The Royal Montreal Regiment Museum has mounted an exhibit, as it does every year at this time, to mark Remembrance Day. This year’s exhibit, 112 years after the start of World War I \u2014 Le Sacrifice D\u2019Ypres \u2014 is an homage to the French-Canadians who volunteered for military service, and to the Battles of Ypres, some of the most brutal engagements of what would come to be referred to as “the war to end all wars”.<\/p>\n
It is the Battles of Ypres and their casualties that we all reference when reciting Lt. Col. John McCrae\u2019s In Flanders Fields, and the reason we wear the poppy.<\/p>\n
As politics shifted in Quebec during the Second World War, attitudes toward military service among the French-Canadian community were different than they had been during the Great War. Lieutenant-Colonel Retired Colin Robinson, former commanding officer of the RMR, points out, emphatically, that the French-Canadians had volunteered for service. \u201cThey absolutely, 100 per cent, wanted to volunteer to go fight for Canada,\u201d Robinson says. Many of them were second-generation and living in the United States who \u201cjumped on a train as soon as war broke out and came back into Montreal so they could sign up.\u201d<\/p>\n
The RMR was the only unit that was allowed to have sub-units led by French-speaking officers. \u201cThey received all their instructions, and all their drills, and all their orders in French, which was actually against regulations at the time.\u201d Sir Sam Hughes, then Minister of Militia and Defense, was against allowing French-speaking units. The RMR did it anyway. The Royal 22e R\u00e9giment \u2014 the Van Doos \u2014 was formed months after.<\/p>\n
The exhibit was designed by Amynte Eygun, assistant curator of the RMR Museum. Researching photos that the museum received as a donation, Eygun says they realized that the soldiers in the photos were French-Canadians of the RMR. \u201cI felt very connected to them,\u201d she says. \u201cThey were the same age as me.<\/p>\n
\u201cYpres was really the big major battle that they fought in first, and it really affected them,\u201d she explains. \u201cSo, I really wanted to represent their history, to show that the French-Canadians did sign up, and they did fight, just as much as the English.\u201d<\/p>\n
The exhibit includes photos of the young French-Canadians of the RMR, with names like Pte. \u00c9mile Fournier, Sgt. \u00c9mile Martin, and Lt. Henri Desrosiers.<\/p>\n
Canada was a very young nation when the war broke out. In many ways, World War I is when Canada lost its innocence. The 20th century, Eygun suggests, really only began, socially and culturally, after WWI. \u201cThe men were really 19th century men fighting a 20th century war.\u201d<\/p>\n
Men and women signing up for World War II had the first war as a reference. \u201cEverybody who signed up for World War II most likely had a family member who fought in World War I, so they knew what they were up against,\u201d Eygun says. They didn\u2019t in World War I.<\/p>\n
The horrors of war cannot be understated, but it was more acute during WWI. To illustrate that fact, the exhibit features the story of Pte. Delphis Godard. Long before shell-shock, battle-fatigue, and PTSD entered the vernacular, men returning from war psychologically-damaged were called \u201chysterical\u201d or \u201cinsane.\u201d Godard, whom the newspapers referred to as the \u201clegless veteran,\u201d had volunteered with the RMR in September 1914, and fought in Ypres. He lost his legs due to shrapnel wounds two years later.<\/p>\n
Shipped home to Montreal, Godard tried to build a life. In 1923, he married 19-year-old Suzanne Colin. Months later, he would strangle her to death in a state of mania that we would today call untreated PTSD.<\/p>\n
Le Sacrifice d\u2019Ypres is on at the Royal Montreal Regiment Museum in Westmount until November 15.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Royal Montreal Regiment Museum has mounted an exhibit, as it does every year at this time, to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":963571,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194292],"tags":[49,48,72931,328889,14207,328890,2338,328887,8767,94977,19293,328888],"class_list":["post-963570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-montreal","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-conflicts","tag-french-canadians","tag-military","tag-military-operations","tag-montreal","tag-royal-montreal-regiment","tag-war","tag-world-war-i","tag-world-war-ii","tag-ypres"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/963570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=963570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/963570\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/963571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=963570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=963570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=963570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}