Thomas S. Axworthy
Executive Director of The Historica Foundation of Canada

According to the distinguished historian John Keegan, ¿the written history of the world is largely a history of warfare, because the states within which we live came into existence largely through conquest, civil strife or struggles for independence.¿¹ World War I certainly proves Keegan¿s thesis for it was one of the tipping events of world history: 20 million people died, the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires disintegrated, new states like Iraq and Yugoslavia were born, newly powerful states like Japan emerged, the League of Nations was invented and the European age which had dominated the world since the 16th century gave way to the ascendance of the United Sates. Millions of husbands, sons, fathers and brothers responded to the call of arms in 1914 and after burying their dead, when they returned to their homes in 1918, the world they had set out to defend had been changed almost beyond recognition.

Canada was far from immune to this transformation by war. In 1914 Canada was still a colony of Great Britain: when Great Britain went to war so did Canada. In 1901 about 60% of Canada¿s population still lived in rural areas and manufacturing played a little part in Canadian exports compared to wheat, lumber or minerals. Canada was still a Victorian nation in morals and culture. Women did not have the vote and their accepted place was at home raising a family, not in the workforce. There was no income tax, and few government regulations: the Victorian tradition of laissez-faire, or little government, still prevailed.

George Woodcock calls the 19th century, ¿the century that made us.¿ ² Two popular novels describe well the Victorian Canada of 1914: Sara Jeanette Duncan¿s The Imperialist (1904) rhapsodized about the mission of the British Empire and Canada¿s role within it. Meanwhile, Louis Hémon¿s famous novel, Maria Chapdelaine (1913) equally extolled Quebec agriculture and the virtues of the Church.³ But the imperial certainties of English Canada and the agricultural Roman Catholic mission of French Canada, were both about to be shattered on the anvil of war. Nellie McClung, at her cottage north of Winnipeg in 1914, wrote with foreboding, as her son Jack clamoured to enlist; ¿instinctively we felt that we had to come to the end of a very pleasant chapter in our life as a family; something had disturbed the peaceful quiet of our lives; somewhere a drum was beating and a fife was calling.¿⁴

Canada¿s contributions to the war effort were immense. With a total population of 8 million there were about 3 million Canadians of working age, one million and a half of whom were men or potential soldiers. Prime Minister Robert Borden pledged a force structure of 500,000, hoping that a third of all eligible Canadian men would volunteer! In comparison, today in peace time, we have a population four times greater with a military just 10% of the size of our World War I predecessors. What is even more amazing, as Desmond Morton writes in Canada¿s contributions to the war effort were immense. With a total population of 8 million there were about 3 million Canadians of working age, one million and a half of whom were men or potential soldiers. Prime Minister Robert Borden pledged a force structure of 500,000, hoping that a third of all eligible Canadian men would volunteer! In comparison, today in peace time, we have a population four times greater with a military just 10% of the size of our World War I predecessors. What is even more amazing, as Desmond Morton writes in A Military History of Canada, is that combining the 232,968 men who volunteered for the infantry, the thousands more who volunteered for the Royal Navy or Royal Flying Corps, the reservists, etc, ¿by 1917, though no one realized it, Borden¿s target was close to being reached.¿ ⁵

This army fought well, especially at Vimy Ridge. The Canadians were the first to feel the onslaught of what today we call ¿weapons of mass destruction,¿ when in April, 1915, soldiers of the First Canadian Division were chemically gassed at Ypres. On Easter Monday, April 9, 1917, at Vimy Ridge the Canadian Army made history. For the first time the four Canadian divisions were on the same battlefield, led by a Canadian Commander, Sir Arthur Currie, rather than a British officer. After four days of fighting the Ridge was captured and Canadians had taken more land, cannons and prisoners than all previous British offensives. But the cost was high. Over 3,000 Canadians died at Vimy Ridge and 7,000 were wounded. In all, 60,000 Canadians died in the mud of France, a sacrifice immortalized in 1915 by John McCrae¿s poem ¿In Flanders Fields.¿

The hundreds of thousands of Canadians who enlisted fought to preserve the Victorian Canada that they loved, but in fighting to preserve it they contributed to a process that changed it utterly. Canada entered the war as a colony and emerged as a nation. When the League of Nations was founded in 1919, Canada was a member in its own right. In 1926, a Canadian Embassy was established in Washington, and the Balfour Declaration proclaimed that Britain and the dominions were equal in stature. In 1931 the Statute of Westminster legally ended the colonial status of Canada. When Canada again went to war in 1939, it did so as an independent, sovereign country.

Wars release passions, both good and bad. The incredible patriotism of Canadians who enlisted for the war effort contributed to the development of a Canadian nationality which was eventually expressed internatio-nally, but it also led to great stress at home. Suspicion of non-Anglo-Saxons was strong and 80,000 ¿enemy aliens,¿ a majority of them Ukrainians, were forced to register. Those who failed to register were interned in camps, and more than 8,000 Canadians suffered this injustice.

Even more bitter was the dispute over conscription. Canadians volunteered in droves but the 500,000 force objective was a tremendous undertaking, and the infantry need to be replenished after the losses in France. In 1917, Prime Minister Borden decided to conscript or draft 100,000 Canadians who had been exempt from military service or chose not to volunteer. Canadians were bitterly divided everywhere over the draft, but in Quebec especially, there were demonstrations and riots. In January 1918, Joseph-Napoleon Francoeur, a Liberal member, tabled the first separatist motion in the history of the Quebec Assembly. Borden persevered: 100,000 men were eventually called up, 50,000 crossed the Atlantic, and 25,000 saw service in France. But for 25,000 men, Canada endured a deep divide.

If war unleashed the evil spirits of ethnic and racial division, it also unshackled social and economic conventions. With hundreds of thousands of men at the front, women entered the workforce: 30,000 women, for example, worked in munitions factories. With women making such a large contribution to the war effort, it was hard to deny them the vote. Activist Nellie McClung persuaded the Manitoba Legislature in 1916 to be the first province to grant women the vote, and the Federal government followed suit in 1918. The war also contributed to industrialization with the Imperial Munitions Board becoming Canada¿s biggest business. By 1918, for example, Canada was exporting $18 million worth of cars and trucks to add to its traditional wheat and lumber shipments, and Sam McLaughlin of Oshawa became a founder of General Motors. Along with industrialization, cities grew, with 50% of Canada¿s population urban based by the 1920¿s. The Canada of Maria Chapdelaine was no more.

Growing cities and an industrial economy called, in turn, for a more active government, and during the war years Canada left laissez-faire behind. The Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk railways were nationalized to eventually become the CNR. If the Borden government was conscripting war, there was a persistent demand that it also conscript wealth. In 1917, Sir Thomas White introduced the Income War Tax Act, and we have had personal income taxes ever since. Robert Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook have summarized the economic impact of the war years thusly, ¿By 1918 the free-wheeling economic activity and business practices of pre-war years had been replaced by government regulations and in a vital sector of the economy, a heavy dose of government ownership.¿⁶

George Woodcock may be right that it was the 19th century that made us: most assuredly, it was the Great War of 1914-1918 that transformed us.

Notes

¹ John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Random House, 1994), p. 386.

²George Woodcock, The Century that Made Us: Canada 1814-1914 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989).

³ This point is well-made by Ramsay Cook¿s chapter, ¿The Triumph and Trials of Materialism (1900-1945)¿ in The Illustrated History of Canada edited by Craig Brown, (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Denys, 1987), p. 375.

⁴Quoted in Don Gillmor, Achille Michaud and Pierre Turgeon, Canada: A People¿s History, Volume Two (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001), p.91.

⁵ Desmond Morton, A Military History of Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1999), p.136.

⁶ Robert Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook, Canada 1896-1921: A Nation Transformed (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974) p.247.

Desmond Morton
Professor of History at McGill University

During 52 months, the Great War, 1914-18, hastened the death of over 20 million people, demolished all but one of Europe's six empires and created enough yearning for vengeance to bring on a world war barely twenty years later that killed three times as many people. To argue that this terrible event also helped determine the future shape of Canada seems impertinently trivial.

The fact remains that the Great War persuaded most Canadians to support their own autonomy. In 1914, the pan-Canadian nationalism of Henri Bourassa or John Skirving Ewart was easily ignored. As prime minister, Sir Robert Borden's vision of Canada was as a leader of a world-girdling British imperial federation controlled by His Majesty's white subjects. War in 1914 was a splendid excuse to show that Canada's loyalty knew no limits.

Within three years, a million Canadian men had volunteered for the war, at least one in every two men of military age. By the war's end in 1919, Canada had torn itself apart and bankrupted itself to sustain its war effort; 60,000 of its men were dead and many more would suffer mental or physical mutilation for the rest of their lives. In an Imperial War Cabinet, Canada's prime minister had helped decide imperial strategy, including an invasion of revolutionary Russia to restore Czarist authority and to restore the alliance of 1914.

In retrospect and even at the time, other decisions were far more important. At Versailles in June 1919, Canadians signed the ill-fated peace treaty under their own name, indented like the other Dominions, it was true, under the United Kingdom. In September 1916, Canada asserted its own direct authority over its soldiers overseas and created a new Ministry of Overseas Force to exercise control. The reform was needed to clean up the mess Canadians themselves had helped create when they entrusted their war effort to a partially insane Sir Sam Hughes, but the decision asserted Canada's extra-territorial sovereignty long before the Statute of Westminster in 1931.

By 1918, Sir Arthur Currie, Canadian-born commander of the Canadian Corps in France, exercised authority in keeping his four divisions together that no British commander would have dared assert. "...we must look upon them in the light in which they wish to be looked upon," confessed the Earl of Derby to a resentful Field Marshal Haig, "rather than the light in which we would wish to do so."¹ Borden had made the point a month earlier when he arrived in London, furious at the waste of 13,000 Canadian soldiers in the hopeless Passchendaele offensive. After he heard the Canadian leader, British prime minister David Lloyd George summoned the generals and forced them to listen. "Let the past bury its dead," thundered the usually taciturn Borden, "but for God's sake let us get down to earnest endeavour." If there were more Passchendaeles, he warned, not a single Canadian would sail for Europe.
²

There had been no such questions or reservations in 1914. Colonel Sam Hughes had thrown away the official mobilization plans and commanded militia colonels to bring their men to Valcartier, a sandy plain outside Quebec City. Within a month 33,000 volunteers covered the plain with their tents. In September they were formally attested under the British Army Act as "Imperials," soldiers raised in a British colony and subject to British military law. How else could they serve abroad? Seventy per cent of them were British born.

In April 1915, the raw Canadians faced their first trial in badly built trenches in front of the Belgian city of Ypres. It was a disaster. In a few days, the Canadians lost over half their fighting strength in dead, wounded and those taken prisoner. The men fell back to their reserve trenches, leaving their useless Canadian-made rifles behind. One brigadier stayed in his dugout with Sam Hughes's son as companion. Another wandered back, looking for help. A Canadian colonel turned up drunk in Boulogne while his men headed to German salt mines as prisoners.

Was it a national humiliation? No. The Germans had cheated by using poison gas. Official figures showed only three Canadian dead from gas but that was a detail. Hughes's Canadian-born pal, Max Aitken, owner of London's Daily Express, had gained access to France as "Canadian Eyewitness." He returned the favour with a quick book, Canada in Flanders, giving a vivid, if fictional, portrayal of Canadians as rugged, sharp-shooting farmers, cowboys and frontiersmen overcoming impossible odds. Conscious of Canadian sensitivity, the British commander, Sir John French, wisely claimed that the Canadians "had saved the situation." To Canadians at home, St. Julien, Kitchener's Wood, Gravenstafel Ridge and Ypres entered their language as triumphs of courage and sacrifice for a new nation, much as Paardeberg in the Boer War had ended as a Canadian victory. Canada may have been British but Canadian soldiers had become the team to cheer for.

How Canadian was the team? Until June 1917, British generals commanded the Canadian division and, when it expanded in 1915 and 1916 to four divisions, the Canadian Corps. As historian W. B. Kerr remembered, the British accents of "Old Originals" dominated the non-commissioned ranks well into 1917. Carefully chosen British staff officers tried to keep their inexperienced Canadian generals from making fools of themselves. Lieutenant-General Sir Julian Byng -- "Bungo" to his British chums — re-shaped the Canadian Corps and transformed its tactics from the disastrous Somme offensives.³ Finally, after days of bombardment had shattered the German artillery and drove defenders insane, on Easter Sunday 1917, the four Canadian divisions rose from trenches and tunnels and walked forward under driving snow to capture Vimy Ridge. At a cost of 10,000 dead and wounded that seemed almost bearable by 1917, the Canadians delivered the first unequivocal Allied victory on the Western Front.

Nations are made by doing great things together, said the French historian Ernest Renan. Taking Vimy Ridge was a great thing a hundred thousand Canadians had done together. Colonel Thomas Tremblay's 22e bataillon canadien-francais had been there with 47 others. Of course the "Vandoos" did not include French Canadians who read Nations are made by doing great things together, said the French historian Ernest Renan. Taking Vimy Ridge was a great thing a hundred thousand Canadians had done together. Colonel Thomas Tremblay's 22e bataillon canadien-francais had been there with 47 others. Of course the "Vandoos" did not include French Canadians who read Le Devoir, cheered Henri Bourassa and denounced the war.⁴ Nor did it include the "enemy aliens" Canada interned in the thousands, nor many of the German-Canadian citizens of Berlin, Ontario, coerced to re-name their city for Lord Kitchener, Britain's War Secretary.⁵

Sir Robert Borden's response to Vimy was to recognize that the losses had to be replaced. Since volunteers had stopped coming, the initial pledge of a war fought solely by the willing could not be sustained. A complex, almost unworkable system of conscription would follow. If Canada was a country of two nations, one might slowly draw triumph from Vimy; the other would draw broken promises, betrayal and defeat.

Not even Vimy Ridge convinced Canadians to see themselves as a single nation. Nor could their prime minister, a colourless politician with little empathy for French Canada or the West. Sir Robert Borden was a deeply conscientious man, profoundly moved by the suffering he encountered when he devoted every spare minute overseas to visiting military hospitals. His imperial convictions cracked under the indolent defeatism he encountered in Whitehall in 1915, when he found most British ministers absent for the grouse-hunting season. Only the one minister he had been prepared to despise as a pacifist and radical, David Lloyd George, was utterly intent on his job as Minister of Munitions. When Lloyd George became prime minister, after a coup partly engineered by Max Aitken, he summoned the Dominion premiers to London. "We need their men," he explained, "We must consult them."

That winter, Borden had learned some grim facts. Americans had entered the war but had yet to create an army. Russia was collapsing; so might the French, with their army dissolving in mutinies. At sea, German U-boats had brought Britain close to starvation. Could Canada cut its Corps? Borden could not share his gloomy reasons, but he could only give one answer.

The struggle over conscription ended with victory for Borden's Unionists in December 1917. Confederation was a partnership more than a democracy; no partnership survives long if the larger partner coerces the smaller. In 1917, a minor political figure named William Lyon Mackenzie King learned that lesson. Defeated in 1911 as a Laurier minister and MP, King burned to resume his career. After cultivating his rebel grandfather's riding of York North, King even volunteered to run for Borden's Unionists in 1917. Borden turned him down. Instead, King ran as an anti-conscription Laurier Liberal and was badly beaten. In 1919, when Laurier was dead and the Liberals needed a new leader, Lady Laurier's testimonial to King's loyalty turned the convention and launched the most successful career in Canadian politics.

Perhaps the Great War cured Sir Robert Borden of his dream of an imperial federation. Who can say what it did to his party? Once he was Liberal leader, William Lyon Mackenzie King needed no further demonstration. As Montreal's That winter, Borden had learned some grim facts. Americans had entered the war but had yet to create an army. Russia was collapsing; so might the French, with their army dissolving in mutinies. At sea, German U-boats had brought Britain close to starvation. Could Canada cut its Corps? Borden could not share his gloomy reasons, but he could only give one answer.

The struggle over conscription ended with victory for Borden's Unionists in December 1917. Confederation was a partnership more than a democracy; no partnership survives long if the larger partner coerces the smaller. In 1917, a minor political figure named William Lyon Mackenzie King learned that lesson. Defeated in 1911 as a Laurier minister and MP, King burned to resume his career. After cultivating his rebel grandfather's riding of York North, King even volunteered to run for Borden's Unionists in 1917. Borden turned him down. Instead, King ran as an anti-conscription Laurier Liberal and was badly beaten. In 1919, when Laurier was dead and the Liberals needed a new leader, Lady Laurier's testimonial to King's loyalty turned the convention and launched the most successful career in Canadian politics.

Perhaps the Great War cured Sir Robert Borden of his dream of an imperial federation. Who can say what it did to his party? Once he was Liberal leader, William Lyon Mackenzie King needed no further demonstration.As Montreal La Presse had once explained to its readers, French Canadians had only a single loyalty, to Canada. British Canadians seemed to need two loyalties. Charles Stacey discovered that Mackenzie King was more a closet anglophile than he could ever admit, but such emotions stayed in the closet. Never again, if King could help it, would Canada be drawn into a European war, to be torn apart by its own divided people. Under Borden, Canada changed from a colony to a junior but sovereign British ally.

The Great War gave King and the Liberals arguments and support enough to take Canada to full and unquestioned independence. Old loyalties proved too strong to keep Canada out of war in 1939, but, as King had pledged, "Parliament would decide." Until Adolf Hitler's triumphant summer of 1940, Canada did as little as it possibly could. As Mackenzie King insisted to shocked British delegates negotiating the Air Training Plan, "it is not our war."⁶

Notes
¹Derby to Haig, 2 November 1917, in Robert Blake (ed.) The Private Papers of Sir Douglas Haig (London, 1952), p. 266. See Borden Papers, Sir Edward Kemp to Borden, 24 February 1918; Preston, Canada and "Imperial Defense", pp. 487-9.

²Cited in Brown, Borden, vol. II, pp. 137-8; Stacey, Age of Conflict, vol. I, pp. 219-221.

³ On Byng, Jeffrey Williams, Byng of Vimy: General and Governor-General (London, 1983), pp. 127-9 and passim. On changes in tactics, see William Rawling, On tactics see Morton, When Your Number's Up, pp. xxx. and Bill Rawling, Surviving Trench Warfare: Technology and the Canadian Corps (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). On trench raids, Dennis Winter, Death's Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London, 1979), p. 92; John Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell: The Western Front, 1914-1918 (London, 1976), p. 76; Maurice Pope, Soldiers and Politicians (Toronto, 1964), p.34.

⁴ On French Canada and the war, see Elizabeth Armstrong, The Crisis of Quebec, 1914-1918 (New York, 1967; Toronto, 1974); Réal Bélanger, "Albert Sévigny et la participation des Canadiens français à la grande guerre (1919 1918) in W.A.B.Douglas and Desmond Morton, Canada as a Military Power (Ottawa, 1982); Jean-Pierre Gagnon, Le 22e bataillon (canadien-français), 1914-1919, Une étude socio-militaire (Québec, 1986); Desmond Morton, "French Canada and War: The Military Background to the Conscription Crisis of 1917" in J.L. Granatstein and R.D. Cuff, War and Society in North America (Toronto, 1971); Mason Wade, The French Canadians, 1760-1960 (Toronto, 1968), vol. II, pp. xxx.

⁵ On internment: Desmond Morton, "Sir William Otter and Internment Operations during the First World War", Canadian Historical Review, LV, 1, 1974; David Smith, "Emergency Government in Canada", ibid., L, 4, 1969; Lubomyr Luciuk, A time for Atonement (Ottawa, 1988); Wilson, Ontario and the Great War, pp. xxx.

⁶ See Pickersgill, J.W., The Mackenzie King Record, vol. I 1939-1944 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960, pp 43-44).

Denyse Baillargeon
Associate Professor, History Department, Université de Montréal

The Canadian Army Nursing Service, established in 1901, consisted of only 80 nurse reservists when the First World War broke out. High unemployment among nurses, a yen for adventure, and the certainty that the war wouldn’t last and would be won easily, along with the desire to serve their country, meant that when war broke out, hundreds of them decided to enlist. At the end of September 1914, 101 nurses headed to England with the first contingent of the Canadian army. A second group left in February 1915, to be followed by many others.

A total of 3,141 nurses worked in the Canadian army, 2,504 of them overseas—over a third of all Canadian registered nurses. Some were posted to British or Canadian hospitals in England, but at least a thousand served in France and Belgium; some were even sent to the Mediterranean or Russia. Unlike nurses from the other allied countries, who were in auxiliary corps, Canadian nurses were full members of the Canadian Army Medical Corps and thus held military rank. Margaret Macdonald, appointed matron-in-chief at the start of the war, was also the first woman of the British Empire to hold the rank of major.

From the outset, the military authorities had planned to keep the nurses in stationary hospitals, 250-bed units with 16 nurses, and in the general hospitals farther from the front, which had between 500 and 1,000 beds served by a team of 72 nurses. In practice, however, it soon became apparent that these medical professionals were also needed in the most advanced posts, called casualty clearing stations, because the wounded soldiers taken there often required emergency surgery impossible to do without the help of nurses. Many nurses thus found themselves very close to the front lines, working in tents or huts with minimal hygiene.

Although farther from the theatre of operations, the stationary hospitals and general hospitals still did not have all the facilities that nurses were accustomed to. Established in big houses, ruined monasteries, unused schools or hastily built shelters, these hospitals were far from an ideal environment. The nurses had to tend patients while slogging through mud, surrounded by rats or, on the Mediterranean front, flies, while being careful to use as little water as possible.

The nurses’ work followed the rhythm of the battles, each bringing a massive influx of wounded. Working around the stretchers lined up on the ground, the nurses had to take care of hundreds of soldiers brought in by train or ambulance. Bullets, bayonets, shells and shrapnel caused extremely serious wounds that bled profusely and often necessitated amputation, the only way to get rid of gangrene. Amputation was also the fate of men who suffered frostbite from their time in the muddy trenches, while on the Mediterranean front, dysentery laid many low. Gas, first used extensively in the First World War, attacked the eyes and lungs. The nurse placed the lung patient in an oxygen tent, but that did not always work as hoped. Nurses were just as powerless to help those suffering from psychological problems, termed shell shock, whose numbers grew as the war intensified. On the other hand, they were perfectly capable of taking care of soldiers with tuberculosis or other common ailments, like the flu. Due to the high mortality rate of the wounded, such cases actually made up the bulk of their work. Towards the end of the hostilities, when the Spanish flu started to spread, they were called upon to tend to soldiers with influenza.

Life at the front had its quieter moments, though, and nurses took advantage of them. Between two deliveries of casualties, they could do their jobs more calmly, befriending the soldiers they tended often over long weeks. They also gave themselves small treats. When not on duty, they could go to dances, receptions and concerts also attended by soldiers, officers or even civilians. They also took part in sports or games and went cycling near their hospitals. Nurses stationed in England took tea with members of the British and Canadian army or with nurses from other hospitals, and played golf and tennis. On leave, some even travelled to Scotland or the south of France.

Army nurses were the only women to go to the front during the First World War. Thirty-nine lost their lives, twenty-one in battles on the continent or at sea, and eighteen as a result of illness. Seven others died in Canada while serving in army hospitals. Over 500 of them were decorated, including matron Ethel Ridley, named Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and Vivien Tremaine, who was awarded the Royal Victorian Order for caring for King George V, who was hurt when he fell off his horse while reviewing Canadian troops. These military honours acknowledged their courage and the esteem in which they were held. This acknowledgment also extended beyond the military sphere, however, for the involvement of nurses in the war greatly contributed to making medical and hospital authorities more aware of the importance of their role. By the end of the First World War, nurses had gained a professional status that could never again be questioned.

Selected Bibliography

Allard, Geneviève, «Des anges blancs sur le front : l’expérience de guerre des infirmières militaires canadiennes pendant la Première guerre mondiale», Bulletin d’histoire politique, 8, nos 2-3 (hivers-printemps 2000): 119-132.

---, «Les anges blancs sur le front. Les infirmières militaires canadiennes durant la Première Guerre mondiale», [MA (Histoire), Université Laval], 1997.

Allemang, Margaret M. Canadian Nursing Sisters of World War 1, Oral History Program. Toronto: Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto, 1977-1980.

Nicholson, G.W. L. Canada’s Nursing Sisters. Toronto: A.M. Hakkert, 1975.

Strong-Boag, Veronica. "Making a Difference : The History of Canada’s Nurses." Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/Bulletin canadien d’histoire de la médecine, 8, 2 (1991) : 231-248.

Mourad Djebabla
Researcher for the Hector Fabre Chair in Quebec History at Uuniversité du Québec à Montréal.

On November 11, 1918, the signing of the armistice put an end to the four years of savage conflict of the First World War. The firing of weapons gave way to weeping and grieving for the millions of war dead. Proud to be on the winning side, but keenly aware of the heavy price paid, the people of the allied countries opened their eyes to the appalling legacy of the Great War: mass death. Between 1914 and 1918, close to 8.5 million soldiers, including 60,000 from the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), died in combat or from their wounds.

During the war itself, soldiers were first honoured by their comrades on the front. Behind the front lines, isolated in no man’s land, simple, temporary wooden crosses marked the graves of those who had died in combat. Owing to the terrible extent of human losses, Canadian war cemeteries were established, starting in 1917, and maintained by the Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC). But the bodies of 19,598 Canadians were never found; many of them had been torn to shreds by the waves of violent shelling the infantry faced. The names of most of those men are engraved on the base of the war memorial at Vimy. In France and Belgium, where Canadian soldiers distinguished themselves during the war, 13 memorials in all were erected between the wars. The main one, and the most imposing, is the one at Vimy, which was inaugurated in 1936, with Canadian veterans and King Edward VIII in attendance. Located at the site of the Canadian victory of April 9, 1917, it honours all Canadians who fell on the field of honour during the Great War.

The Canadian soldiers of 1914–18 were also commemorated at home. Starting in November 1918, most Canadian municipalities signalled their intention to erect a monument in tribute to their dead, and to engrave on the marble, for posterity, the names of their citizens who died in the war. The war memorials gave civilians a way of publicly grieving and paying tribute to the war dead. These monuments were, for the first time in Canada’s history, on more than just a family or local scale: from sea to sea, over 1,300 cenotaphs went up, all commemorating the same event in which thousands of Canadians had taken part.

Between the wars, the federal government left it up to each community to erect its own memorial. Monument committees were set up, often on the initiative of women. The committees had to manage the finances, select an architect and determine a location for the monument, which, once inaugurated, was officially handed over to the municipal authorities. But a cenotaph was only a physical manifestation of the respect for the memory of those who died in 1914–18, and gradually, as the 1920s progressed, it became the focus of a commemorative ritual: Remembrance Day, November 11.

The choice of this date, originally known as Armistice Day, recalls first and foremost the end of the four years of slaughter and the peace won thanks to the soldiers’ sacrifice. The commemorative service of November 11 gradually took shape in the 1920s to honour the soldiers who had given their lives. Like religious rites, once established, the elements of the memorial liturgy were unchanging.

The November 11 ceremony is a structured space in which each player and each element of the commemorative rite has an important role to play:

– Since the early 1920s, the ceremony has generally opened with the national anthem, “O Canada.” This is the most meaningful moment, because at this instant, everyone present is united in the same respect and love of country that the soldiers being honoured died to preserve. The anthem confers upon the ceremony its duly patriotic character. Yet it is “God Save the King” (or later, the Queen) that closes the ceremony, recalling the constitutional link between Canada and Great Britain.

– After the secular, profane anthem, the religious dimension is reflected by prayers, often accompanied by hymns. Just as the national anthem serves to unite people in their love of their country, the religious element of prayer unites the members of various religious communities in the same place on the same occasion. Prayer is a reminder of the noble sacrifice of the dead for a cause deemed just by the living. Its function is nothing less than to glorify the dead in the eyes of the living in order to lessen the pain of their loss and give it meaning.

– Next follow two minutes of silence, introduced in 1919 on the recommendation of King George V, to give all those present a chance to turn their thoughts to those no longer among them. The silence is a time to reflect on the sacrifice of the men being honoured.

– The laying of wreaths is the funerary aspect of the ceremony and the implicit acknowledgement of the souls at rest. Decorated with flowers, the monument takes on the symbolic appearance of a collective tomb.

As part of the November 11 ceremony, the laying of wreaths by civilian and military authorities, but also by the crowd, expresses collective piety towards the war dead.

- Military units also take part. At the end of the ceremony, the units march through the streets, marking the return of life with a demonstration that calls for admiration of their handsome uniforms after the tribute to the dead.

The role of the army in the ceremony is not to celebrate the victory of November 11, but rather to represent the dead. The marching soldiers provide an eternally young and living image, a timeless image, as remembrance must be.

– The veterans, as well as the widows (dressed in black between the wars), are present, bearing witness for those no longer there and honouring comrades, sons and husbands. The spectators in the crowd also pay tribute to the veterans.

Along with war memorials and the Remembrance Day ceremony, a third tribute to the war dead is the wearing of poppies, which began in 1921. The poppy, celebrated in John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields,” was officially recognized in 1925 as the symbol of remembrance of those who died in 1914–18. Profits from sales were used to help war invalids. Wearing poppies each November 11 was a visible sign of respect for the memory of the soldiers who died in the Great War.

All these customs that were adopted in the aftermath of the First World War were also followed after the other wars of the 20th century, gradually diluting the specificity of the Great War: the war memorials, the November 11 ceremony and the poppies now honour all the dead of modern wars.

Selected Bibliography

Djebabla-Brun, Mourad, Se souvenir de la Grande Guerre: la mémoire plurielle de 14-18 au Québec, Montréal, VLB, 2004.

Labayle, Éric, 9 avril 1917: les Canadiens à Vimy, Louviers, Ysec, 2001.

Shipley, Robert. To Mark our Place: A History of Canadian War Memorials. Toronto: NC Press, 1987.

Vance, Jonathan. Death so Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000 (1997).

Wood, Herbert, and John A. Swettenham. Silent Witnesses. Toronto: A. M. Hakkert, in association with the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Canadian War Museum, 1974.

Online

Directorate of History and Heritage, Department of National Defence, National Inventory of Canadian Military Memorials:
www.dnd.ca/hr/dhh/memorial

Commonwealth War Graves Commission:
www.cwgc.org

Although by August 13 1918 the Allied offensive had been definitely checked, the German leaders could no longer doubt that the initiative had passed from their hands. On that date, at a conference held at Spa with Field-Marshal von Hindenburg, Reichschancellor Count von Hertling and the Foreign Secretary, Admiral von Hintze, in attendance, Ludendorff, while opposing any voluntary surrender of ground, admitted "that it was no longer possible to force the enemy to sue for peace by an offensive". Since the defensive alone could hardly achieve that object, the war would have to be ended by diplomatic means. Hindenburg, on the other hand, derived some comfort from the fact that "the enemy had once more failed to extract all possible advantages from his great initial successes" and that German armies were "still standing deep in the enemy's country." Next day, at a Crown Council presided over by the Kaiser, His Majesty ordered peace negotiations to be opened through the King of Spain or the Queen of the Netherlands.187 It was also about this time that orders were issued calling off large-scale air attacks planned against the British and French capitals by German bombers using thousands of one-kilogram incendiary bombs. While it was proclaimed to the world that these cities were being spared on humanitarian grounds, there seems little doubt that the inevitability of a German defeat was the main reason for the cancellation of the attacks. Throughout the war British and French planes dropped some 14,000 bombs on German soil. A British plan to attack Berlin, however, failed to materialize owing to insufficient aircraft capable of such a mission.

In the meantime Allied plans on the Western Front were undergoing revision. As early as the evening of August 11, as German resistance stiffened, Marshal Foch had shown himself willing to modify objectives and consider alternatives to further offensive operations on the Amiens front. At that time large-scale operations were due to be resumed on the 15th. But on the 13th General Debeney asked for and received a day's postponement of the assault by his army; and next morning General Rawlinson was given the same extra time in which to complete his preparations. Sir Douglas Haig has revealed in his diary that he shared Rawlinson's misgivings about attacking the well-prepared Roye-Chaulnes defences and that he was resolved that the French First and British Fourth Armies should merely "keep up pressure on that front" in order to hold the enemy's attention, while he prepared to strike elsewhere with the British First and Third
Armies.

There is no doubt that Rawlinson was considerably influenced by representations made to him by General Currie, upon whose forces the burden of a major share of a renewed offensive must fall. At a meeting on the morning of August 14 the Army Commander showed Haig a letter (accompanied by air photographs taken the previous day of the German positions) in which Currie set forth the arguments against renewing an operation which would "cost a great many casualties" without obtaining adequate results. He suggested that if the attack were found to be absolutely necessary it should be postponed in order to allow time to "recover the element of surprise." He recommended that an alternative, and better, course would be to withdraw the Canadian Corps from the line, and after resting it for a few days employ it on the Arras front in a surprise attack in the direction of Bapaume. An advance in this sector coupled with an attack by the French from their present line, might well force the enemy to abandon his positions west of the Somme without the necessity of a frontal assault.

This last suggestion was in keeping with Haig's own ideas. An exchange of letters with Foch on the 14th brought no agreement about postponing operations at the Somme, and that evening a telegram from the Generalissimo asked Haig "once more to maintain the date already set." The Field Marshal, however, had made up his mind to limit the Somme attack to a series of set stages, and on the afternoon of the 15th he pressed his arguments at Foch's advanced headquarters at Sarcus (twenty miles south-west of Amiens). "I spoke to Foch quite straightly", his diary records, "and let him know that I was responsible to my Government and fellow citizens for the handling of the British forces." Foch's resistance had already been weakened when he learned from General Debeney that morning that the projected attack on Roye "would certainly be difficult", and even if mounted would leave the French forces too weak to maintain it. "I definitely came around to the opinion of Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig", he wrote in his Memoirs, and he agreed that the Amiens offensive should not be pressed.

A new operation order issued by British G.H.Q. directed the Third Army, which was holding a nineteen-mile front north of Albert, without delay to "press the enemy back energetically in the direction of Bapaume"; the Fourth Army while continuing its preparations for an attack would be prepared to follow up any German withdrawal towards the Somme. Farther north the First Army would take advantage of any German retirement to exert pressure south-eastward from the Arras sector; under favourable conditions, it would attack Monchy-le-Preux and Orange Hill.

In a letter confirming his acceptance of Haig's proposals Marshal Foch made it clear that he was depending on the British operations to be developed with sufficient impetus to ensure a resumption of the thrust south of the Somme. He went on to thank Sir Douglas for his cooperation, which had completely freed the Amiens area and the Paris-Amiens railway. For an offensive north of the Aisne he was now going to transfer the French First Army from Haig's command back to Pétain's group of armies. Accordingly the Franco-British boundary was shifted northward to the Amiens-Chaulnes railway, and the relief of the Canadian Corps by French troops began on 19 August.

On the night of August 19-20 the 2nd Canadian Division began moving northward by bus and train to rejoin the First Army in the Arras sector, followed the next night by the 3rd Division. A number of days were to elapse before the 1st and 4th Divisions made the move. General Currie closed his Headquarters at Dury on the 22nd. During the day he called on a number of senior commanders and had the satisfaction of being told by General Byng that the Canadian performance at Amiens was "the finest operation of the war".

Adapted and used with permission from Nicholson, G. W. L., Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914-1919. Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1964, p.396-398.