Horses, Howitzers, and Hymns

Upon his arrival in France in February of 1917, twenty-one-year-old Lieut. Warren Skey purchased a small Au Jour le Jour to record his day-to-day experiences as a gunner, who packed ammunition, loaded on horses, to the guns at the front. He was serving with the 48th Howitzer Battery of the 2nd Brigade, Canadian Field Artillery during World War One. Almost a hundred years later author Marianne Goodfellow would discover her great-uncle Warren's wartime diary forgotten among some family memorabilia-and so she set out to read it.

Exhaustively researched, richly supplemented with visual documentation, and sensitively written, Horses, Howitzers, and Hymns tells of the courage and the suffering of the men and horses of an artillery brigade. But it is also the remarkable personal story of one young man and his family-Warren's father, the Reverend Skey, served in France as a military chaplain during the last year of the war-and their abiding ties to St. Anne's Anglican Church in Toronto. And it is, above all, the story of the author's deeply felt connection to the great-uncle she never knew:

I like to think of him now, not with his fellow lieutenant or signaller shot dead beside him, but rather, riding his horse over the French countryside in springtime or hearing those hymns on church parades that reminded him of home.

Lieut. Skey was awarded the Military Cross for his rescue of wounded men and horses at Passchendaele. Both Warren and his father returned home safely after the war.