Nathan M. Greenfield’s talent for combining rich (and often overlooked) historical data with first-person accounts made his book The Battle of the St. Lawrence both a critical and popular success. Now he turns his formidable storytelling skill to one of the defining battles of the First World War and a seminal event in the building of our country.

The Second Battle of Ypres pitted the highly trained German soldiers—armed with the first weapon of mass destruction, chlorine gas—against the 1st Canadian Division, which had been in the trenches for just over a week. Yet it was the Canadians who ultimately triumphed, stopping the German advance that followed history’s first poison-gas attacks.

In Baptism of Fire, Greenfield revisits the battlefields and war rooms of history, deconstructing military motives and unearthing scores of unpublished interviews, giving voice to the men who faced what one officer called a “filthy, loathsome pestilence” that turned copper buttons green and seared the Canadians’ lungs. He describes how surprise turned to terror as the infantry saw the first clouds of chlorine gas rolling towards them; how, at first, the German soldiers had joked that their mysterious silver cylinders, spied across the enemy line, were a new kind of German beer keg. Recreating how the Canadians immediately filled the 12-kilometre- long hole in the Allied lines after the initial gas attack, Greenfield takes readers into the unimaginable horror of shell fire that turned men into “pink mist” and obliterated trenches, leaving the survivors to defend a position of death. And he explains how the untried Canadians, with their defective Ross rifles, breathing through urine-soaked handkerchiefs, successfully made one of the most important stands of the war—perhaps even staving off an ultimate German victory.

With alacrity and a great respect for the men in the trenches, Greenfield adds a new dimension to, and explodes a few myths behind, the Battle of Ypres. Within his pages are the words of the Canadian—and German—soldiers themselves, many of whom have never been heard before. Their accounts make this a gripping read for anyone seeking to understand our historical or military past.

NATHAN M. GREENFIELD, PhD, is the Canadian correspondent for The Times Educational Supplement and is a contributor to Maclean’s, Canadian Geographic and The Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of The Damned, which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction; Baptism Of Fire, which was a finalist for the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction; and the widely praised The Battle Of The St. Lawrence. Greenfield lives in Ottawa.

FACEBOOK: Nathan M. Greenfield Author
TWITTER: @HongKong Battle

Nathan M. Greenfield's profile page

"Greenfield writes exciting popular history, and his account of the Canadian Division's great battle at Ypres in April 1915 is the perfect subject for his talents. The first major gas attack, the shock of action and terrible casualties, the testing under fire of untried leaders and soldiers--it's all here and, as the author argues, we watch the beginnings of Canada's nationhood on foreign fields." (J.L. Granatstein, author of Who Killed the Canadian Military?)