Nov. 11 observes the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I, and the valiant role Canada played in the “War to End All Wars” is on the minds of many Canadians.
Renie Gross remembers how her father, Michael Dunne, a soldier in WWI, barely talked about his experiences in a war that brought human suffering to a level the world had not seen before.
It was partly old-fashioned chivalry toward her and her four sisters, she said, but also “the characteristic of many soldiers returning from the First World War.”
“The conditions were so terrible that they didn’t talk a lot about it, and no one really wanted to know about it. The sort of sense was this surge of patriotism that was experienced by the whole country, [but] in fact they had been sent to a terrible theatre of war, into a terrible war of attrition with no clear winners and losers most of the time,” said Mrs. Gross, a resident of Edmonton.
It was not until decades later, very near the end of his life, that Mr. Dunne began telling his war stories to his teenage grandson, Paul Gross. His experiences greatly affected Paul, who made it his lifelong dream to make a movie about this significant period in Canadian history.
He brought his dream to reality in “Passchendaele,” an epic film that tells of a soldier’s love story set against home-front activities in Calgary, and the horrors of trench warfare in the Battle of Passchendaele in Belgium in the fall of 1917.
The movie’s opening scene is based on a story Mr. Dunne told his grandson: At the Battle of Vimy Ridge he had killed a young German soldier by bayoneting him in the forehead.
Like many young Canadians at the time, Mr. Dunne enlisted when he was only 18, following in the footsteps of his two older brothers. Shortly after arriving in France in June 1916, he went to see his second oldest brother, Jim, who was stationed nearby. But Jim had been killed in a battle the day before.
Mr. Dunne himself was reported either wounded or missing in action on several occasions during the war, as was his oldest brother, Tom. The impact on his mother, Annie Dunne, was grave.
Mrs. Gross recalled how one of her uncles described Annie’s reaction whenever she would see the boy from the telegraph office coming to their home in Brooks, Alberta.
“He said she would immediately begin to tremble, because it was almost never good news. … She particularly suffered greatly from the uncertainties of the times, and in fact she didn’t live long enough to see my father after he got home from the war. She died in the summer of 1918 and he didn’t get home until December,” she said.
“My younger uncle always said she died of a broken heart.”
Achievements and Sacrifices
