Veterans Memorial

While walking through Charlottetown, we came across this striking monument showing three soldiers moving forward together. With Province House immediately behind it, the memorial sits among the buildings and streets where so much of Prince Edward Island’s political history has unfolded.

The monument was originally erected in memory of Prince Edward Islanders who served and died during the First World War. The three bronze figures represent members of Canada’s armed forces advancing together. Unlike monuments that portray an idealized commander standing formally above the viewer, these men are shown as ordinary soldiers in motion carrying their equipment and weapons as if moving toward the battlefield.

The inscription begins, “The men of Prince Edward Island in memory of those who at the call of King and Country left all that was dear to them, endured hardship, faced danger and finally passed out of the sight of men by the path of duty and self-sacrifice.”

Those words were written for a generation profoundly affected by the First World War. Prince Edward Island had a population of only about 93,000 people in 1911, yet thousands of Islanders served during the war. In a small province made up of closely connected communities, the losses would have been deeply personal.

But the memorial did not remain solely about the First World War, additional dates were eventually placed on the monument:

1914–1918
1939–1945
1950–1953
Afghanistan 2001–2014

The memorial therefore became something its original builders could not have anticipated: a place where successive generations of Islanders could remember those who served in later conflicts as well.