Kate's family was from Grand Falls, Newfoundland. Her whole family was caught up by the cataclysm of the war and irrevocably scarred. The family has seven children, six boys and a girl. Raymond, a brother, was killed at Ypres in 1916, after only three-months service. Stan was killed near Langemarck in Belgium. Hedley, the elder brother, was killed on the Somme in August 1918. Two other brothers survived the war, Joe, with a severe thigh wound, and Ken, also wounded. All five combatants were thus casualities of war, and Kate was left to tend the wounded and dying at home in Canada. Like Vera Brittain, Kate and the survivors were haunted by the space of absence, that "nothing . . . what was never to be, after the war was over. The best were gone by 1917 or doomed, and what the world would have been like had they not died is anybody's guess. The war left their things unfinished: enterprises conceived, projects initiated, routes surveyed, engagements announced. And that's where it ended" (Winters and Baggett, pp. 127-28).