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, stands a granite cenotaph erected in memory of 44 men who died soldiering in the First World War. Those men came 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 people who built and were built by a Canadian community that was also distinctly British Columbian.