Not so long ago John Lennon was earnestly urging us to give peace a chance. This book – which covers seven important battles in Canada’s military history – has an equally earnest but opposite message. Editor Graves asserts that Canadians have too long believed they are “reluctant warriors,” which has led to the dangerous assumption that Canada is unlikely to wage war again. Calling armed conflict “one of the more enduring expressions of the human condition,” he urges us to give war a chance. We might learn something.

What we might learn, however, remains unclear. The introduction only states that “Canadian soldiers, while praying for peace, must prepare for war.” Readers would be better off ignoring the book’s propagandistic subtext (which seems more a marketing hook than a cogent argument), and view the collection as simply a series of adventure stories. As such, Fighting for Canada is a thrilling read and an educational look at the unchanging horrors of war.

The seven battles described here are depicted from the tactical level, focusing on the actions of the troops in the theatre of war. Little goes as planned, whether the soldiers are fighting in a bloody 18th-century battle between the British and the French or as part of a Canadian unit’s heroic (and suicidal) cavalry charge in 1918.

The authors – various military historians – should be rewarded for their diligent research and writing skills. Their battle narratives are compelling without being naive, and manage to avoid oversimplification in the name of meaning. When the book reaches for larger themes, however, the reader may be left misinformed. The threat of Fenian raids from the U.S. into Canada, for example, is described as “serious enough … to convince the independent provinces of British North America that there was unity in strength and, on 1 July 1867, they confederated.” This is historical simplification of the first order.