First World War

More than 3,059 McGill men, students and faculty, were called to active duty during the First World War. The McGill contingent of the Canadian Officers' Training Corps, led by engineering professor V.I. Smart, trained students as militia officers, and was formally connected with the 148th (McGill) Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, which sailed to England in September 1916.

Many female McGillians served on the front lines as ambulance drivers and nurses, and volunteered in Montreal; the warden of McGill’s Royal Victoria College, Ethel Hurlbatt served as chairwoman of the Women’s War Registry Committee, which supported the war effort and ensured the continued stability of the Montreal workforce.

In Dannes-Camiers and Boulogne, France, Dr. Herbert Stanley Birkett, McGill’s Dean of Medicine, headed the McGill No.3 Hospital, which was the war’s first hospital unit created by a university. The 1040-bed unit provided frontline medical and surgical care to military personnel. It was staffed by McGill faculty members, medical students and nurses from the Royal Victoria and Montreal General hospitals’ schools of nursing.

An illuminated book, which is displayed in the walkway connecting the McLennan and Redpath Library Buildings, lists the names of the 363 McGillians who fell during the war. The War Memorial Archway in the Raymond Building on the Macdonald campus and the WHAT are permanent reminders of the war’s toll, while three particular McGillians who were killed in the line of duty – student Lieutenant George Irvine Baillie, and graduates Lieutenant Gordon Home Blackader and Captain Percival Molson – are remembered by the chemistry library, the art and architecture library, and the football stadium.

A stained glass window in the Strathcona Building commemorate three McGill professors who lost their lives in the Great War: Lt. Col. Roland Playfair Campbell, Lt. Col. Henry Brydges Yates and Major John McCrae. Following the battlefield death of a close friend, Dr. McCrae put pen to paper while sitting in an ambulance, creating the indelible imagery that would galvanize a nation’s grief: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row…”