Introduction to a facsimile edition of Smith, Lorenzo N., Lingo of No Mans Land : A World War 1 Slang Dictionary.

E.W.’s foreword to Lingo of No Man’s Land describes its author as ‘a typical son of Massachusetts… fired by the newspaper reports of desecrated France and Belgium’. The foreword explains that he became so impatient with US reluctance to declare war that he crossed the border into Canada to enlist, serving for a year in the Westmount Rifles before a shrapnel injury brought his active military career to an end in Messines in April 1916. Lorenzo Napoleon Smith was indeed born in Massachusetts, in a town called Lowell, but he had returned to Canada with his Canadian family by the time of the 1911 census, when they were living in Montreal. On the 16th of February 1915, Smith left his job as an electrician to join the 23rd Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, giving Montreal as his place of birth (indicating that he considered himself fully Canadian despite being born in the US). He was transferred to the 4th Battalion on the same day and sailed from Halifax on the SS Missanabie six days later. After a short period in England, Smith arrived in France on the 7th of May and joined his Battalion in the reserve trenches at Festubert on the 23rd. Several days of heavy shellfire and numerous casualties must have provided a shocking introduction to the realities of trench warfare. [Extract from opening paragraph]