Two men in this photo would not survive the Great War. One would go on to become prime minister of Canada.

Taken in late 1916, it shows, from left, Lieutenants Jon Einarsson, Allan Macmillan and John Diefenbaker, at either Shornecliffe in Kent or Crowborough in Sussex, two military camps in the United Kingdom.

The three men were all articling law students from the 196th [Western Universities] Battalion. After enlisting, they travelled together by train to Halifax and then onward to England.

Diefenbaker was invalided home in late 1916. MacMillan—whose brother briefly became premier of Prince Edward Island in the 1930s—was killed at "Vimy Ridge" Ridge on April 9, 1917. (In Diefenbaker’s autobiography, he wrote that Macmillan had a premonition of his death when he was sworn in a year earlier in Regina.)

As for Einarsson, in February 1917 he was assigned to the 1st Canadian Mounted Rifles. On October 25, he was killed at the beginning of the Passchendaele offensive.

The death devastated Einarsson’s parents back in Logberg, Saskatchewan. They had lost their first-born son, their first child born in North America, a boy who showed immense promise, already a University graduate and articling in Law in Yorkton, Saskatchewan. Jon’s teenage brother Villi, who was in France with the 27th [Winnipeg] Battalion and kept an illegal diary, stoically wrote two weeks later “saw Jon, my brother’s name on the casualty list.”

Jon Einarsson’s body was never recovered. His name, with thousands of others, is inscribed on the Menin Gate Memorial in Ypres, Belgium. The Gate is a gigantic memorial of marble, broad, vaulted Roman in design. Fifty-six thousand names are engraved in gold on the walls, all British dead whose graves or bodies were never found in the salient or after the war. Every night at 8:00 buglers from the local fire brigade play the Last Post.

Many decades later, Diefenbaker sent this photograph to Jon Einarsson’s youngest brother, who was his mailman in Prince Albert.

Do you have an ancestor who served in the Great War? Submit their story and it could be included on this Great War Album website.