In Sandy Gow's family, six young men and women from her great-grandfather's generation served in the Great War.

Grandsons and great-grandsons of soldiers and nurses who served in the First World War helped re-enact battle scenes for The Great War.
(CBC)

It was part of family history — how her great aunt Margaret lied about her age so she could serve as a nurse — how their cousin, the poet and doctor John McCrae, wrote the poem that would become synonymous with the First World War, In Flanders Fields.

But for 23-year-old Gow, who grew up in St. John's, those stories didn't come alive until last year during the shooting of the film The Great War.

Gow was one of 150 descendants of First World War veterans chosen to participate in the dramatization of Canadians' experience in The Great War and The Great War Experience, to air on CBC Television beginning Sunday.

The Great War, a two-part miniseries, dramatizes the poignant stories of some of Canada's greatest heroes, including Talbot Mercer Papineau, played by Justin Trudeau, and Canon Frederick George Scott, who wrote a moving account of his experiences as a chaplain after the war.

It also portrays some of the seminal battles of the war, with the grandsons and great-grandsons of those who served in the trenches re-enacting the fighting during filming in St. Bruno, Que., last summer.

Gow, playing the part of a nurse and equipped with the finest equipment of 1916, was surprised to find herself pressed into real medical service as re-enactors began coming to the medical tent complaining of heat exhaustion and blisters.

"We were covering people with cold cloths and getting bandages. Things were happening so quickly that we just improvised," she said in an interview with CBC Online.

Participants in The Great War Experience said they felt a connection to the past.
(CBC)

"I can only imagine that this is something like what my two great aunts went through. You don't know if you're doing the right thing — you just do it," she said.

The authentic First World War wool uniforms that were issued to Canadian troops were hot and scratchy and that had many of the re-enactors feeling faint in the summer heat, said Greg Kelley, a 21-year-old history student who took part in the battle scenes.

"During the re-enactment of Beaumont-Hamel [a 1916 battle], we came under fire and there were explosions going off around us," he said, admitting that he found it exciting to take part in the action.

Kelley is the great-great-grandson of Scott, the courageous chaplain who stayed near the front ministering to soldiers under fire. Scott is played by actor Michael Rudder in The Great War.

Scott's book, The Great War As I Saw It, gave an insider's look at the trauma and tragedy of the trenches and tells the story of how Scott lost his own son at the Somme.

"He wanted to find his son's body and give it a proper burial," Kelley said. "He went out on the battlefield and what he eventually found was a left hand sticking out of the mud with a signet ring on the finger."

Scott's descriptions of his war journeys are so detailed that Kelley was able to trace his steps during The Great War Experience, a documentary about 14 of the re-enactors who travelled to the battlefields to see where their ancestors had fought.

"I felt a strong connection to the Canadians who had been over there," Kelley said of his experience in Europe.

Followed along in book

Kelley said he followed along in Scott's book as he travelled, but he identified more with Harry Scott, the 25-year-old son who died.

"I wondered what he was thinking about as he was going over the top. As a military historian, it was incredible to think about how he died, but I also looked at the situation he was in — 25 and just starting his life," Kelley said.

Participants in The Great War Experience often discovered their ancestors' paths had crossed. Scott may have stood on the same battlefield on the same day as the poet and doctor McCrae.

"We wondered if they had exchanged a few words that day," Gow said.

Stephen Workman, 43, a physician from Halifax, also had the words of an ancestor to follow along as he helped re-enact battle scenes.

His great uncle, Private Donald Ross, was a farm boy from Grafton, Ont., just 18 years old when he enlisted.

"He was a brilliant writer," Workman said, explaining that Ross' letters had been passed down in the family. "Some of the scenes he described were so powerful that they were written into the movie."

Recovery in England

Ross' letters from France would have been censored, but he was wounded twice and sent to England to recover and from there he could tell his family exactly what he had experienced in France.

"It was how he worked out his post-traumatic stress — by writing," Workman said.

Ross fought at Vimy Ridge, considered one of Canada's first great victories of the war, which is being commemorated this weekend on its 90th anniversary.

Ross was set to be discharged after his second wound, but was sent back to the front, where he died in August 1918.

All six of Gow's great aunts and uncles lived, but their cousin McCrae died in 1918 of pneumonia.

Their stories are part of The Great War, to air Sunday and Monday at 8 p.m. (8.30 NT) on CBC Television and The Great War Experience, to air Monday at 7 p.m. (7.30 NT).