The war (which was called “the war to end all wars”) ended with the signings of the armistice on November 11, 1918 and the Treaty of Versailles June 28, 1919. Several key points of the treaty were:

• Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France.
• Germany’s army was restricted to 100,000 soldiers.
• No military fortifications were allowed in The German Rhineland adjacent to France.
• Parts of Germany inhabited by Poles were given to Poland.
• Germany was to pay the Allies $ 33 billion to reimburse them for the cost of the war (reparations), at the rate of $ 63 million per year.

619,636 Canadians served in WW 1 – 59,544 died and 172,950 were wounded.

5,326 soldiers served in the 21st Battalion – 1,276 were killed in action.

Adolph Hitler served as a messenger during the First World War and was wounded in the leg. After recovering, he was promoted to the rank of Corporal and returned to action. He finished the war in hospital recovering from a gas attack near Ypres in 1918.

Beaverbrook attempts to put the efforts of Canadian soldiers into perspective by quoting a French General:

“My countrymen are fighting within fifty miles of Paris to push back and chastise the vile and leprous race which has violated the chastity of our beautiful France. But the Australians at the Dardenelles and the Canadians at Ypres fought with supreme and absolute devotion for what, to many of them, must have seemed simple abstractions, and that nation that will support for an abstraction the horror of this war of all wars, will ever hold the highest place in the records of human valour.”

Beaverbrook goes on to say:

“The rank and file volunteered in hundreds of thousands, and then in more hundreds of thousands, because they saw that the Empire was in peril. From thousands of miles the flower of the youth of the Empire have come and trained, and fought and died, or have drifted back broken after the war to the Dominions whence they set out.”

Brigadier-General William St. Pierre Hughes:

“It was outstanding fighting ability that enabled my 21st Battalion to come home with the record of never having been given a black eye in over four years of active participation in the war. They never went after anything they did not take and they never gave up anything they captured. Of the original 1,058, less than 150 are now alive in 1935, most of them buried in Flanders’ Fields and in the Somme.”

Although Bill and Keith went together and served together, they didn’t come back together – but they both came back.