faithful to his darling Mabel and she to him. Harper loves his wife and is honest with her about many, though not all, his experiences in Europe. When he sends Mabel a photograph of him with a French woman, she is upset. He tries to explain that it is all part of the war, but Mabel isn’t convinced. They eventually make up, but the correspondence reveals the emotional fragility created by war.

Adding to the tension, Harper is worried about several members of his family who had enlisted and are fighting at the front. He contemplates them getting shot and therefore given a “blighty.” That’s a ticket to England to sit out the war as a casualty. The word comes from Blighty, a synonym for England.

Harper peppers his letters with such vernacular slang. A “cushy,” for example, is a bullet wound that sends a soldier back from the front where he will be repaired and sent back into battle or, if he’s lucky, will be sent home. Cushy because he was not blown to smithereens. The German soldiers are “soldaten” and the British are “Tommies.”

Marriott also inserts some unsettling statistics about Canadian soldiers. For example, they “suffered from the highest rate of venereal disease among the allies” and “more Canadians were court-martialled for drunkenness than for all other offenses combined.”

While there is no doubt of Harper’s loyalty to King and Country, Marriott has him express doubts about Field Marshall Douglas Haig’s willingness to sacrifice the infantry as a human battering ram. He adds praise for Canada’s Brigadier General Arthur Currie, a.k.a. “Guts and Gaiters,” for countering Haig’s “suicidal plan” at Hill 70 and other bloody battles where Canadian losses were heavy.

Eventually, Harper would be promoted to lieutenant after being awarded the Distinguished Combat Medal for taking out a German machine gun nest. The DCM is the second highest award for gallantry in action for non-commissioned officers. He brushed it off modestly in his letter to Mabel. After the war, he returned home to take a job as a land surveyor. He and Mabel were married for 73 years. He died in 1987 at age 94.

By the time you turn the last page of Harper’s story, you will know the horrors of the war to end all wars. You will also know the sense of loss. For Harper, VE Day “seemed like a pyrrhic victory. The war was a colossal mistake. Mankind had lost far more than it could ever regain.”

Marriott and Harper pose the inevitable question about wars: Would it be different the next time? Would the world learn from its mistakes? The answer came in 1939 when the slaughter of young soldiers would begin again and this time more ferociously than ever before.  

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Ron Verzuh is a writer and historian. [Editor’s note: Ron has recently reviewed books by Harpreet Sekha, The Simon Fraser University Retirees Association, Bill Arnott, R.D. Rowberry, Christy K. Lee, and Colin Campbell for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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