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Canadian Prisoners Of The First World War: The Struggle For Resilience, Grace Peeters-Rosien

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In the First World War, 3,500 Canadian soldiers were taken prisoner. Throughout their captivity, they endured intense humiliation, dehumanization, and abuse. Despite this, the men were able to remain resilient and even found ways to fight back. By using memoirs and letters written by the prisoners, this paper will analyze how these Canadians were determined to keep fighting. This paper will be using an analogy of a bank account to explain how close the prisoners came to breakdown, and how they continuously struggled to endure. Society and war had taught these men that prisoners were weak and cowardly, but they …