[PHOTO] Maitland across from Buddies

I love the sheer intensity of this autumnal yellow.

[PHOTO] Looking back on the dead of Earlscourt, Toronto

Back in August of 2017, while walking through Toronto's Prospect Cemetery, I took this photo of this cenotaph. Prospect Cemetery extends as far south as St. Clair Avenue, touching Earlscourt, and back a century ago when this neighbourhood was a newly-annexed municipality on the northwest fringes of the City of Toronto, Earlscourt was a new community home to many recent British immigrants. These people volunteered by the thousands to serve on the Western Front, and died in the hundreds. The Archives of Ontario feature a collection of letters taken from one such family, on the Gray family who had immigrated from Kent a year before the war began, seeing one son live and another die.

After the First World War, this memorial was built in Prospect Cemetery, Earlscourt’s local cemetery, in honour of the neighbourhood’s dead. Future king Edward VIII lent his presence to the ceremonies surrounding of this cenotaph in 1919. I can only imagine the sheer amount of psychic trauma that must have been around in this one community, just a few minutes' walk north and west of my home, for this monument to come about, only coming to surface on occasions like this. I can barely imagine the extent of the grief across Canada and the wider world. Almost all memory of this vast grief, all lived memory at least, is gone. I wonder, looking at these mute monuments, if we might be the better--the less troubled, at least--for that void.

[NEWS] Ten links on the centenary anniversary of the end of the First World War (#ww1)

• MacLean's a href="https://www.macleans.ca/multimedia/the-memory-remains-capturing-the-echoes-of-the-first-world-war/">highlights the photos of Peter MacDiarmid, literally blending archival photos of locations of note to Canada in the First World War with contemporary photos of those same areas now.


• Patrick Chovanec at the NYR Daily talks about what he learned of the First World War, its contingencies and its uncertainties, through following a day-by-day Twitter account of the war.


• Robert France at The Conversation writes movingly about the utter waste of the First World War, something made worse by the inability of some of us now to understand its lessons against war.


• David Elstein at Open Democracy looks at failings in the BBC coverage of the First World War, particularly in its representations of other countries' actions.


• Craig Gibson at NOW Toronto remembers the life of his grandfather William Gibson, maimed and shortened by the First World War.


• J.L. Granatstein writes in MacLean's about the many changes imposed on Canada by the First World War, everything from industrialization to ethnic conflict to a new place in the world.


• France Inter writes about the 140 thousand Chinese workers who came to western Europe during the First World War to relieve shortages of labour, even to the trenches.


• Wawmeesh Hamilton writes at The Discourse about the many Indigenous veterans and victims of war, including the First World War. Were--are--their sacrifices honoured by other Canadians?


• George M. Johnson at The Conversation writes about how, for many British writers, their work helped them and their society start to heal from the losses of the First World War.


• Window on Eurasia shares the warning of Russian historian Leonid Mlechin that the world seems to have learned nothing from the negative lessons of the nationalist fanaticism, the desire for revenge, engendered by the First World War.