Unwanted Warriors by Nic Clarke, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters

Far from the bloody mire of Europe’s battlefields, the Great War extracted another price – the dignity of Canada’s rejected volunteers. Unwanted Warriors tells the history of these first casualties of war: the tens of thousands (perhaps even hundreds of thousands) of men who tried to enlist but were deemed “unfit for service" by medical examiners. Condemned as shirkers for not being in uniform, rejected volunteers faced severe ostracism. Their own sense of nagging guilt, coupled with self-doubt about their social and physical worth, was often crippling. Faced with external and internal assaults, some rejected volunteers exiled themselves from society ... others chose to end their lives. Nic Clarke draws on the service files of 3, 400 rejected volunteers to examine the deleterious effects that socially constructed norms of health and fitness had on individual men and Canadian society during the First World War. Unwanted Warriors is the first book to consider the mechanics of the military medical examination, the physical and psychological characteristics that the authorities believed made a fighting man, and how evaluations changed as the war dragged on. It also brings to light the experiences of those who deliberately claimed disability to avoid service – a minority within the large population of rejected volunteers who felt denigrated, if not emasculated, by their exclusion from duty. | Unwanted Warriors by Nic Clarke, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters