Death on Two Fronts: National Tragedies and the Fate of Democracy in Newfoundland, 1914-34, by Sean Cadigan

Abstract

Death on Two Fronts: National Tragedies and the Fate of Democracy in Newfoundland, 1914-34, by Sean Cadigan. History of Canada Series. London, Allen Lane, 2013. xvii, 384 pp. $34.00 US (cloth). first date in this book's title, the year the Great War began, clearly refers to one of the tragedies the author sets out to discuss. Still, the adjective national, for an event that is often interpreted as a calamity for civilization, stands as a warning that what follows is more than a recounting of the harrowing events that devastated the fields of Flanders and France. Another cryptic adjective in the title is the number two. Those who were raised and live outside of Newfoundland tend to think of the western Front, along with acknowledgement of the Dardanelles disaster at Gallipoli, as the front associated with death in the Great War. Such parochialism is dispelled here, when the reader learns that the word is also used in Newfoundland to describe the ice fields off the province's northeast coast, where the seal hunt is concentrated and where three months before the assassination at Sarajevo seventy-eight men from one sealing vessel (the SS Newfoundland) died from a combination of severe weather and bungled management of the hunt. A history professor at Memorial University (itself established to honour the fallen of the First World War and later of the Second as well), Cadigan displays great literary skill as he describes the horror Newfoundland soldiers and sealers encountered in the trenches and in the North Atlantic. In particular, the devastation wrought upon the Royal Newfoundland at Beaumont Hamel, during the battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916, haunts the rest of the book. At one point, in 1917, the had taken so many casualties, and in the absence of adequate replacements, that it was withdrawn from the Front in order to serve as the personal bodyguard to Field Marshall Haig at general headquarters. tragedy at Beaumont Hamel is told in chapter five, halfway through the book, which ends with chapter ten, The Death of Democracy. It is that last tragedy, on a third front one might say, that makes Cadigan's study something more than a predictable account of the First World War. For in addition to the personal pain and grief that loss of life and maimed bodies of returned soldiers brought to Newfoundland, it demoralized the colony's politics. On this latter point, it is important to be clear about the island's constitutional position within the Empire: after 1907, it possessed nominal status as a dominion, which after 1916 grew to full status because of its war effort, especially the sacrifices of the Regiment (p. 173). Maintaining recruitment by voluntary enlistment therefore became, for some, a crucial measure of Newfoundland's emerging autonomy, conscription an admission of weakness--personal, political, and moral. More important than either stand was the conflict between pro- and anti-conscription supporters, which contributed to the deterioration of Newfoundland's post-war economy and politics. …