Percy Willmot: Cape Bretoner at War
When Britain went to war in August 1914, Canada and the rest of the British empire followed without question and without being asked. By the time the Great War finally ground to an end in November 1918, more than 600,000 Canadians had enlisted for the struggle. One of them was Percy Charles Willmot.
Percy wrote very frequently, no matter where he was or what was going on and he was a gifted writer, whose sparkling personality still clearly emerges more than eighty years later. His letters tell us much about the wartime experiences of many thousands of soldiers like him and they remind us of the intense intimacy of the shared experiences of the trenches, especially for someone like Percy, serving in a unit in which so many of his comrades came from his own community.