Cat No.: CA0385: (See also product CA0385-DL for this "book" as a downloadable file and save the mailing cost.)
When the author, Capt. S. G. Bennett, was commissioned to write the history of the Regiment he found himself in the fortunate position of having to pick and choose what of the wealth of detailed information available he could best use to produce an accurate, comprehensive, informative and readable book of a reasonable size.
One of his major choices was to dedicate about half the book (counted by page number*) to Appendices containing the service details of all of the men serving in the regiment as a Nominal Roll, and a few pages of Abbreviations and Indexes. (*The pages in the book are numbered to 336, but when all unnumbered intro. and illustration pages are included the actual page count rises to 370.)
The other half of the book, then, provides a history of the activities of the Regiment from its voluntary beginnings through the official “establishment” and its physical assembly, largely from personnel of four of the existing Ontario based cavalry regiments: These were the Governor General’s Body Guard, the 2nd Dragoons, the 9th Mississauga Horse and the 25th Brant Dragoons. From this assembly on the Canadian National Exhibition grounds in Toronto, the story quickly proceeds through, equipping, training, the mass movement to Europe, and to a more exhaustive, and detailed, account of engagements with the enemy on the European battlefields.
As you might expect the story is arranged in chronological order and a nice touch is margin notes identifying the applicable dates for that section of the text. The author has distilled his account from many sources, including what has been “voted” as one of the best official war diaries and documents borrowed from the Historical Section of the General Staff. The story is amply illustrated with 23 pages of photographs and situation maps.
While the account provides a great deal of detail about the individual engagements the regiment was involved in, only the names of the officers directly in charge tend to be mentioned. However, the author claims to have been careful to include mention of ALL activities undertaken by the regiment, so the potential involvement of any particular individual, of any rank, can be implied from his service dates in the Nominal Roll and the dates of the actions.
This will be a wonderful resource for any researcher who can count a member of the 4th Canadian Mounted Rifles amongst their forbears, or for students of the Great War at large. This digital publication is fully text searchable through the application of our enhanced OCR and the search delay is minimized by our FastFind technology.
No. of CDs is: 1 ; Format is: PDF ; Searchable?: YES;
FastFind: Yes; ISBN No.: 978-1-897405-91-8 ;