The Gardeners of Vimy: Canadian Corps’ Farming Operations During the German Offensives of 1918

“The Gardeners of Salonika” was Georges Clemenceau’s jibe at the French and British divisions tied down in entrenchments round the Greek port for a good part of the First World War, because all they seemed to do was dig, rather than launch a Balkan offensive. The Canadian Corps, from Field Marshal Haig’s perspective, was similarly removed from the war when Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Currie, strongly supported by the Canadian government, refused to accept the piecemeal breakup of the Corps to help shore up the British line during the great German offensive which began in March 1918. Haig never forgave this rebuff, and his diary is studded with unfavourable comparisons of the Canadians with the Australians, who permitted their divisions to be detached from the corps organization and shifted to menaced sectors of the Western Front. As a result of Currie’s action, which Lord Derby, the British Secretary of War, forced Haig to accept, three of the four divisions which made up the national army were restored to Canadian command, occupying the Vimy bastion and lines extending from it northward. The Corps had last fought in a major operation in October/November 1917, at Passchendaele; it was not to be employed again (except for small operations incidental to holding a substantial portion of the front) until the climactic battle of Amiens in August 1918. In the interim, while the Allies fought with their backs to the wall to stem the great series of German onslaughts, the Canadians, secure in the immensely strong lines they had created around Vimy, were given opportunity to rest and to train for the moment when they would be used to spearhead a renewal of the Allied offensive against the German army. The Canadians held a vital and extensive part of the Allied line, and were obviously performing a major defensive function during the long weeks of the German offensive, even though their relative inaction occasioned much British resentment. In that sense they bear little resemblance to the Gardeners of Salonika. In another, however, they were the genuine article, and can legitimately be termed “The Gardeners of Vimy,” for during the spring and summer of 1918, as well as guarding the Vimy lines, the Canadian Corps was also involved in battle zone farming in a big way. How did the Corps come to be engaged in an essentially peaceful and bucolic enterprise, especially during such a critical period? This activity was completely unknown to me, until a few references in the enormous finding aid to Record Group 9 in the National Archives of Canada piqued my curiosity. The Canadian Corps, as a large fighting formation of over 100,000 men, required many non-fighting units and sub-units to support it in the field, supply it, provide it with reinforcements, medical services, legal and police services, and so on. All its parts generated masses of paper, and much of this is deposited in Record Group 9. Among this immense volume of documents is to be found a memorandum of early 1918 entitled “Suggested Establishment for Agricultural Employment Coy.,” signed by Major F.C. Washington, who is identified as “Canadian Corps Agricultural Officer.” Why did the Corps need an Agricultural Officer and an Agricultural Employment Company? The story that emerges from fragmentary evidence is incomplete, yet while hardly of cosmic significance, is an unusual and interesting one

From the mountains to the prairies and beyond the pale : American yodeling on early recordings

This sound review surveys yodeling in North American popular music, beginning with some of the earliest recordings on which it is featured. In order to better contextualize the recordings, I will also mention a few examples of sheet music with yodeling—items which are generally overlooked. My intention is to question why yodeling became attached to particular genres and how it functions in the construction of those genres. Indeed, two popular music genres—so-called hillbilly music and cowboy or Western music—made yodeling an important, if not identifying, component. The focus here is on yodeling’s connotations and associations and how these established expressive relationships between the moods, personae, and images of the songs

A program to help students of life sciences prepare a research protocol

This paper describes a Web‐based program that has been written in JavaScript to help honours‐level students to design a protocol for their research project. It consists of several screens which contain text‐input boxes and options, that students can select to determine what statistical test is appropriate. On each page students can obtain information concerning the particular step in the procedure for defining the research protocol. Some links to useful pages on the Internet are also provided. After the student has navigated the screens, the program writes a protocol outline, depending on the information entered by the student. The program was introduced to fourth‐stage students of Nutrition and Dietetics at the beginning of the Research Project module. Students were asked to complete an anonymous questionnaire containing attitude statements after they had discussed the protocol with their supervisors. Students generally rated the usefulness of the Internet links highly and considered the program to be user‐friendly, clearly laid out and visually appealing. Most students agreed that the program helped to clarify what is needed for the protocol, provoked them to think of aspects of the project, the importance of which they might have failed to realize early enough, and helped them to ask appropriate questions of their supervisors

Using Radio Telemetry and Geographic Information Systems to Map and Estimate the Home Range Size and Daily Movement Patterns of Female Cheetahs on Namibia’s Commercial Farmland

Fewer than 10,000 cheetahs remain in the wild in Sub-Saharan Africa.Namibia has the largest population, estimated to be 4,000 cheetahs. Habitat fragmentation and prey depletion from human expansion for agriculture have pushed 90 percent of cheetahs to reside on commercial farmland where there is an absence of larger predators, but where there is conflict with the livestock farmers. Radio telemetry was used to investigate the seasonal variation in home range size among nine female cheetahs on commercial farmlands on or near the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Otjiwarongo, Namibia. ArcGIS 10.3 and Geospatial Modeling Environment were used to calculate the home range size. This was estimated for the overall, annual, monthly, and seasonal variants for each individual cheetah. Nine female cheetahs were tracked in this study; six ofthem were rewilded and three of them were wild. The wild cheetahs had a larger home range estimation compared to the rewilded cheetahs. The home range size and average distance moved (km) between GPS locations had no significance between the seasons basedon the statistical program R 3.2.1. These results in combination with further research can help formulate a long-term conservation plan for the remaining and rewilded cheetah population on Namibia\u27s commercial farmland

Direct reading of electrocardiograms and respiration rates

Technique for reading heart and respiration rates is more accurate and direct than the previous method. Index of a plastic calibrated card is aligned with a point on the electrocardiogram. Complexes are counted as indicated on the card and heart or respiration rate is read directly from the appropriate scale

The Return of the Ring (2016), edited by Lynn Forest-Hill

Book review, by Dennis Wilson Wise, of The Return of the Ring (2 vols, 2016), ed. by Lynn Forest-Hil

Dedication to Nathan Isgur

Nathan passed away in July after a lengthy illness. I am sure most of you are familiar with his many contributions to heavy quark physics and it is certainly fitting that we take a few minutes to honor him at the beginning of this meeting. Actually Nathan's main physics interest was the strong interactions rather than heavy quark physics per se. He was already very well known for work he did with Gabriel Karl and others on the nonrelativistic quark model before the work that he did on heavy quark symmetry and its applications. However, Nathan understood the limitations of the nonrelativistic quark model, and was thrilled that the methods he helped develop allowed one to derive systematically from the theory of the strong interactions many properties of hadrons that contain a heavy quark