Capturing northern Ontario's lost military past

Laurentian professors emeritus Graeme Mount and Dieter Buse have written a book to shed light on some of northern Ontario's war heroes.

Untold: Northeastern Ontario's Military Past, Volume 1 looks at the region's military involvement from 1662 to WWI.

Buse said the two professors decided to write the book for two reasons:

"First, we discovered there was very little said about the military history of this area," Buse said. "Secondly, if you go to Remembrance Day commemorations, or your local cenotaph, if you look at the fact that people doing their genealogical research are interested in the military past of their relatives, you can tell that people need to have something to fall back on."

"We feel we have performed a social service," Buse said.

Part of that history is how men who enlisted were often placed in battalions who were strongly identified with other regions.

"In the case of Sudbury, Timmins, and Cobalt, most of them were put into the 48th Highlanders, which is identified with Toronto and the 15th Batallion," Buse said.

"127 people who signed up out of the militia in the Sault went to the 23rd Battalion, identified with the Eastern Ontario regiment."

"Even William Merrifield, the great hero from the Sault, a lot of people claimed was their hero. He served with the 4th battalion which is identified with central Ontario."

Mount said the most compelling part about writing these stories and tracking the soldiers' histories was being able to put human faces on the images we have of war.

"The surprise was the horrendous conditions, the mud, the rain, the bullets coming in, but having names and faces made everything even more realistic, even more tragic," Mount said.

"When we read that these people were 19, 23 years old, sometimes even less, lying to enlist early. It was Humboldt, Saskatchewan all over again."