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Review: Book about Northern Ontario military history 'sparkles with interesting stories'

Sudbury author gives his opinion on book by two local historians
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(Supplied)

We northerners sometimes feel like poor cousins, our noses pressed against the cold pane as we look in to see what the cool kids down south are up to. 

This image of our supposed lesser significance hit me between the eyes one day this past summer when smoke from the northwardly-creeping forest fire was so thick it forced me indoors. 

Once inside, I flipped on CBC News from Toronto, and was made to hear about a god-awful forest fire just three-hours north of Toronto! Huh? How about saying it was a stone’s throw away from Sudbury? What — are we invisible?

According to local historians, Dieter Buse and Graeme Mount, Northeastern Ontario has not only gone missing from the noonday news but from the history books, and the authors aim to set the record straight in their new book, “Untold: Northeastern Ontario's Military Past Volume 1, 1662- World War 1.”

Okay, let me confess that when I was asked to review a history book I considered the project about as appealing as a trip to the dentist, but I’ve got to admit I was wrong. 

“Untold” reads easy and sparkles with interesting stories. It persuaded me to re-imagine our northeastern landscape as a place where the high drama of great European conflicts was being played out, and it introduced me to a slew of ordinary northerners who helped shape our nation. 

You’ll recognize their family names because they’re the same ones borne by neighbours. More importantly you’ll recognize these people as northerners, rugged personalities carved from the granite of ingenuity, audacity and sheer pluck. 

They are the paddlers who led troops through uncharted boreal forest, and they’re the rain-soaked infantrymen who dipped their shoulders and walked into a hailstorm of bullets at the battle of the Somme. 

But not all were soldiers — some were broad-shouldered bûcherons like Alphonse Losier from Chapleau who felled trees in France, and plucky constructors such as Wilfred Rochon from Timmins who ignored enemy artillery fire as he built a railway to the front. 

And of course there were miners — like Stanley McDonald from Cobalt who tunnelled beneath the very ground on which enemy troops stood. 

But this isn’t simply an account of men in battle, for it also tells of sacrifices made by women on the home front and in the Medical Corps. 

Murielle Fell from Gore Bay served at seven different hospitals overseas, and eventually fell critically ill from the strain of overwork. Hers is just one of many heartrending accounts. 

Consider John Gutcher’s story. This Sudburian agonized for three months from multiple gunshot wounds before dying in a prisoner-of-war camp in the Rhineland.

And Alfred Cheechoo of Moose Factory succumbed to influenza while waiting for a troop ship home in 1919. 

“Untold” is brimming with such accounts, not of strangers or of people from “elsewhere,” but of relatives, our own and our neighbours’, brave and perhaps foolhardy souls who stepped away from the comfort of their lives so they might shape the world we live in. 

Pick up a copy of “Untold” and learn about them—for the pure pleasure of reading, and so their names may not be lost from our shared memory.

Copies of “Untold: Northeastern Ontario's Military Past Volume 1, 1662- World War 1” can be purchased at Chapters Indigo, Amazon, and select independent bookstores across Canada and the United States or through the Latitude 46 Publishing online store at www.latitude46publishing.com.

Greater Sudbury's Ric DeMeulles is the author of three novels and a retired occupational health and safety professional. Learn more about deMeulles on his website, demeulles.ca


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