Canadian Expeditionary Force Research Articles

МАТЕРИАЛЬНОЕ ОБЕСПЕЧЕНИЕ КАНАДСКИХ ДОБРОВОЛЬЦЕВ В ГОДЫ ПЕРВОЙ МИРОВОЙ ВОЙНЫ

The paper studies the Canadian government’s policy in the field of material support for volunteers who enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Forces and the Navy during the First World War. It limits the chronological scope of the work to the period of August 4, 1914 – August 29, 1917. On August 4, 1914 Canada's entry into the war, and on August 29, 1917 the universal conscription was introduced in the country. In fact, it limits the presentation of events to the spring of 1916, when the basics of material support for Canadian volunteers were finally settled. It traced the evolution of government policy in the field of assigning monetary allowances to persons who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force and in the Navy. It paid particular attention to legislative measures for the material support of volunteers. In general, during the First World War, material support for volunteers of the Canadian Expeditionary Forces and Navy was an integral part of the social policy pursued by the dominion authorities. It represented a system of measures aimed at compensating these categories of the population for the restrictions and hardships of military service, and to some extent raised the prestige of military service in society. It also represented an important basis for maintaining the morale of the troops at a high level and instilled in them confidence that the state guaranteed material support for their lives and everyday life.

"If Ever a Wreck Came Back from Overseas She Was One": The Treatment and Pensioning of Psychologically Traumatized Nursing Sisters after the First World War.

During the First World War, 2845 women served as nursing sisters with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. After the war, some women developed nervous and mental conditions that they said were caused by their wartime service and applied for military pensions and treatment. So how were these women treated by doctors and pension boards? Men who suffered from psychological trauma were frequently labelled as "cowards" or "malingerers." Many of the symptoms typically associated with nervous cases, such as hysteria, were viewed as inherently feminine at the time but we know little about how this criterion was applied to female veterans. One hundred forty-three nursing sisters who applied for pensions reported that they suffered from mental and nervous illnesses. An examination of veteran pension files suggests that psychologically traumatized women were also judged based on gendered stereotypes and encountered similar barriers to male veterans in trying to prove that their conditions were attributable to their service. These findings reveal the unique challenges and trauma women faced long after the war had ended.

Martha Hanna. Anxious Days and Tearful Nights: Canadian War Wives during the Great War.

The great World War I conscript armies of continental Europe required married men to serve. In Great Britain, conscription was introduced in 1916, and in the course of that year expanded from unmarried to married men. Canadian conscription, imposed in 1917, began with unmarried men but the war ended before married men were forced into service. Almost all the married men who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force were volunteers, and they enlisted in droves. The wives and children they left behind have received relatively little attention, but they find their historian in Martha Hanna. Offering what she calls a “composite portrait of Canada’s war wives,” Hanna’s book makes for illuminating and at times heartbreaking reading as it tracks the trials and tribulations of women coping with anxiety about their husbands’ safety even as they struggled to make ends meet and raise children alone. Given that Canada’s married soldiers were mostly volunteers, Hanna begins Anxious Days and Tearful Nights by inverting a familiar recruitment slogan to ask, “Daddy, why did you go to war?” Volunteers were frequently British-born immigrants who saw enlistment as patriotic support for the homeland. Some saw the war in idealistic terms, while others sought to escape unhappy marriages. Many were motivated by the desire to boost their family’s income, especially in the war’s first year, when an economic recession that began in 1913 kept many people in straitened circumstances. Enlistment ensured that a man’s wife received a monthly Separation Allowance of roughly $20 funded by the federal government. A soldier could opt to assign a portion of his pay to go directly to his family, and wives received supplemental support from the Canadian Patriotic Fund, a private organization dependent on donations that Hanna asserts was unique among belligerent nations. By Hanna’s calculation, the average Canadian war wife had between $50 and $60 per month; it was a meager sum, especially as the cost of living rose by late 1916.

Coloured Diamonds: Integrated Baseball in the Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914-1918

For the duration of the First World War, the Canadian Expeditionary Force was officially integratedin principle, but stubbornly segregated in practice. Black soldiers, having fought to fight, discoveredthat relationships forged in the trenches often shook ingrained prejudices. If there was no such thingas an atheist in a foxhole, then the same could be said of bigots and baseball diamonds. Integrated baseball inthe CEF was more common than extant histories suggest. Black and white soldiers played against each other,and shared benches alike, when such desegregated diamonds were still exceedingly rare on the home front.

Chaplains of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–18: modern revisions on one hundred years of historiographical development

This article surveys nearly 100 years of how British and Canadian Great War army chaplains were historicised through three distinct stages: the interwar decades, the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and a revisionist phase that began in the 1990s and continues. Postwar memoirs of numerous literary-minded British and Canadian veterans almost invariably characterised chaplains as hypocritical and irrelevant to the average soldier, doing more harm than good to the cause of organised religion. This and other war disillusionment motifs were taken up by the 1960s anti-war movement and sealed into public consciousness. The 1990s, however, witnessed the beginning of scholarly, revisionist efforts to disentangle history from literature and myth. The effort has produced a more balanced, complex, and interesting assessment of chaplain front-line performance, as revealed through the diverse testimony of soldiers from all socio-economic backgrounds, not just the educated literary class.

Материальное обеспечение членов семей канадских добровольцев в годы Первой мировой войны

The article analyzes the Canadian government policy of social protection and support for soldiers’ dependents during World War I. The description of events begins when Canada entered the war (August 4, 1914) and ends when the North American Dominion switched to the system of compulsory military service (conscription) (August 29, 1917). The reconstruction of the details of the material support for soldiers’ dependents during the war helps reveal the details of the functioning of the Canadian government’s social policy in the early 20th century. The article is based on the legislative acts of the Dominion Government, official records of the debates in the Canadian parliament, and the Provincial press publications. It examines the institutional foundations of providing financial assistance to soldiers’ dependents using the example of the creation and activities of special state and non-state institutions (the Canadian Patriotic Fund, the Board of Pension Commissioners, and the Separation Allowance Board). It studies the process of forming the legislative base of social security for dependents of soldiers serving in the Canadian Expeditionary Forces and the Canadian Navy. The author traces the assignment and payment of social benefits to wives, children, parents and other dependents. The Canadian laws enacted during the war provided social assistance to military dependents in the form of state maintenance benefits and survivor’s pensions. The low rate of government benefits was offset by donations raised by charities. The process of creating special state bodies was very slow, and their activities were not always effective. Against this background, the work of the Canadian Patriotic Fund looked more fruitful.

A Weary Road: Shell Shock in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918, by Mark Osborne Humphries

A Weary Road: Shell Shock in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918, by Mark Osborne Humphries

A Weary Road: Shell Shock in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918. Mark Osborne Humphries

<i>A Weary Road: Shell Shock in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918</i>. Mark Osborne Humphries

A Weary Road: Shell Shock in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918 by Mark Osborne Humphries, and: Shell-Shock and Medical Culture in First World War Britain by Tracey Loughran

Reviewed by: A Weary Road: Shell Shock in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918 by Mark Osborne Humphries, and: Shell-Shock and Medical Culture in First World War Britain by Tracey Loughran Peter Leese Mark Osborne Humphries. A Weary Road: Shell Shock in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. xii + 461 pp. Ill. $45.00 (978-1-4426-4471-7). Tracey Loughran. Shell-Shock and Medical Culture in First World War Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. x + 279 pp. $105.00 (978-1-107-12890-3). Both of the accounts under review belong to the emerging "third wave" of historical trauma studies that can be characterized, among other things, by close, nuanced attention to the performance of gender; to the historical specificities of psychological injury; to the changing "scripts" of social and medical expectation. Both accounts tackle relatively restricted themes connected to shell shock during the First World War. This close focus pays off in important new insights. Inevitably there is a trade-off in the loss of alternative and complementary perspectives. Tracey Loughran's study gives full attention to published medical discourse in Britain as it emerges and shifts through the war years. Critical to her argument is the view that published wartime medical debate—in military and civilian journals, specialist publications, and textbooks—gives no less a valuable insight than front-line medial diaries or hospital case notes. In this view there was "no disjuncture between published medical discourse and on-the-ground clinical practice" (p. 17). The varieties of medical knowledge that civilian, military, and nonspecialist medics brought to their treatment of psychological disorders, as well as the shifts of opinion before and through the war, become the main focus of attention as a result. The investigation of medical culture that follows gives substantial attention to pre-war developments and training and the ways in which these were inherited and subsequently modified as a result of the war. In the first two chapters of Shell-Shock and Medical Culture, Loughran concentrates on this later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical thinking with particular attention to the Darwinian inheritance and the varied origins of diagnostic concepts. Distinctions of body and mind, human and animal, civilized and primitive dominate here and have obvious relevance for the diagnostic preconceptions and categorizations that emerged 1914–18. The central chapters of the study consider first, the varied schools of thinking that emerged under the intense pressure of wartime conditions; and second, why questions of class and gender were rendered invisible in the formal medical discussion on shell shock. Loughran is especially alert to the plurality of thinking, lack of consensus, and contradictory opinion that persisted through the war, and that resists any narrative of straightforward "progress." Loughran's viewpoint also suggests British medical culture functioned very differently than in France or Germany. Rather than enforcing norms and class expectations these were suspended so as to more effectively prosecute the war. The final two chapters concentrate respectively on the notion of will in medical approaches, and on related ideas of instinct and regression. The advantage of [End Page 166] Loughran's method here is that these underlying conceptualizations incorporate both pre-war and wartime thinking, and at the same time cut across a range of potential attitudes and treatments. Will-related treatment concepts, for example, which became more widespread in the latter part of the war, could draw on both psychological approaches as well as on pre-war notions of instinct and social behavior. As Loughran rightly points out, this lack of clarity was beneficial during the war. Existing notions of self-discipline matched many soldiers' own senses of emotional "containment" as a socially sanctioned aid to coping. Loughran's final chapter and conclusion explore how the shifts of wartime thinking turned out to be entirely reversible, as the return to hereditary and constitutional explanations of mental breakdown soon after the war demonstrates. The implementation of wartime "lessons" is here described as much less than some historians have in the past wished for, but viewed within a longer time frame, nevertheless significant. War-related terminology fades out after 1922, but the huge interest in wider notions...

Charlie's War: The Life and Death of a Black South African in the Canadian Expeditionary Force

ABSTRACT This article explores the biography and First World War experience of Private Charlie Some, a Black soldier from Natal, South Africa who served in the No. 2 Construction Company of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) in 1917/1918 and was brutally murdered in France in the last months of the First World War. Contrary to the prevailing treatment of ‘the No. 2,’ which takes a national perspective on the unit and in the process conscripts it to national ideologies, this article argues that a transnational, imperial frame reveals how the violence and racism of empire shaped the experiences of Black soldiers in the Great War, including those who served in the No. 2, and that racism and imperial anxieties were defining features of the war itself.

A Weary Road. Shell Shock in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1918 by Mark Osborne Humphries

A Weary Road. Shell Shock in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1918 by Mark Osborne Humphries

Happy is the Land that Needs No Heroes

This essay interrogates two articles by the Canadian historian Jeff Keshen and the Australian historian Mark Sheftall, which assert that the representations of soldiers in the First World War (Anzacs in Australia, members of the Canadian Expeditionary Forces, the CEF), are comparable. I argue, however, that in reaching their conclusions, these historians have either overlooked or insufficiently considered a number of crucial factors, such as the influence the Australian historian/war correspondent C. E. W. Bean had on the reception of Anzacs, whom he venerated and turned into larger-than-life men who liked fighting and were good at it; the significance of the “convict stain” in Australia; and the omission of women writers’ contributions to the “getting of nationhood” in each country. It further addresses why Canadians have not embraced Vimy (a military victory) as their defining moment in the same way as Australians celebrate the landing at Anzac Cove (a military disaster), from which they continue to derive their sense of national identity. In essence, this essay advances that differences between the two nations’ representations of soldiers far outweigh any similarities.

Filling the Ranks: Manpower in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918 by Richard Holt

<i>Filling the Ranks: Manpower in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918</i> by Richard Holt

Answering the Call to Serve their (Acadian) Nation: The Volunteers of the 165th Battalion, 1911-1917

Little has been written about Acadian volunteers to the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) during the First World War. This article offers a detailed profile of the volunteers of the 165th (Acadian) Battalion, created as part of a larger national initiative in 1916 to boost recruiting by appealing to specific regional and ethnic identities. However, recruiting for this unit fell short, as it did across Canada in 1916, and it was disbanded in 1917. The 885 volunteers were largely drawn from Francophone counties in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Longitudinal analysis linking them to their military records and the 1911 Canadian Census provides detailed information about their origins, occupations, and family situations. The volunteers were broadly representative of Acadian rural society, but disproportionately drawn from highly mobile and single young men from southeastern New Brunswick who had moved to Moncton in search of work. Comparing them to volunteer members of the 22nd (French Canadian) Battalion and the CEF as a whole provides new insights into the difficulties of voluntary recruitment for the CEF.

"Due to His Abnormal Mental State": Exploring Accounts of Suicide among First World War Veterans Treated at the Ontario Military Hospital at Cobourg, 1919-1946

Relying on records of veterans’ hospital admissions, and service and pension files of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, this paper explores authoritative accounts of First World War veterans’ mortality attributed to suicide and accidental causes among veterans treated as mental cases at the Ontario Military Hospital at Cobourg, Ontario. Military and pension officials invariably ascribed veterans’ suicide attempts and deaths to moments of temporary insanity or chronic mental illness, which were in turn attributed to hereditary or personal failing. Veterans’ own statements within these files reveal discrepancies between the storylines authored by and about veterans, emphasizing the impact of war and the “tension of agency” in veteran deaths by suicide.

“The place is a prison, and you can’t change it”

Speedwell Military Hospital was a hospital for veterans of the Canadian Expeditionary Force located in the newly-built Ontario Reformatory in Guelph. Speedwell was part of a nation-wide program administered by the Department of Soldiers’ Civil Re-Establishment (DSCR) during the First World War intended to neutralize some of the social dangers associated with demobilization. As the health of individual veterans at Speedwell became closely associated with the nation’s economic strength, the ultimate goal of hospitals like Speedwell was the transformation of sick and wounded veterans into healthy and productive workers. However, as the needs of patients changed after the war, the initial promise of Speedwell as a site of rehabilitative labour made it clearly unsuitable for veterans in need of long-term convalescence care.

From Dawson City to Regina Trench: How Joe Boyle’s Mounted Yukoners Adapted to Fighting the First World War, 1914–1916

The Northern Review 44 (2017): 139–162 The Yukon Motor Machine Gun Battery, as it was officially titled as of June 16 1916, began life in Dawson City in October 1914, as Boyle’s Mounted Machine Gun Detachment. Its formation resulted from the coalescence of two factors: the interest of the Canadian Minister of Militia Defence, Sam Hughes, to have mobile machine gun units form a part of the emerging Canadian Expeditionary Force; and the willingness of the wealthy Yukon mining entrepreneur, Joseph Whiteside Boyle, to fund such a unit as an expression of his desire to contribute to the emerging Canadian war effort. With a strength of only fifty men, however, it was a small unit, and military authorities soon realized that mounted units like it would be of little use in the high intensity trench fighting of the Western Front. After its arrival in England in July 1915, its very existence became problematic for a time as authorities tried to figure out what to do with it. This paper explores the conditions that resulted in its survival and continued service when a need was found for motor machine gun batteries to serve with each the four Canadian divisions. The Yukons were attached to the 4th Division, and in time became specialists in a form of machine gunnery that, while suited to the needs of the industrialized form of warfare that characterized that conflict, was no doubt a far cry from the idealized expectations of the unit’s founders and original membership. This article is part of a special collection of papers originally presented at a conference on “The North and the First World War,” held May 2016 in Whitehorse, Yukon. https://doi.org/10.22584/nr44.2017.008

Collecting Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) Badges and Medals Related to the Yukon During the First World War

The Northern Review 44 (2017): 163–208 [We will also post a version of this paper with some figures in colour. Please check back.] I have been collecting Canadian militaria since the early 1970s. I now believe I have collected every known military badge associated with Yukon Territory military units. These include the Yukon Field Force (1898); the Dawson Rifles of Canada (1900); Boyle’s Yukon Machine Gun Detachment (1914)—whose regimental badge was created by Jacoby Brothers in Vancouver; the Yukon Motor Machine Gun Battery (1915)—whose badges were created in England by Gaunt and Sons of London; the Yukon Infantry Company (1916)—whose unique badges were created by Jacoby and included a miniature miner’s gold pan complete with a gold nugget at the base of the pan; the Pacific Coast Militia Rangers (1942); and the Yukon Regiment (1962). In my collection I also have examples of all medals that were awarded to Yukon residents. This paper presents an overview of the badges that were worn on the uniforms worn by the military units that were raised in the Yukon for service with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. These badges are considered very rare to military CEF collectors, and seldom offered through an auction. The second part of the papers covers the medals awarded to Yukon men who served in these units and, in particular, the many awards bestowed on Lt. Col. Joe Boyle. Military memorabilia is very important in the remembrance of the soldiers who represented the Yukon Territory during the First World War. Along with a military file, the badges and medals worn by soldiers are a true connection with the past. This article is part of a special collection of papers originally presented at a conference on “The North and the First World War,” held May 2016 in Whitehorse, Yukon. https://doi.org/10.22584/nr44.2017.009

Lion in Winter: Sam Steele, the Yukon, and the Chaos in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in England

The Northern Review 44 (2017): 267–291 Major-General Sir Samuel Benfield Steele, the iconic Western Canadian policeman famed for helping to tame the West and the rowdy miners of the Yukon, was also a senior military commander in the chaotic administration of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in England in the First World War. Called by one biographer called the “Lion of the Frontier,” Steele was less successful in his First World War command than popular narratives of his life have portrayed. This article demonstrates how he floundered under the strains of total war. In the Yukon, Steele’s natural decisiveness and independence received free rein, where he did not have to defer and get approval from multiple authorities for decisions, and where the scale of his responsibility was such that he could directly interact with all involved. In those conditions, Steele thrived. He was a leader made by the frontier and performed best in that environment. In England, now in the centre and far from the frontier, the attributes, character, and experience that served him so well did not translate. Steele was not the primary culprit or cause of the chaos in the administration in England, but neither was he blameless or innocent of contributing to it. In effect, the Lion of the Frontier became the Lion in Winter. This article is part of a special collection of papers originally presented at a conference on “The North and the First World War,” held May 2016 in Whitehorse, Yukon. https://doi.org/10.22584/nr44.2017.012

Thrashing Seasons: Sporting Culture in Manitoba and the Genesis of Prairie Wrestling par Nathan Hatton

Reviewed by: Thrashing Seasons: Sporting Culture in Manitoba and the Genesis of Prairie Wrestling par Nathan Hatton Christopher L. Stacey Hatton, Nathan–Thrashing Seasons: Sporting Culture in Manitoba and the Genesis of Prairie Wrestling. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016. Pp. 340. Scholarly historical analysis of professional wrestling has arrived—C. Nathan Hatton's prodigious research and fine writing ground his account of sporting culture and wrestling in Manitoba from its inception among various Indigenous people to the 1930s. Professional historians are just beginning to realize how an examination of wrestling can fine-tune existing scholarship and historiography. Hatton manages to connect the story of wrestling in Manitoba to various strands of social, political, and military history, such as the advent of the second industrial revolution and progressive reform, both of which affected agricultural output and urbanization; ethnicity and changes in demographics; and the effects of the First World War. The author identifies throughout the era an interplay between amateur and professional wrestling before the latter became mere entertainment, featuring more and more "worked" (choreographed and predetermined) matches. Equally important, Hatton explores what a scholarly examination of wrestling can reveal about changing perceptions of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and other forms of identity, and he connects the evolution of sporting culture and wrestling in Manitoba to other sports such as boxing and baseball in Canada and the United States. The book's seven chronological and thematic chapters mix both narrative history and historical and historiographical analysis well. He eschews the arcane and often obtuse jargon that plagues a lot of social scientific and cultural analysis, including previous studies of professional wrestling. The province's first combative wrestlers were the Chipewyan and Netsilik Indigenous people and the voyageurs. Voyageurs were European traders, trappers, and adventurers who acquired a certain "masculine capital" (p. 25) through drinking, fighting, and acts of bravery. Perceptions of masculinity have always informed the history of wrestling and sporting culture, and the sport's association with other 'unsavoury' activities, such as gambling, drinking, and other forms of 'vice,' caught the attention of moral reformers. Thus amateur wrestling, free of the taint of gambling, money, and vice, evolved with the growing interest in constructing and maintaining gymnasiums while avoiding gambling, money, and compensation. Reformers saw wrestling and other physical activities as acceptable alternatives to other forms of entertainment they associated with immoral behaviour and vice. The continuing popularity of professional wrestling between 1896 and 1914 reflected the importance of 'muscular Christianity' and interest in various forms of masculine identity. The second industrial revolution was stirring concern about preserving masculinity in the midst of rapid urbanization and demographic changes that included an influx of non-Anglo-Protestant people into the prairie region. Despite professional wrestling's growing popularity, reformers, the press, and local public officials sharply criticized what they saw as unsavoury characters, [End Page 464] criminality, excessive violence, and corruption, including the emergence of "fakers," who 'fixed' matches. The arrival of new immigrants was creating a new market for matches, but that tapped into Anglo-Canadian xenophobia and ethnic rivalries and prejudices. Hatton claims that, while wrestling revealed political, racial, ethnic, and class divisions in its promoting of matches and cards, it also became "contested territory" (p. 13) for such conflicts. So while bouts in the ring reflected xenophobia and ethnic prejudices in a period of emerging British national identity, the sport also engaged non-Anglo immigrants—it "facilitated a level of cultural continuity between the New World and the Old World" (p. 103). The "Simon Pures"—progressive-era, middle-class, reform-oriented institutions, such as the YMCA—facilitated and oversaw amateur wrestling contests and promotions. Because of the social ills they associated with professional wrestling, government officials and reformers sought to promote and expand amateur wrestling by separating it completely from the seedier professional product. Despite their efforts, the lure of money and a bit of fame left considerable overlap. The monograph centres around Manitoba's role in the Great War, which the author views as a turning point for wrestling in the province. While wrestling was collapsing at home, it thrived within various units of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) in Canada and overseas, with enthusiastic...