Once Well Beloved: Remembering a British Columbia Great War Sacrifice

“Our well beloved dead who died that we might live.”

In the town of Merritt, in British Columbia’s Nicola Valley, is a granite cenotaph erected in 1921 to remember 44 men from the valley who died soldiering in the First World War. Those men were from a Nicola Valley that had been suddenly and dramatically settled just a decade before, by the will of railway executives and the arrival of British colliers. Twelve of those soldiers are the subject of these pages—and through them, we meet the men, women and children of the Nicola Valley, the dead and their survivors: the makers of a Canadian community that was also a distinctly British Columbian community.

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