Shock Troops follows the Canadian fighting forces during the titanic battles of Vimy Ridge, Hill 70, Passchendaele, and the Hundred Days campaign. Through the eyes of the soldiers who fought and died in the trenches on the Western Front, and based on newly uncovered Canadian, British, and German archival sources, Cook builds on Volume I of his national bestseller, At the Sharp End. The Canadian fighting forces never lost a battle during the final 2 years of the war, and although they paid a terrible price in the killing fields of the Great War, they were indeed, as British Prime Minister David Lloyd George exclaimed, the shock troops of the Empire.

"Nearly a century's worth of history books has only brought us so far in understanding the simple, mulish endurance of the infantryman, but Cook takes us a few more steps along the road. Among the best chapters in Shock Troops are those dealing with the creature comforts, pet peeves, superstitions and daily tribulations of the soldiers—the very things that Cook has showcased in his superb trench-culture exhibit at the war museum...Shock Troops never lets us forget that when the barrage lifted and the whistles blew, everything rested on the shoulders of the men about to clamber over the top."
—The Globe and Mail