Memory and Valour is a Canadian military history podcast exploring the human stories of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the First World War (WW1). Through authentic diaries, letters, and archival research, each episode brings listeners into trench warfare, shell shock, conscription, battlefield tactics, and the lived experience of Canadian soldiers on the Western Front.
This is Canadian WW1 history beyond the textbook — focused on courage, sacrifice, memory, and the families forever changed by war.
Follow Memory and Valour for immersive Canadian First World War storytelling.
The Germans never meant the Hindenburg Line to be a wall. It was an answer to arithmetic: too much front, too few soldiers. In this episode, we look at how it was built over a single winter by tens of thousands of labourers, why the Germans burned and poisoned the ground they gave up to reach it, and what the veterans of the 49th Battalion thought of the old field marshal whose name it carried.
Then we follow the Canadian Corps through the fighting of September and October 1918, from the Drocourt-Quéant Line, where seven Canadians won the Victoria Cross in a single day, to the Canal du Nord and the capture of Cambrai. Along the way, we hear from German and British voices who were there, and from the Edmonton men of the 49th, in their own commanding officer's words.
The Line was never one wall, and it wasn't taken in one day. This is the story of how it came apart.
27 Sept 2026
39 - The Goodest Boys: Dogs of the First World War
Dogs never carried a rifle in the First World War, but they may have been its most effective piece of equipment.
This episode follows the mercy dogs who searched no man's land for the wounded and the messenger dogs trained to clear barbed wire at a dead run while men fired rifles over their heads, on purpose.
Featuring Captain and Prusco in France, a German dog named Steif who took a bullet and still finished the job, Satan of Verdun, and Paddy, a beagle cross who marched with an Edmonton-raised field ambulance from the Calgary Exhibition Grounds through four years of war.
Where memory endures, valour lives on.
13 Sept 2026
38 - The Devil's Lace: Barbed Wire and the First World War
Barbed wire never fired a shot. It didn't need to.
This episode traces how a cheap farm fencing technology became one of the deadliest features of the First World War, from the first Somme bombardment that couldn't cut it, to Vimy's careful planning around it, to the tanks that finally crushed it in 1918.
Along the way: Piper James Cleland Richardson's Victoria Cross, a doomed wire-cutting officer named Garton, and five archival veteran voices describing, in their own words, what it meant to build it, cross it, and sometimes die in it.
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