It was on this date in 1914 that Canada, as part of the British Empire (the UK government was headed by Liberal Prime Minister H.H. Asquith), entered the First World War. By the end of the war, four bloody years later, more than 600,000 Canadians had been in uniform with 425,000 of our countrymen having served overseas. This was a remarkable contribution to the war effort when one considers that Canada’s population was only eight million at the time. Our Prime Minister of the day, the great Sir Robert Borden, later visited Canadian military hospitals in the UK and afterwards, never broke faith with the men who served in the armed forces on his watch. The first group of Canadian soldiers sailed for the United Kingdom in the fall of 1914. It wasn’t long before names like Vimy Ridge, the Somme and Passchendaele became known to all Canadians. By the time the war ended in 1918, 67,000 Canadians had given their lives and a further 170,000 wounded. To put those numbers into prospective, revealing what a bloodbath the war was, approximately 40 per cent of the Canadians in uniform were either killed or wounded. Lest we forget. caption id="attachment_576499" align="alignleft" width="624" Canadian soldiers in the trenches, First World War/caption Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist.  He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy.  A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.