"The Wood Beyond": Reflections on Academic Freedom, Past and Present

Abstract

The title of my address and the form it has taken are serendipitous. While in Victoria last March, I dropped into Munro's Bookstore for a novel to read on the flight back to Toronto. I had just finished On Beulah Height, a superb Dalziel and Pascoe mystery by Reginald Hill that my wife had given me to read on the way out to the Coast, and so I .chose the book that preceded it. The Wood Beyond, like all Dalziel-Pascoe novels, is set in Yorkshire, but a key subplot is Peter Pascoe's discovery that his great-grandfather was unjustly executed for cowardice during the third battle of Ypres, better known as the battle of Passchendaele. And the name of that battle rang a bell. Passchendaele is the name of a village in the Ypres salient finally captured by Canadian units in early November 1917. The battle ranks among the most disastrous engagements of the 1914-1918 war. In the course of 103 days of fighting, from July 31 to November 10, the forces commanded by Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig moved a twelveki lometre f ront line about five muddy kilometres eastward, at the appalling cost of 70,000 English, Scottish, Canadian, Australian, and