New Brunswick’s 26th Battalion served continuously on the Western Front from 1915 until the Armistice in 1918. More than 5,700 soldiers passed through its ranks during the First World War: 900 were killed and nearly 3,000 were wounded.
Now, a new book, A Family of Brothers, explores the lives of many of the soldiers in the 26th Battalion, who travelled from all corners of New Brunswick to fight on the front lines in the First World War.
The men fought at Ypres in the fall of 1915, on the Somme at Courcelette and Regina Trench in 1916. They carried on to Vimy Ridge, Hill 70, and Passchendaele in 1917. They were part of the battles at Amiens and the Hundred Days campaign of 1918.
A Family of Brothers tells the story of the “Fighting 26th,” from their mobilization to the aftermath of the war.
Using letters, newspaper accounts, war diaries, and other official documents, J. Brent Wilson offers an account of the soldiers at the front and those behind the lines, their experiences of the war and how their lives would be transformed upon their return to the Canada.
The author told CBC, “I’ve tried to paint as wide a picture of what the experience of being a soldier in a battalion like the 26th was and hopefully it provides part of the story that people may not have been aware of.”
He was surprised by how many soldiers came from small New Brunswick villages he had never heard of and “don’t really exist anymore.”
Mr. Wilson teaches in the history department at the University of New Brunswick and has worked at the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society since 1989. He is the editor of Hurricane Pilot: The Wartime Letters of W.O. Harry Gill, D.F.M., 1940-1943, Vol. 10 in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series, and a co-author of Kandahar Tour: The Turning Point in Canada’s Afghan Mission.
A Family of Brothers is volume 25 of the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.
Read more in the CBC report, ‘A family of brothers’: 26th Battalion celebrated in First World War book.
