The Great War as I Saw It

A fifty-three-year-old Anglican priest and poet when the First World War broke out, Montreal-born Frederick George Scott (1861-1944) was an improbable volunteer, but also an invaluable war memoirist about life at the front. The rector of Quebec City's St. Matthew's Anglican Church, he enlisted at the very beginning of the conflict and served on the Western Front until the Armistice. A High Anglican and staunch British imperialist described by one of his fellow officers as "an old snob of the old school," Scott also defied stereotypes, often rejecting the privileges he was entitled to as an officer and insisting on being at the frontlines with the rank-and-file soldiers, with whom he felt genuine kinship. As a result, he was seriously wounded in the autumn of 1918, near the end of the war. The book, first published in 1922, is an idiosyncratic portrait by a man of strong religious convictions witnessing the horror of modern warfare.

Montreal and Kingston

McGill-Queen's University Press

2014

xliii-327p

en

978-0-7735-4424-6