73 14 15 16 17 18 The GreatWar Canadian nurses’ pride in their blue uniforms, which earned them the nickname bluebirds. Many frontline diaries were pocket-sized notebooks, which were deposited with friends and family by soldiers on leave. Officially forbidden, often written covertly, and carried close to the body, they were the repositories for the writers’ experiences, long used as primary material for other studies or more literary works but not studied as their own genre. These diaries record immediate responses through the lens of diverse witnesses at the frontlines and the home front, and so provide a more complete picture of the war’s social panorama by giving insight into the human side of the war. Despite this, they have so far been mostly neglected in archives. Diaries behind the frontlines of war include the writings of doctors, nurses, orderlies, and chaplains. For example, the Operation Canada DigitalWar Diaries Project gives readers full digital access to the unpublished diaries of Reverend William Andrew White (1874-1936) (Figure 5), a Black Canadian chaplain born to former slaves in Virginia who moved to Nova Scotia at the age of twenty-five and attended Acadia University before being ordained as a reverend in 1903. On February 1, 1917, at the age of 42, he enlisted in the No. 2 Construction Battalion, an all-black segregated unit of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (Figure 6). The only Black officer in the Canadian Expeditionary Force during World War I, Captain White was also the only Black chaplain who served in the Canadian or British forces during the war. For the first time, the Operation Canada DigitalWar Diaries Project gives access to his voice, thoughts, and experiences. White kept two diaries while he served in Europe with the No. 2 Construction Battalion, and his writings often reveal the intersection of war with race and religion. White critically references the racist second-class treatment of the “coloured boys,” who were often accused of “faking” illness. He also provides snippets on his weekly Sunday sermons, but despite his faith, the experience took Figure 5: Captain William Andrew White, chaplain of the No. 2 Construction Battalion, Photograph ca. 1916. William Andrew White Diary Landing Page, The Operation Canada Digital War Diaries Project, MLC Research Centre, Toronto. Courtesy of Anthony Sherwood.
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