The Western Front of the First World War consumed individuality as thoroughly as it consumed individuals. As Canadians, our folk-memory of the war is of the quick and the dead indistinguishable from the mud. In the trenches, the soldiers are already “beneath the poppies,” waiting for death that seems utterly random and impersonal. It is telling that the war’s best-known hero is the unknown soldier. The war was the worst of nascent modernism, a vast engine with humanity as machine part: expendable and replaceable, where a soldier’s individual effect was less than his fraction of the whole.

It is these images that in part explain the popularity of memoirs of the First World War, particularly the everyman soldier’s memoir. These books offer a means to frame the war more manageably than the appalling history and unfathomable statistics, and to reaffirm the individual, notably more as a survivor than as a victor. It also explains why, 85 years after the war, memoirs continue to emerge from family storage long after the death of their writers, and are still being published. Such is the case with the journal of Deward Barnes and the memoir of James Robert Johnston, both Canadians who served in France and Belgium in 1917-18.

It is unlikely that Deward Barnes’s journal, under the title It Made You Think of Home, was ever intended to be published. The almost daily entries are spare and often cryptic. Here, the book’s editor, Toronto writer Bruce Cane, does yeoman service explaining military technicalities and soldiers’ argot while putting Barnes’s war in context both within the diarist’s locale and the wider war. His detailed annotations are at least as long as the diary itself.

Even though Barnes went “over the top” 14 times, combat occupies a much smaller portion of the diary than the minutiae of day-to-day life. Despite the terseness of the entries, it becomes apparent that the soldier’s lot was endless tedium underscored by anxiety and occasionally punctuated with terror. Getting access to decent food, dealing with lice, and maintaining the link with home via letters figure large.

The wartime memoir of James Robert Johnston, Riding into War, was written 45 years after the war, and was intended to be read by persons other than Johnston himself. With charming self-deprecation, he patiently explains his activities, provides some wider military context, and keeps jargon to a minimum. The memoir has been delicately edited and annotated by the University of New Brunswick Military and Strategic Studies Program, under research director Brent Wilson’s name.

Johnston’s combat service primarily entailed hauling supplies by horse or mule from depots in the rear to troops in the front line. Along these routes – frequently precarious, often with the threat of drowning in mud – he was constantly exposed to shellfire. Johnston’s details on the role of horses, and the riders’ relationships with them, is a relatively unique view on the war. “I believe my saddle horse knew more than I did, and is one of the reasons I lasted as long as I did,” writes Johnston.

Anyone interested in Canada’s role in the First World War will find that both books provide perspectives at once new and familiar. For those just approaching the history, It Made You Think of Home benefits from having extensive annotation to guide the reader through unfamiliar territory.

In both books, the individual characters of the authors emerge, putting a face and a voice to the statistics and battle maps. Though both authors survived the war and returned physically sound, inevitably, the war left its mark on them. Johnston, concluding his memoir, writes that upon returning home, “my nerves were not too good.” Barnes, the older and more taciturn of the two, is surprisingly direct: “My nerves are gone.”