Memory and Valour

09/08/2026

TRENCH TRIVIA TUESDAY!!

This German gr***de worked by blast, not fragmentation. Thin sheet steel, tight radius, built so you could throw it and keep walking forward instead of diving for cover. The Potato Masher. The Door Knocker. The Stielhandgranate. 🪖🇩🇪

Compare that to the British Mills bomb: cast iron, fragments flying further than any man could outrun, a weapon built for defending a hole in the ground. 🇬🇧🪖

Two completely different jobs, and in 1915, while both sides were mass producing theirs, Canadians were still building bombs by hand out of jam tins, two hundred yards from the enemy. 🇨🇦🍁🪖

09/04/2026

🎶 New Front Line Friday! Where my home is a museum that nobody approved.....

A four-minute Edison Blue Amberol cylinder that's been sitting on a shelf for longer than I want to admit.🎼

Edison introduced this format back in 1912, celluloid wrapped over a plaster core, advertised as practically unbreakable and boasting double the playing time of anything that came before it.🎵

It belonged to my grandfather. And once I really thought about it, this cylinder turned out to be the ancestor of an entire career, the exact kind of machine that pointed him toward the life's work he ended up building. 🎧📻🎙

Full story in the video.
Where memory endures, valour lives on. 🎙️🍁

09/04/2026

Welcome to Memory and Valour's newest followers! I'm genuinely honoured to have you here.🪖

I started this page because the men and women of Canada's First World War generation deserve better than a paragraph in a textbook nobody finished. Here you'll get real stories, real artifacts, and just enough gallows humour to make the history stick.

Thanks for joining the ranks. If you've got a family story of your own, I'd genuinely love to hear it.
🇨🇦🍁

William Saniger, Kyle Quick, Clinton Digness, Coni Buchholz, Rob Krause, James Watts, Aaron Haggstrom , Blaine McGowan, Sarah Jane, Ron Mcbride

09/03/2026

Six hundred men of the 49th Battalion went forward on the morning of October 30th, 1917. By nightfall, a hundred and forty-five were still standing. 🪖

NEW PODCAST EPISODE IS LIVE:
This is Passchendaele. The mud that swallowed men whole. The runners who carried messages across ground the artillery couldn't clear. Private Cecil Kinross, who walked alone into a machine gun position and came home with a Victoria Cross. 🎖️ And a runner named Hughie John McDonald, whose quiet courage never got a mountain named after it, but deserves to be remembered all the same.

Nineteen archival veteran voices from a 1965 CBC broadcast. Nine days in hospital before the worst morning of his battalion's war. A battalion that had already survived Mount Sorrel, the Somme, and Vimy, and still wasn't ready for this. 🪖

New episode is up now. Take off your shoes, and walk into it with me.

Where memory endures, valour lives on. 🍁

09/03/2026

That’s Passchendaele: The 49th Battalion and the Mud

https://open.spotify.com/episode/12fgykc8yAr798fEriUY6D?si=oL_LkidPRp-cnRISPzPwZg Passchendaele. Say it out loud and it already sounds like an ending. Ask most people what they know about it and you'll get the same handful of words back: mud, futility, generals who didn't know when to stop....

https://memoryandvalour.ca/2026/09/03/thats-passchendaele-the-49th-battalion-and-the-mud/

Explore the harrowing history of Passchendaele, where courage faced unthinkable conditions during WWI. Discover the voices of the brave.

09/01/2026

Between the shelling, there was an unbelievable amount of nothing to do.⏳️🪖

Soldiers filled it by making things. Spent shell casings, bullets, shrapnel, turned into something else entirely. Historians call it trench art.🏆

Most of it was never signed. Which means there's a piece sitting in someone's attic right now, beautifully made, and nobody left alive knows the name of the man who made it.⚱️

Follow along for the story behind it. 🪖🇨🇦🍁

08/30/2026

08/29/2026

I spent this morning at Northern Lights Cemetery, with a brush, bucket, and a veteran's headstone that hadn't seen a proper cleaning in a long time. 🪖

Sgt. George Thomas Myles. 1917 to 2004. King's Own Regiment, tank etched into the granite, a regimental crest worn soft by decades of weather, and "together forever" carved beside his wife Elsie's name.

That's the work: getting the lichen and grime off so the details underneath, the crest, the badge, the story, can be seen again. Small hands-on effort, big honour behind it.

Grateful to do this alongside Operation Restoration and Valour Park Association, who are out here doing this work headstone by headstone so that these men aren't forgotten.

Do you have family resting in a cemetery near you? Go find their stone. Say their name out loud.

Where memory endures, valour lives on. 🍁

08/29/2026

Standing at my Uncle Bobby's grave this morning. 🌹

Robert Lang: loud, funny, life of every party. My dad's big brother.

Joined the Marines at 17. Two tours in Vietnam. Came home a 20-year-old sergeant, then spent 20 years as a Canadian SAR Tech, pulling people out of sinking ships and crashed planes. 🪖🍁

43 years married. Kids, grandkids, and a dog named Max who never left his side. 💚

Some guys are loud because that's all there is. Bobby was loud because he'd already run toward the fire and come back laughing.

Know a SAR Tech in your family? Tell me in the comments. 🇨🇦

08/29/2026

I'm proud and honoured to have spent this beautiful morning with Operation Restoration Valour Park Association and PPCLI veterans. We scrubbed and cleaned every veteran headstone in Northern Lights Cemetery. As it should be. Lest we forget. And remember, where memory endures, valour lives on. 🪖🇨🇦🍁