In 2022, historian Brandon Marriott and his family visited Vimy Ridge, where a key battle in the First World War was won by Canadian soldiers in April 1917.
“It was a very cloudy day, and as you kind of come up to the ridge, there’s this massive stone monument on top. I remember these clouds were ominous. They were grey, kind of hanging over the monument,” Marriott says. “It was really a touching sight.”
On that spring day in 1917, Canadian soldiers were able to hold Vimy Ridge, but it came at a cost. More than 3,500 Canadians lost their lives and 7,000 were wounded during the battle. Marriott, now 43, toured the preserved trenches and tunnels with his wife, a Canadian diplomat, and his son, who was seven years old at the time. His wife told his son that her great-grandfather Lester Harper had fought at Vimy Ridge and written letters home to his wife, who kept them. Marriott’s ears perked up.
“As a historian who had worked with tons of letters from predominantly the 17th century, I was curious, and I wanted to see them, so I asked,” Marriott says. “As I read through these letters, the content really surprised me, and I thought to myself, ‘This needs to be a book, and this is a great opportunity. I have to write it.’”
Brandon Marriott.
Fast forward three years, with a library’s worth of research behind him, and the book is a reality. Till We Meet Again: A Canadian in the First World War will be published September 30. Marriott waded through more than 700 pages of Harper’s letters home and created a vivid, emotional, and very personal story of his time fighting in what became known as the Great War.
Marriott, who grew up in Vancouver and earned his first three postsecondary degrees at Simon Fraser University, now lives in Oslo, Norway, where his wife is assigned. He completed his doctorate in history at Oxford, with a specialty fairly removed from the First World War. He wrote two theses, including a book, about the blending of religious identities in the 17th century, specifically looking at a group of European Christians who followed a Jewish messiah who later converted to Islam.
Marriott also taught world history, including at SFU, and studied Canadian history, so he had some grounding in the First World War before embarking on this book. Plus, he says, reading 20th-century letters in English was easy compared to 17th-century Italian and Latin.
Marriott ably captures the horror of trench warfare and what life was like for a soldier more than 100 years ago.
It’s hard to overstate the sacrifice that soldiers in the First World War made for their country. They were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice—giving up their lives for their country—but they also sacrificed all the creature comforts, time with their loved ones, and their livelihoods.
The First World War claimed more than 66,000 Canadian lives between 1914 and 1918, and more than 172,000 soldiers were wounded. Canada was involved in the war from the beginning, as the country’s external affairs were at that time still governed by the United Kingdom, which, along with France, Russia, and eventually the United States, fought against the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire.
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Trench warfare, which comes starkly and vibrantly to life in Marriott’s book, was gruelling. “Lester knew that the front would smell of war. Like mud and rust and rot, the recruits had been told. But here, the air was beyond rank. The sour stench assaulted his nostrils and made his eyes water,” Marriott writes in the book. “The eau de guerre was a hodgepodge of odours. There was gunpowder, burnt earth, and BO mixed with a dollop of shit. Then there was a thick and sickeningly sweet aroma that you could almost taste. That was decomposing flesh.”
It didn’t only smell bad—death was omnipresent.
“When men were blown up by shells, their colleagues gathered the chunks of meat and bone that had rained down upon them. If they were lucky, they found enough of their comrade to fill a sandbag. While collecting and bagging the body parts of a friend may sound horrific, the soldiers felt obliged to bury their pals,” Marriott writes.
Lester Harper in his military attire.
The details come from more than 700 pages of Harper’s letters home, some of which are reprinted in the book, as well as years of Marriott’s research. Marriott had to intuit Mabel’s responses, based on Harper’s replies, because Harper wasn’t able to keep her letters.
“He mentions on numerous occasions that he has to destroy them. He feels guilty, but he has to burn them because he used to carry everything in his backpack,” Marriott says. “He often says he felt bad, but he burned her letters to make space for grub.… I wish we could have access to those letters. That would have been such a marvellous source.”
Harper was just 23 when the war started. He was working as a farmer in Pouce Coupe, in northern British Columbia, when he signed up to head for France, leaving Mabel behind. The young couple had already lost one daughter to illness.
Marriott brings Harper alive again, both through Harper’s own words—several of the letters are included in the book—and through his research. One fascinating aspect of the book is the use of soldiers’ slang, individual terms like “napoo” and “Emma Gees,” which Marriott says took hours and hours of research to track down.
“I remember at one point early on I took my son to the library to collect sources, and to the university library here [in Oslo], and we stood in front of the rows of books, and he said, ‘How many are we going to get?’ And I said, ‘We’re going to get all of them.’ I wanted to read everything, to understand and to try to put everything in context,” Marriott says.
Emma Gees were machine guns, so-called for their initials. Napoo is a slang term based on the French term Il n’y en a plus, meaning there is no more. The word was used for everything from dead friends to empty jars of peanut butter.
“They don’t like to use the word dead to refer to their friend, so they say he’s napoo,” Marriott says. “It seemed to be one of those words when you live in the shadow of death and their lives were always at risk that they didn’t like to use that word. So they came up with numerous different ways from saying he went west, or he clicked it. There were tons of terms that soldiers used to avoid using the word.”
There’s one harrowing scene in the book when Harper is trapped, seemingly doomed. Later, he will receive a medal for his actions, but he’s the last one to brag about it. He tells Mabel in his letter home, saying he and his men took a dozen prisoners and five machine guns, killing scores of others. “Now dear, please do not tell everyone about this,” he wrote home. “I mention these things to you, but do not pass them on beyond the family circle.”
An armistice ending the war was declared on November 11, 1918, but Harper’s generation, known as the “lost generation,” would return home to face the Spanish flu and then before long the Great Depression followed by the Second World War.
Marriott’s lifelike recounting of Harper’s story is a reminder to all of us of the horrors of war, something many of us alive today haven’t had to personally experience.
“I think about that all the time, especially with this [book] and with my son, and thinking about World War One—it’s 110 years ago now and the importance of still remembering this sacrifice,” Marriott says. “It may seem like such a distant event, especially to our younger generation, but it’s so critical to remember the sacrifices, the millions of dead, as well as the trauma for the survivors. Lester had nightmares for years about it.”
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