The experience of the 1914-1918 Great War left a lasting mark on the youth of Canada. Over the years however, that experience has been generalized and sanitized in history books so that long-ago events in distant countries no longer seem real. The authentic voices of those who actually served and experienced the horror of war are now seldom heard.

The photographs taken by Jack Turner provide a startling reminder that that this was a very different experience than that of today's youth. It was a shared experience, as shown by the pictures of friends from home in a strange and disturbing landscape but is also a lonely one with photographs showing devastation, destruction and death - and everywhere there was mud.

These are not the carefully posed photographs of the publicity units but are instead what one young man saw and what he chose to preserve. Jack Turner would have been no older than many of today's high school graduates when he faced the blasted battlefields of France. His legacy of forbidden photographs reminds us of the impact that this experience would have on a farm boy from Prince Edward Island and of the horror of war.