So I'm Canadian and for a history class I'm taking I had to read Robert Graves, "Goodbye to All That" and about half a dozen times during the book he mentions that the Canadians were especially brutal, particularly they would rarely take prisoners. Almost the whole book is done from the author's memory, (its an autobiography) so is that actually true of Canadians in general during the war or was that just his personal experience?
and about half a dozen times during the book he mentions that the Canadians were especially brutal, particularly they would rarely take prisoners
He also depicts the Irish in very stereotypical terms, and depicts them as poor soldiers despite the excellent service of the 16th (Irish) division on the Somme at Guillemont. This is, too my knowledge, a common trope in memoirs of European soldiers from WWI. "The Senegalese kill everything," "those outdoorsy, backwoods Canadians/Australians/New Zealanders/etc. are natural soldiers," and various tropes which were commonplace at the time, and none of which had any more than a sliver of truth to them. As to prisoner killing, Canadian historian Tim Cook has an excellent article called the 'Politics of Surrender', which focuses on the Canadian case, but can be pretty much applied to all 3 major armies on the Western Front. Prisoner killing, or refusing to accept surrender, was not uncommon on the Western Front, especially in the heat of battle.