In an officers’ mess of two double companies of Canadians only one officer drank on his arrival in a canteen camp in England; within three months there was not an abstainer in the mess.
_Facts told at Society for Study of Inebriety, Jan. 10, 1916_
These men come mostly from districts in Canada where intoxicants are prohibited by law, and many of them, being young lads, who perhaps have never tasted liquor before their arrival, fall easy victims.
Overseas soldiers come to our hospitals astonishingly cheerful and fit in a general sense, and wonderfully receptive to treatment. Only three per thousand die in our great hospitals. This is largely due to the hardy life of the men and the fact that they are removed from the danger of taking too much alcohol. The home troops have a much higher mortality, partly because their use of alcohol diminishes their chances. Re-admissions are largely due to drink on furlough.
_Major Maclean, M.D., of the Third Western General Hospital_
A Canadian soldier, who had been wounded at the Front, was taken to a house by women and left alone drunk. An officer gave him an excellent character, and said he was on his way back to Canada. These men experience temptations here (he said) that they would not find in Canada, and there was too much of this going on.
_Hastings Police Records, February 19, 1917_
I heard a sad account of the havoc of the wet canteen and a private in a Canadian A.M.C. told us of a lad of 17 who is made so drunk that there is rarely a night when he has not to be helped up to bed. One of the soldiers here told me of his son in Canada being anxious to join up, but after seeing the condition of things over here he was doing all he could to discourage his son.
The Canadians in most cases are entirely lost when they arrive in this country, and are much more liable to the temptation which is thrown in their way, but when you give a figure such as this—that in one camp during last year, and two months of the previous year, there were 7,000 cases—it seems to me that it is about time we realised the magnitude of the evil. I do not know what has happened to them, except that I imagine a large number have gone back to Canada, and have not been able to play the part they had hoped to play.