Unending Seige
Other Canadian Participants
Caption: Private, 2nd Construction Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force, circa 1917
Tens of thousands of other Canadians served outside the Canadian Army Corps. The Canadian Cavalry Brigade, for example, worked as part of the British Cavalry Division. It had to wait for the spring of 1918 and the beginning of a war of movement to enter the scene and perform acts of bravery that would, in a very short space of time, earn two Victoria Crosses.
Elsewhere behind the front, thousands of men were fighting in the railway troops, and in 1918 a large number of these men would become infantrymen. Nearly 2,000 dead would decimate their ranks between the assault on Vimy Ridge and Armistice. There would also be three companies of sappers with the English engineers' units who would return to be with their countrymen at the front when the war ended. The Canadian Forestry Corps would recruit up to 12,000 men in France and 10,000 in Britain. A number of Canadians, including nurses and doctors, would be with service units in Palestine, Egypt and elsewhere against the Turks.
To contain the Bolshevik Revolution, some 5,000 Canadians would spend a few months in Siberia, where the Allies maintained an expeditionary corps. Between October 1918 and June 1919, when they left Russia, the Canadians were not involved in any large-scale fighting. Their casualties then amounted to eight dead and 16 wounded.
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