My current project is to put together a presentation for the Western Front Association, Pacific Coast Branch conference and AGM in Victoria, March 4th to 6th. My topic is "The Canadian Cavalry Brigade in World War I". To do so I have done a historical summary and collected images to tie in with the editorial copy. One photo takes me back: my father and me, standing on the front steps of our house, in approximately 1962. I am in the uniform of an RCN midshipman. A much earlier photo shows Dad, c 1914-15, in cavalry uniform, with his father and grandfather.
When the photo of Dad and me was taken, he would have been 68 or 69 years old, my current age. When I was a young man the days of my father's youth, and the Great War, seemed an impossibly long time before. But in the Second World War, when I was born, WW I must have seemed like the day before to Dad.
Now that I have entered the world of 1914 via writing "Soldier of the Horse", it is starting to feel like yesterday, even to me, ninety-seven years later.
