Canada's First Cold War

How Canadians went from fighting Germans in Europe to battling Bolsheviks in Russia after the First World War

- Harry Wilson

KILL BRIDGE SENTRY. Stop communication between Station & Bridge. Prevent escape of enemy. Pretty standard list of objectives to see on a map of a military action executed in the second decade of the 20th century, right? Well, yes — but there is something unusual about these imperatives. They were carried out not where you might expect — on a shell-pocked battlefi eld in Belgium, say — but amid a remote expanse of taiga in -40 C temperatures more than 3,000 kilometres away.

The list appears on this map, which Canadians used to plan a surprise Allied attack on Segezha, a village in northwestern Russia, in February 1919 — a phrase that should give pause to even novice First World War history buffs. An