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“I want to explain to our American friends, and I do mean friends, what that number means. To do that, I have to tell you who we are, and the honest version isn’t the one on the postcards. Because Canada is coming. And we are relentless.

In the First World War, the Germans learned to dread one thing on the Western Front: finding out that the Canadian Corps was moving into the line opposite them. Lloyd George wrote after the war that the Canadians were marked out as the storm troops of the British Empire, and that when the Germans spotted the Canadians arriving, they braced for the worst. During the last hundred days of that war, four Canadian divisions engaged and beat something like a quarter of the entire German army on the Western Front.

Here’s the part the postcards leave out… Canadians in the Great War frequently killed Germans who were trying to surrender… Not once. Not one bad unit. Cook found it ran through almost every battalion in the Corps, from privates to generals.”