Canadian Expeditionary Force Research Articles

Lives in Transition: Longitudinal Analysis from Historical Sources ed. by Peter Baskerville and Kris Inwood

Reviewed by: Lives in Transition: Longitudinal Analysis from Historical Sources ed. by Peter Baskerville and Kris Inwood Lisa Dillon Peter Baskerville and Kris Inwood, eds., Lives in Transition: Longitudinal Analysis from Historical Sources (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2015) The edited volume Lives in Transition: Longitudinal Analysis from Historical Sources has arrived at a propitious moment when academic researchers are foregrounding the critical importance [End Page 382] of early life conditions on later-life outcomes at the same time that public concern for intergenerational social inequality has intensified. This collection touches on both issues, and more. The chapters in this volume are grouped into four themes – transnational migrations, mobility in the rural world, mobility in the urban world, and ethnicity and war – and encompass 19th and 20th-century Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. While most of the chapters address the lives of free white male groups such as farmers, industrial labourers, and migrating settlers, some chapters address marginalized populations such as convicts and Aboriginals. This book is particularly notable for its integration of methodological innovations with path-breaking evidence on historical life course patterns. This volume serves as an excellent primer on various approaches to constructing linked data sets, usually via census-to-census linkage, but often with the integration of other historic sources. Some of the studies relied upon high-performance computing and machine-learning to develop automatic record linkage programs. Luiza Antonie, Peter Baskerville, Kris Inwood and J. Andrew Ross linked women and men between the 1871 and 1881 censuses to study Canadian occupational mobility while Gordon Darroch linked census microdata from 1861 and 1871 Ontario to study factors conditioning entry into farming. In his analysis of factors predicting movement and persistence in rural Perth County, Ontario, 1871–1881, Baskerville focused on 1871 residents in a smaller geographic unit but then searched for each resident across Canada and the United States in the censuses of 1880/1881; by doing so, Baskerville situated his population at the crossroads of micro- and national history. Kenneth M. Sylvester and Susan Hautaniemi Leonard traced farm operators and their households over time, drawing upon both personal and agricultural schedules of the Kansas census from selected communities. Other scholars broadened their studies by tapping into complementary resources. In his study of US social mobility between 1900 and World War II, Evan Roberts used a survey of Chicago working-class families conducted in 1924 and 1925, linking survey respondents backward to the 1920 census and forward to the 1930 census. John Cranfield and Inwood drew upon the personnel records of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (cef) 1914–1918, linking them to the 1901 Canadian census. Sherry Olson linked Montréal residents enumerated in the 1881 census to the 1901 census, but also attached addresses and rental values from the municipal tax roll to her data, consulted Catholic and Protestant marriage records to help with the matching effort, and used gis to estimate distances between households. By linking aboriginals and mixed-race men in the cef records back to the 1901 Canadian census, Allegra Fryxell, Inwood, and Aaron van Tassel discovered that “Aboriginal participation in the war was considerably more extensive than has been recognized.” (270) The two studies of British convicts transported to Tasmania drew upon British convict records which meticulously recorded extensive details of convicts’ origins, physical characteristics, and experience under sentence, as well as surgeon-superintendent voyage journals. Rebecca Kippen and Janet McCalman used this source to identify a unique set of “character” variables in terms of convicts’ behaviour under sentence; the researchers then searched across a wide variety of genealogical sources for the destiny of each convict. Lenihan also used crowd-sourced genealogical information, a register of 6,243 immigrants of Scottish birth arriving [End Page 383] in New Zealand before 1921. Kandace Bogaert, Jane van Koeverden and D. Ann Herring consult largely qualitative sources, including recruitment materials, church records, advertisements and letters in newspapers and army records, to understand the origins and spread of influenza in 1918 in the Polish Army Camp at Niagara-on-the-Lake. The various papers demonstrate two basic approaches: a national-level or provincial/state-level study which uses...

Unwanted Warriors: The Rejected Volunteers of the Canadian Expeditionary Force by Nic Clarke

Unwanted Warriors: The Rejected Volunteers of the Canadian Expeditionary Force by Nic Clarke

Cross protection between the first and second waves of the 1918 influenza pandemic among soldiers of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) in Ontario

ObjectivesThis research analyses morbidity and mortality during the 1918 influenza pandemic among Ontario soldiers in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF). This paper asks: did exposure to influenza during the first wave confer protection against illness and death during the second wave of the pandemic? MethodsPneumonia and influenza (P&I) cases and deaths among Ontario soldiers were transcribed from the 1918 Admission and Discharge books for the CEF. Following the methods of Barry et al. [10], hospital admission and mortality rates for P&I were compared for new recruits (<1 month service) and seasoned soldiers (>1 month service) in order to assess the possibility of cross protection during successive waves of the pandemic. ResultsThe first wave of the 1918 influenza pandemic occurred between March and May of 1918, with the second wave erupting from September to December. Mortality in the second wave was more severe, with a case fatality rate of 4.7%, which was more than double the rate of 2.3% from March to May. Seasoned soldiers experienced 82.5% protection from illness due to P&I illness in the fall, and 84% protection from death. ConclusionsThe morbidity data for the soldier population of Ontario, data unavailable for civilians, confirms the presence of a herald wave in Ontario. The findings support the hypothesis that exposure to influenza during the first wave of the pandemic had a protective effect during the second more deadly wave in the fall. Regional heterogeneity characterized the pandemic among soldiers in Ontario. Conscription practices may have funnelled vulnerable recruits, such as rural farmers, into training camps after the first wave of the pandemic, but prior to the second wave.

Humanities

Humanities

“The Listening Posts are Certainly our Night Lights”: Canadian Trench Newspapers During the Great War

Living in the trenches during the First World War, Canadian soldiers experienced extreme levels of stress. There were unending days of monotony, mud craters filled with water, and food tins stuffed with all-­‐too-­‐familiar consumable goods. Soldiers responded to this seemingly unbearable environment by adopting a number of practices that helped ease the stresses of daily life. One of these practices was the publication of their very own newspapers. ‘Trench newspapers’ featured stories, poems and cartoons, laden with humour, irony and sarcasm. For its part, the 7th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force published its own newspaper called The Listening Post. This essay examines the eighth edition of The Listening Post, published in November 1915, to shed light upon soldier culture during the Great War. The essay reveals that trench newspapers provided soldiers with an invaluable means of dealing with life in the trenches.

The first wave of the 1918 influenza pandemic among soldiers of the Canadian expeditionary force.

This article evaluates the evidence for the presence of the first, mild wave of the 1918 influenza pandemic among soldiers in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF). Death records for soldiers in the CEF who died in Canada in 1917 and 1918 were extracted from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and record-linked to the Canada War Graves Registers, Circumstances of Casualty database. Monthly mortality rates from pneumonia and influenza (P&I) were compared with mortality rates from all other causes for 1917 and 1918, and by region for 1918. The herald wave of influenza was present among CEF soldiers in 1918. P&I mortality was significantly higher in March and April 1918 than during the same period in 1917. P&I mortality rates varied across the country and were significantly higher among soldiers who died in the Maritime region of Canada. In March, Maritime P&I mortality was significantly higher than its counterpart in the West; in April it was significantly higher than P&I mortality in both the Central and Western regions. The CEF findings suggest that local, geographic heterogeneity characterized the first wave of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Canada and illustrate the ways in which well-established, historical patterns of cross-border social contact with the United States, coupled with the special conditions created by warfare, disproportionately funnelled influenza into particular regions. Identification of the mild first wave among soldiers in the CEF calls for more research on the civilian experience of both waves of influenza in Canada.

Canada's First World War, 1914–2014

This fall marks 100 years since the First Canadian Contingent sailed for Europe. In anticipation of the anniversary of the First World War, the Canadian Historical Review prepared two special features to highlight past and current thinking about the war and its place in the journal and in Canadian history generally. The first, published in March, is a bibliography of the more than three-dozen articles directly related to the war that have appeared in the chr since it began publication in 1920, less than two years after the armistice. Each article in the bibliography will remain Open Access. You will find the bibliography complete with hyperlinks on our website at http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.1.97 . To continue this impressive tradition of scholarship and prompt new and equally diverse work on the war and related themes in its pages, the chr is pleased to publish the second special feature in this issue. Three scholars actively engaged in the study of the war were asked to contribute interpretative and broad, but unavoidably selective, reflections on how historians have written about Canada and the war. We invited a fourth to comment on these historiographic pieces and a fifth to help frame our readers' reflections on the commemorative and other public initiatives that have already begun and will intensify in the coming months. We are delighted that our authors accepted the challenge and trust our readers will find their work as useful and stimulating as we and our peer-reviewers have. This special feature also marks the inauguration of a new section of the chr, Historical Perspectives. This occasional section will showcase discussion among multiple scholars of important topics and historiographies. Mark Osborne Humphries opens with “Between Commemoration and History: The Historiography of the Canadian Corps and Military Overseas,” focusing on the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) and the relationship between historians writing on the military overseas and those analyzing the home front ( http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.3.384 . Amy Shaw then examines how historians have understood the contribution of nurses and other women, motherhood and family, and aspects of mourning in her “Expanding the Narrative: A First World War with Women, Children, and Grief” ( http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.3.398 ). Mourad Djebabla's “Historiographie francophone de la Première Guerre mondiale: écrire la Grande Guerre de 1914–1918 en français au Canada et au Québec” discusses French-language scholarship as related to the war, especially concerning Quebec ( http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.3.407 ). Tim Cook's wide-ranging “Battles of the Imagined Past: Canada's Great War and Memory” reflects on the topics of the initial three contributors and considers four possible narratives: the war as a terrific and useless slaughter, nation-building tool, divisive event, and absent event http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.3.417 . Like Cook, Christopher Moore's thought-provoking “1914 in 2014” considers the collective memory of the war and historians' contribution to it, asking “What we commemorate when we commemorate the First World War?” What might a counter-narrative to the dominant view of Canada's decision to enter the war in 1914 as natural and nationalizing contribute? ( http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/chr.95.3.427 )

FightingFit? Diet, Disease, and Disability in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–18

In spite of considerable period propaganda to the otherwise, the average member of the Canadian Expeditionary Force was far from a northern superman. Some, in fact, were quite the opposite. A close analysis of enlistment records indicates that majority of Canada’s would-be warriors not only were — as one might expect — of average height and build, but also that many suffered from a wide variety of health concerns ranging from poor eyesight and dentition through to serious musculoskeletal, neurological, and psychiatric disorders. Moreover, evidence suggests that many recruits were poorly nourished. Indeed, despite the very real horrors and dangers that the Great War presented, the enlistment and discharge weights of CEF members suggests that joining the military was actually good for many Canadian males. This analysis is based on summary statistical examination of the medical and attestation papers of over 20,000 servicemen and a close textual analysis of the full file for a smaller number of men.

The Great Canadian Machine Gun Mania of 1915: The Public, the Press, and Government Decision Making in Procuring Machine Guns for the Canadian Expeditionary Force

Following the first entry of Canadian troops into battle at 2 nd Ypres in April 1915, the machine gun for a time dominated public and political discussion in Canada. Both the Canadian public and the government determined that they needed to do all that they could to get as many of these weapons into the hands of Canadian troops as possible. An examination of this phenomenon reveals much about the mood of the Canadian public and the difficulties experienced by the government as both came to realize in a more urgent sense than ever before just would be involved in waging a war of a scale and intensity that few had conceived of. Apres l’envoi au front des premieres troupes canadiennes en avril 1915 durant la Deuxieme bataille d’Ypres, la mitrailleuse a monopolise tous les debats publics et politiques au Canada pendant un certain temps. Le public et le gouvernement canadiens avaient decide de part et d’autre qu’il fallait tout faire pour mettre autant de ces armes que possible dans les mains des troupes canadiennes. L’etude de ce phenomene en dit long sur l’humeur de la population canadienne et sur les difficultes qu’eprouvait le gouvernement canadien quand tous deux prirent plus vivement conscience que jamais des consequences veritables de mener une guerre d’une ampleur et d’une intensite que peu avaient imaginees.

On the Battlefront: Canadian Soldiers, an Imperial War, and America's National Pastime

“The moment our men get out of the trenches they begin to play baseball… .”1 —Lieutenant Coningsby Dawson, an officer in the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the First World War The Great War is credited by some historians for giving direction to Canadian nationalism. Success on the battlefields provided many citizens with patriotic pride, as well as a sense of brotherhood as Canadian troops fought alongside the British in an imperial struggle. Despite an environment that favoured nationalism and imperialism, Canadian soldiers embraced America's national pastime. For many of the rank and file, baseball was an important part of their war experience. The commanding officers' support for sport, however, was essential to baseball's existence in the Canadian Expeditionary Forces. Despite the enjoyment baseball brought soldiers, a handful of officers in the military's high command were apprehensive about sport's rising status. By 1917, after years of uncertainty about how to incorporate baseball into the soldiers' training regimen, the military could no longer ignore the need and role for sport in military life. Perhaps spurred by American entry into the conflict, the CEF issued a report that officially authorized baseball and like games.

Zooming In on the Big Picture: Digitization of Nitrate Panoramic Film

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has made significant changes in the storage of the institution's cellulose nitrate collection and made great progress towards solving the problem of inaccessibility concerning nitrate panoramic film.LAC's vast collection of nitrate material includes 600,000 photographic negatives of which approximately 4,000 panoramas have remained inaccessible to both the public and archivists. The panoramas had previously been stored in their original housings, often multiple negatives per metal canister, at an offsite storage facility that was not considered conducive for the long-term preservation of nitrate material.As part of the preparations to move the nitrate collection to LAC's new state-of-the-art Nitrate Film Preservation Facility (NFPF) staff described, assessed, measured, and rehoused each panoramic negative by separating the panoramas, individually rolling, then wrapping them in bond paper and placing them in boxes in an upright position. In February 2011, the entire nitrate collection was relocated to this new facility, which includes a collection processing room and a digitization room.Building on the initial research undertaken by Greg Hill and Tania Passafiume (presented at the IS&amp;T conference in 2006[1]), this paper will outline how staff established a successful workflow to digitize a selection of 1,500 panoramas from the Merrilees collection. This collection is in high demand but the panoramas have been restricted in access due to the fragility of the material. The selected panoramas are mainly images of Canadian Expeditionary Force battalions from the First World War, with the negatives measuring up to 2.6 metres (9 feet) in length. After digitization the images will be uploaded to the LAC website. In light of the upcoming 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War it is anticipated that the public, through web-based crowdsourcing, will help in the identification of many of the soldiers in the panoramas.This discussion will highlight several challenges such as the limited options of equipment and setup available when digitizing nitrate panoramic film, and dealing with a medium affected by deterioration. A complete review will also be presented of the new process developed to obtain a high resolution preservation scan thereby allowing public access to the panoramas while simultaneously preserving the original material in a secure and controlled environment.

‘The Greater and Grimmer Game’: Sport as an Arbiter of Military Fitness in the British Empire – The Case of ‘One-Eyed’ Frank Mcgee

On 16 September 1916, Lieutenant Francis ‘Frank’ Clarence McGee of Ottawa was killed by heavy shellfire on the Somme. A member of one of Canada's most prominent political families and a hockey superstar, McGee's death was greatly mourned. His death was all the more tragic because he had an impairment that should have caused him to have been rejected for service. McGee had been partially blinded while playing hockey in 1900. This paper challenges the traditionally held view that McGee entered the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) by using a ruse to mask his visual limitations, arguing that he was accepted into the CEF because of his status as a hockey star. More broadly, this paper offers a conduit through which to explore the role sport played as an arbiter of military fitness in the British Empire during the early twentieth century and contributes to our understanding of the role of sport in the British Empire's preparation for war.

Shoestring Soldiers: The 1st Canadian Division at War, 1914 - 1915 (review)

Reviewed by: Shoestring Soldiers: The 1st Canadian Division at War, 1914 - 1915 Patrick Brennan (bio) Andrew Iarocci . Shoestring Soldiers: The 1st Canadian Division at War, 1914 - 1915. University of Toronto Press 2008. 384. $52.00 Recent writing on Canada's military role in the Great War has effectively exploited the learning-curve paradigm popularized by British historians [End Page 298] whereby enthusiastic but largely unskilled amateurs, drawing on the hard lessons of their combat experience, successfully made the transition to battle-hardened professionals. A key buttress of this interpretation of experience-based progress has been the long-held view that the Canadian Expeditionary Force initially showed much courage and keenness but little in the way of command or administrative ability. This was a comforting assumption and one to which the book's title makes pointed reference, because it highlighted the ultimate transformation from the potential of 1914, 1915, and 1916 to the virtuoso performances of 1917 and 1918. Breaking the learning-curve's grip on Canadian Great War historiography has proven difficult, but in Shoestring Soldiers Andrew Iarocci has certainly struck a welcome blow. In ten chapters, Iarocci deals successively with the marshalling and training of the 1st Division (1-4), its bloody introduction to combat at the Second Battle of Ypres (5-8), and finally its ensuing engagements during the remaining months of 1915 (9-10). It is the first eight chapters of Shoestring Soldiers that make the most valuable contribution. Nowhere is Iarocci's thorough archival research more in evidence than when he assesses the division's training during its first winter in England. In contrast to the usual account of precious time frittered away on the sodden Salisbury Plain, he outlines a rigorous, remarkably sophisticated, and certainly well-organized training regimen that left the 1st Division as well prepared - if not as well equipped or supported - to fight a modern war as the German reservists with whom they would soon grapple. With a chapter devoted to each day, the 1st Division's baptism of fire in Flanders in April 1915 is covered in rich - and at times, numbing - detail. To reconstruct this chaotic engagement, the author relied chiefly on surviving message logs, as well as a keen eye for the operational and tactical implications of the terrain over which the soldiers fought. After reading chapters 5 through 8, it is hard to believe that we have very much more to learn about the battle's hour-by-hour developments. Iarocci aptly characterizes the Canadian side of the battle as a fluid, disorganized, and ferocious defensive struggle, indeed as fierce an engagement as any of the Canadian division would participate in during the war. Persuasively, he argues that the forces shaping Second Ypres were not 'raw courage, frontier grit and . . . a deficit of good sense' but 'skill, experience, cohesion, leadership and exhaustion.' In his treatment of the central controversy Canadian historians have obsessed over for decades - manifest weaknesses in high command - he is especially fair, reminding armchair and academic strategists that in this instance the fog of war was particularly opaque, leaving Generals Alderson, Turner, and Currie in near-impossible situations. While Currie's reputation once again survives, Iarocci deserves credit for at least questioning the future corps commander's decision to abandon his command post [End Page 299] during the heat of the action. For their part, Turner and Alderson receive a long-overdue rehabilitation. As for the final two chapters, they are interesting but anticlimactic, the author having already made his most significant points. Thoroughly researched from Canadian and British (as well as some useful German) documents, Shoestring Soldiers offers both insightful and balanced analysis. The author's conclusions are important, starting with his revisionist assessment that the 1st Division was a capable fighting formation from the outset, and because of that, 'the foundations of the learning curve paradigm are increasingly uncertain.' Indeed, this solid and generally well-written account has brought the idea of a continuous learning curve into question, suggesting a more sophisticated version of the traditional paradigm, one where tactical and operational improvements were made in a series of discontinuous steps, clearly not all of them worthy of being characterized as progress. Patrick...

"The hours and times of your desire": Sholto Smith's romantic vision for Colwyn (1925)

Early in 1920, French-born architect Sholto Smith (1881-1936) decided to abandon his Moose Jaw practice, and his Canadian wife and family, and emigrate to New Zealand. His decision seems to have been precipitated by a memorable encounter with a woman who would later become a celebrated pianist for the Auckland radio station 1YA, Phyllis Mary Hams (1895-1974). Sholto Smith had met Hams during World War I while he was on leave from the Canadian Expeditionary Force and visiting Colwyn Bay, North Wales. Sholto Smith's major contribution to Arts and Crafts Auckland, the house he designed as a gift for Phyllis Hams on the occasion of their marriage on 3 March 1925, was named Colwyn to memorialise their Welsh meeting place. Despite only living in New Zealand for his last 16 years, Sholto Smith left a legacy of over 100 buildings. Colwyn was a well-placed advertisement for his domestic architecture, and his Arts and Crafts and Tudor house designs were soon in great demand throughout the building boom of the 1920s. Smith had arrived in Auckland on 17 March 1920 and immediately joined the practice of Thomas Coulthard Mullions (1878-1957) and C Fleming McDonald. The latter had been the architect of the original Masonic Hotel in Napier (1897), and the firm originally specialised in hotels and commercial architecture using modern materials including reinforced concrete, but dressing the modernist structure with historicist references. Several of their inner-city Auckland buildings such as the Waitemata and Manukau Council building on the corner of Shortland and Princes Street, Chancery Chambers in O'Connell Street and the Lister building on the corner of Victoria and Lorne Streets, still survive. After McDonald's death, Sholto Smith became a partner in the firm and encouraged Thomas Mullions to move into residential property development in central Auckland: Shortland Flats (1922) was a commercial venture where the architects formed a company owning shares in the building which comprised 24 flats designed to generate rental income. But detached suburban domestic architecture was Sholto Smith's real passion. Before leaving Canada for fresh beginnings in New Zealand, he drew an architectural perspective for his ideal home. He titled this drawing Dreamwold, and his vision for this ideal house was to be realised in Auckland at 187 St Heliers Bay Road. For this house design, Sholto Smith drew inspiration from Canadian colleagues such as British Columbian architect Samuel Maclure (1860-1929) and from the British masters of the Arts and Crafts Movement including CFA Voysey (1857-1951) and MH Baillie Scott (1865-1945). Colwyn is reminiscent of the latter's Corrie Wood (1908) in Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire in its adventurous open planning. A little bit of Olde Englande recreated in the South Pacific for his homesick new wife, Colwyn was Sholto Smith's perfect Dreamwold, right down to the text on the wooden mantelpiece over the fireplace. The quote inscribed there is taken from the beginning of Shakespeare's sonnet 57, and seems addressed by Smith to his 30-year-old bride: "Being your slave, what should I do but tend upon the hours and times of your desire?" Epitomising the romantic archetype, Colwyn remains a fine example of the type of Arts and Crafts dwelling that well-to-do Aucklanders aspired to inhabit in the 1920s.

‘You will not be going to this war’: the rejected volunteers of the First Contingent of the Canadian Expeditionary Force

Between the start of the war in 1914 and commencement of conscription in 1918, tens of thousands of men who volunteered for service in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) were rejected as unfit for service. However, despite forming both a numerically and socially significant minority with Canada's wartime population, these men are, generally speaking, non-existent in most Canadians' public and academic memories of the Great War. This paper seeks to redress this lapse in public and academic memory by examining the files of over 3050 men rejected for service during the formation of the First Contingent of CEF at Valcartier mobilization camp in August–September 1914. In all, these 3050 individuals account for approximately 60% of the over 5000 men that were ejected from the camp. Divided into two parts, the first part of this paper describes these files and the information that can be garnered from it. It indicates that as well as offering insight into the physical characteristics of these men, this source also presents a conduit through which to engage with the nature of the CEF medical examination, the ways families might endeavour to undermine their husbands', fathers', brothers' and sons' attempts to enlist, and a rejected volunteer's wider experiences – both during and after the war. The second half of the paper then employs this source material to paint a portrait of these men. In doing so, it demonstrates that there were often no visible indicators – other than the lack of a khaki uniform – that marked rejected men as different from those deemed fit to fight. In engaging with this topic, this section also explores some of the implications rejection had for these men.

“In the interest of the Indians”

When the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) began actively enlisting Native men for overseas service in December 1915, the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) saw an opportunity to further their goal of assimilating Native peoples through active duty. To maximize the number of Native soldiers, the DIA lent Iroquois clerk and translator Charles Cooke to the CEF to help recruit on reserves in Southern Ontario in the winter and spring 1916. During the northern half of Cooke’s tour from Rama to Manitoulin Island, many of the communities he visited took advantage of his connection with the DIA, using the current need for soldiers as a bargaining chip in pre-war disputes with the government. While they used Cooke to further their local concerns, he judged the Native men’s potential abilities as soldiers, as well as the strength of their communities, according to the tenets of the DIA’s goal of assimilating Native peoples.

Anti-heroes of the Canadian Expeditionary Force

The civilian-soldiers that formed the ranks of the Canadian Corps created a unique soldiers’ culture composed of songs, poetry, doggerel, cartoons, and newspapers during the course of the war to cope with the strain of service. This unique soldiers’ culture offers keen insight into soldiers’ experience. The antihero was one of the most important themes running through soldiers’ culture. In a war where soldiers were elevated to heroes by civilians, the soldiers in turn often chose instead to emphasis the antiheroic in their cultural products. There were several antihero archetypes in Canadian soldiers’ culture, and this essay will examine three: British cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather’s Old Bill, “old soldiers,” and malingers. While these archetypes were separate, with identifiable qualities, they also bled into one another, creating a rich tapestry of anti-heroic cultural products and icons. These antiheroes provided a voice to the soldiers, even at times a language by which the soldiers could make sense of their war experience. The antiheroes were not always emulated, but their unheroic actions resonated with the trench warriors.

"He was determined to go": Underage Soldiers in the Canadian Expeditionary Force

Jusqu'à 20,000 soldats d'âge mineur ont servi à l'étranger durant la Première Guerre mondiale, mais leur participation est souvent passée inaperçue compte tenu de la difficulté de les distinguer de leurs camarades plus âgés. Les adolescents mentaient souvent sur leur âge afin de s'enrôler, poussés par le goût de l'aventure, la pression de leurs pairs et la fièvre du patriotisme. On constate en étudiant la réaction des soldats adolescents à l'effort de guerre et leurs rapports avec leurs parents, la société et les forces militaires qu'en dépit de l'agonie des parents et des problèmes que ces soldats représentaient parfois pour l'establishment militaire, les jeunes Canadiens étaient intégrés favorablement à l'effort de guerre du Canada et en repré sentaient un volet important.

Review: Clio's Warriors

CLIO'S WARRIORS Canadian Historians and the Writing of the World Wars Tim Cook Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006. 352pp, $29.95 paper (ISBN 0774812575)The discipline of Canadian history owes much to the official history programs run by the Department of National Defence, particularly when one considers the number of prominent scholars who spent part of their careers there. Names like Charles P. Stacey, J.M. Hitsman, S.F. Wise, J.M.S. Careless, J.L. Granatstein, Desmond Morton, and Norman Hillmer are familiar to most students of military, diplomatic, and political history in Canada. And yet, as Tim Cook points out in Clio's Warriors, the lot of an official historian is not an easy one-torn between the expectations of different professions and interest groups, fellow scholars, military officers, ordinary veterans, politicians, and the public.Although Cook introduces a host of influential figures (not all of whom are connected with the government) over the course of the book, two stand out: Archer Fortescue Duguid, the official historian of the Canadian expeditionary force in the First World War, and Charles Stacey, the official army historian during and after the second World War. Duguid and Stacey laid the foundations for the serious study of military history in Canada through their determination to create, save, and catalogue as much material as possible to preserve the memory of Canada's wartime activities. Duguid is a largely forgotten figure today, overshadowed by the work of international counterparts like Sir James Edmonds of Britain and Charles Bean of Australia, who oversaw highly regarded multivolume projects on their respective countries' armies in the First World War, and by the prolific and energetic Stacey. That Duguid was an engineer by training seems to explain both his meticulous methods (he was a believer in history as a science, not an art), and the fact that he was never able to come to grips with the enormous amount of material at his disposal to complete the official history of the CEF that he repeatedly promised to his superiors and the Canadian public. Stacey, by contrast, was trained as a historian, and produced numerous outstanding works during and after the war that were appreciated by his military superiors, academic peers, and the general population (98).Stacey's achievements are even more impressive when one considers the circumstances in which he worked. During the war, he and his small staff had unprecedented access to top commanders like Andrew McNaughton, Harry Crerar, and Guy Simonds. This access and cooperation, however, limited his ability to criticize the generals' plans and judgements. He also faced obstinate politicians who saw the historical section as an easy target for budget cuts. Brooke Claxton, minister of national defence after the war, made the incredible statement that nobody would be interested in reading about the second World War after 1948. Not only does this seem ridiculous with hindsight, given the enormous amount of literature, television, and film devoted to the war in the decades since, but even at the time it was a naive or disingenuous prediction. Great War veterans were still publicly clamouring for their story to be told in the late 19403, and calling for Duguid to make good on his decades of promises or let someone else do the job. …

It Made You Think of Home: The Haunting Journal of Deward Barnes, Canadian Expeditionary Force: 1916-1919 (review)

Reviewed by: It Made You Think of Home: The Haunting Journal of Deward Barnes, Canadian Expeditionary Force: 1916-1919 Glenn Wright (bio) Bruce Cane . It Made You Think of Home: The Haunting Journal of Deward Barnes, Canadian Expeditionary Force: 1916-1919Dundurn. 318. $35.00 Over six hundred thousand Canadian men and women served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) during the First World War. It was and remains one of the most important events in world history, as Margaret Macmillan demonstrates in her study of the peace-making process, Paris 1919. For Canada too, the war had a significant impact on the course of our national development, and while less than a handful of our First War veterans remain, the war continues to occupy a prominent place in our consciousness. The 'Canada Remembers' program, sponsored by Veterans Affairs Canada, ensures that the sacrifices and achievements of our veterans are recognized, battlefield tours are popular, and books on the war are published and republished in great numbers. Canadian literature on the First War is extensive - biographies, memoirs, histories of battles and regiments, novels and poetry, and, in recent years, community histories. Throughout the war, soldiers were able to communicate with their families and loved ones by correspondence, but personal diaries and journals were strictly forbidden. Fortunately, a number of soldiers and nursing sisters chose to ignore the regulations and the historical record is better for the risks they took to leave us with first-hand accounts of their experiences. Many diaries were used as the basis for memoirs published soon after the war, while others were tucked away in drawers or trunks, forgotten and unread for several decades. Deward Barnes was born in Toronto in September 1888. He never attended high school and for several years prior to the war, he was employed at National Casket. In February 1916, he answered the call to arms and volunteered with the 180th Battalion, CEF. He arrived in England in November of the same year, was drafted to the 19th Battalion, and moved to France with his unit in April 1917. He missed the battle for Vimy Ridge but, over the course of the next eighteen months, saw his share of the fighting at Hill 70, Passchendaele, and the Allied breakthrough in August 1918. In October 1918, he received a 'blighty' when he was wounded by machine-gun fire. Following weeks of hospitalization and convalescence in England, Barnes arrived home in Toronto in March 1919. He had experienced the gruesome realities of war: he counted friends among the dead and in March 1918, he was selected to take part in the execution of a fellow soldier who had been convicted of desertion. Contrary to regulations, Deward Barnes kept a diary from the day he enlisted until he returned to Toronto in 1919. Like many soldier diarists, he recorded events, both large and small, of military life, but he often reflected on the war and on his own experiences in a way not always found in accounts of this nature. Seven years after the war, he transcribed his diaries in a series of notebooks, added some details, and then put his war story away for posterity. Now, in the capable hands of editor Bruce Cane, Barnes's story of the war is available to a wide audience for the first time. [End Page 371] Wartime diaries and letters are often published with few editorial enhancements, but Cane took a different approach and annotated the diary, providing the reader with the broad context by elaborating on events described by Barnes, filling in details about military life and operations that Barnes took for granted. In doing so, Cane has produced a very interesting account of one man's war, not to detract from the diary itself, but to place it firmly in the milieu in which it was written. This allows the reader fully to appreciate Barnes's experiences as a solider in the CEF. This is an excellent addition to Canadian first-hand accounts of the Great War, and brings us close to the realities of a war that continues to capture our imagination almost ninety years after the guns went silent. [End Page 372...