Camp Hughes is located off the Trans Canada Highway, just East of Brandon, Manitoba. While today it looks nothing more than an over grown field with a series of ditches, over one-hundred years ago it served as training base for soldiers fighting in what would eventually become know as the First World War or The Great War. The camp would briefly become Manitoba’s second largest city with almost forty-thousand troops training there between 1915 – 1917.

Some background…The First World War was a complicated conflict fought across the world in a variety of ways but for Canadians who spent much of the war in trenches located in France and Belgium it truly was the “war of the trench”. Camp Hughes is significant in that a European battlefield style trench system was built there for training and is one of the only World War One era trench systems that remains in the world today. For many young men, some as young as even sixteen, it was their first introduction to trench warfare and would also be their last stop before heading overseas to a conflict that would take the lives of over nine million soldiers and seven million civilians.

The Documentary… Last Stop to Armageddon is a documentary about creating a connection between today’s young generation and the First World War through Camp Hughes. Even though the actual battlefields are an ocean away and the events were over a hundred years ago, right here in Canada a young Canadian can begin to start to understand by walking the same trenches that the soldiers did. Camp Hughes is more than just a physical connection but a haunting symbol of a tragic conflict and a reminder of the the ultimate sacrifice that those who never returned to Canada gave.

Last Stop to Armageddon was filmed at Camp Hughes as well as at the Royal Canadian Artillery Museum in Shilo, Manitoba and the Manitoba World War I Museum at Pilot Mound, Manitoba.