[fastpat]

Why Did Canadians Hate Germans?
Posted by Laurence Vance at 04:03 PM

From a Canadian reader:

My Grandfather related to me some years ago that he and his fellow Canadians, when captured at the battle of Ypres in April 1915, were treated with some disgust and disdain by the Germans, who called them "geldsoldaten". The Germans ripped off some insignia and generally treated the Canadians much more roughly than British prisoners. It took a while for the Canadians to realize what the word meant: "money soldiers." Mercenaries.

In 1915, all the German armies were conscripted. The Canadians at that early date were volunteers.

And what the Germans couldn't understand, my grandfather told me, was why these Canadians hated Germans so much that they would come all this way just to kill them.

Either that, or these Canadians just liked killing people.

So the Canadians got a very rough ride.

Are the soldiers in Iraq today conscripted? Of course not; aren't they actually mercenaries?

Do they therefore either (a) hate Iraqis so much that they're willing to go all that way to kill them, or (b) like killing people?

The similarities to those Canadians of that long-ago war seem quite striking.

Incidently, my grandfather was part of a battalion of 660 men that left Vancouver in November of 1914.

Of that group, two men survived the war.

B.M.
Vancouver, B.C. http://blog.lewrockwell.com/