Dan Black (1)

In 2014, the 100th anniversary of the start of WWI, I researched the war for a term paper and a museum display. Much information came to light of little known stories of the war. Of those stories I was particularly drawn to the ones about the underage soldiers who found a way to enlist and fight. A particularly poignant story was that of Herbert Bradley who joined up and fought until he was sent back home after it was discovered that he was underage. After all that, he died in 1918 of the Spanish flu at age 16.

As I was already interested in the stories of underage soldiers, I picked up "Old Enough to Fight" in part to see if the soldiers from Port Coquitlam were mentioned (they weren’t) but also in part to see how wide spread underage service was in WWI. According to Black and Boileau there were many boy soldiers who fought and the writers show us how prevalent they were as they take us through the battles that Canada fought by naming the teenagers who were there, many of whom died.

This book is not a mere catalogue of names; it shows us the boys in action, paying tribute to their contributions to the war effort. It also tells the story of Canada’s (and Newfoundland’s) war and the effect that the war had on the people of Canada and a whole generation. Canada matured as a country during the course of the war and the boys who joined matured as well. As Romeo Dellaire writes in his forward to the book, “The children involved in Canada’s War effort may have entered as innocent boys looking for adventure, honour, and purpose, but they underwent a maturation that many would not have originally anticipated.”… (mais)