Early in the winter of 1913, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, an Icelander from Manitoba, set out on one of his explorations of the Arctic regions of Canada. Public opinion had been so roused and excited over Admiral Peary reaching the North Pole on April 6, 1909, that the Canadian Government felt that they owed it to the Empire to make some attempt at charting the northern regions for the Dominion. Under Government organisation and supervision the enterprise lasted for five years. Thousands of square miles were added to Canadian territory within the Arctic Circle, many of which, contrary to popular conception, are green and habitable. The geography of certain lands and seas was amplified and corrected, interesting and useful scientific material was obtained, and much light thrown on general conditions prevailing in those latitudes which had escaped the observation of Roald Amundsen when he accomplished the navigation of the Northwest Passage during 1903-6.
The opening years of the second decade of the twentieth century, however, had not been without their toll of the Empire makers in Canada. Just before the Great War broke on an unsuspecting Dominion, Lord Strathcona passed away in his 94th year. From an apprentice clerk in Hudson's Bay Company he had passed from honour to honour until his death, when he was High Commissioner for Canada in London. Not many months later he was followed by the last surviving Father of Confederation, Sir Charles Tupper, who had preceded him in the office. Both of these pioneers in Canadian life wielded an influence very far reaching in the interests of the British Empire.
At the outbreak of the war similar losses in Canadian public life passed without much notice in the stress and strain of the struggle to which Canada was to devote herself during the ensuing years.
The prompt action of Sir Sam Hughes, the Minister of Militia, the sending of 400,000 men overseas to fight the great fight, the seemingly never-ending battles of Ypres, St. Julien, Festubert, Givenchy, St. Eloi, Sanctuary Wood, Vimy Ridge, Loos, Hill 70, Courcelette, Passchendaele, and the Somme, under General Lord Byng and General Sir Arthur Currie, appear too vivid in the mind as yet to be regarded as history.
Something of the spirit of the Canadians in sharing the common sacrifice is reflected in the beautiful though poignant lines of Colonel Macrae of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, who himself made the supreme sacrifice in one of the early engagements of 1915:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Beneath the crosses, row on row
That mark our place, and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe;
To you, from falling hands, we throw
The torch. Be yours to lift it high!
If ye break faith with us who die,
We shall not sleep, though poppies blow
In Flanders fields.
As for those at home, now that the war has passed into the ages-long annals of the Empire, no words can express their thoughts better than those of Laurence Binyon at the entrance of the British Museum in London, England: