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‘You will not be going to this war’: the rejected volunteers of the First Contingent of the Canadian Expeditionary Force

Between the start of the war in 1914 and commencement of conscription in 1918, tens of thousands of men who volunteered for service in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) were rejected as unfit for service. However, despite forming both a numerically and socially significant minority with Canada's wartime population, these men are, generally speaking, non-existent in most Canadians' public and academic memories of the Great War. This paper seeks to redress this lapse in public and academic memory by examining the files of over 3050 men rejected for service during the formation of the First Contingent of CEF at Valcartier mobilization camp in August–September 1914. In all, these 3050 individuals account for approximately 60% of the over 5000 men that were ejected from the camp. Divided into two parts, the first part of this paper describes these files and the information that can be garnered from it. It indicates that as well as offering insight into the physical characteristics of these men, this source also presents a conduit through which to engage with the nature of the CEF medical examination, the ways families might endeavour to undermine their husbands', fathers', brothers' and sons' attempts to enlist, and a rejected volunteer's wider experiences – both during and after the war. The second half of the paper then employs this source material to paint a portrait of these men. In doing so, it demonstrates that there were often no visible indicators – other than the lack of a khaki uniform – that marked rejected men as different from those deemed fit to fight. In engaging with this topic, this section also explores some of the implications rejection had for these men.