Stephen Dale - Noble Illusions: Young Canada Goes to War

NOBLE ILLUSIONS

NOBLE ILLUSIONS

Young Canada Goes to War

STEPHEN DALE

Fernwood Publishing
Halifax & Winnipeg

Copyright 2014 Stephen Dale

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Editing and text design: Brenda Conroy

Cover design: John van der Woude

Printed and bound in Canada by Hignell Book Printing

eBook development: WildElement.ca

Published by Fernwood Publishing

32 Oceanvista Lane, Black Point, Nova Scotia, B0J 1B0

and 748 Broadway Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3G 0X3

www.fernwoodpublishing.ca

Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, the Nova Scotia Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage, the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage and Tourism under the Manitoba Publishers Marketing Assistance Program and the Province of Manitoba, through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, for our publishing program.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Dale, Stephen, 1958-, author

Noble illusions: young Canada goes to war / Stephen Dale.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-55266-649-4 (pbk.)

1. Mass media and warCanadaHistory. 2. Mass media

and propagandaCanadaHistory. 3. World War, 19391945

CanadaPropaganda. I. Title.

P96.W352C3 2014 303.660971 C2014-902933-0

Contents

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express his sincere gratitude to the Canada Council for the Arts, The City of Ottawa Arts Funding Program, and the Ontario Arts Council for their generous financial support, without which this book could not have been produced.

Many people contributed useful suggestions, referred me to materials and provided much-needed encouragement (and more than a few warnings). In particular, Id like to thank Matthew Behrens for valuable editorial counsel and leads to materials; Derek Rasmussen for his comments; Larry Malouin and Dennis Gruending for bringing some fascinating research materials to my attention; and Erika Shaker for publishing a portion of an earlier draft in Our Schools/Ourselves and for sharing her insights on the subject. I thank Dawn Moore for making a great suggestion and David Dyment for his wise words, offered on several occasions. Nik Sheehan deserves particular recognition for developing a film treatment based on this book (a film which should have been made), for starting a productive and stimulating conversation, and for coming up with the title, Noble Illusions .

Id like to express my gratitude to the staff of the National Library and Archives of Canada for providing me with access to Young Canada .

I am indebted to the team at Fernwood Publishing for all their contributions, and I benefited from the advice of the anonymous reviewers. Id like to single out Wayne Antony at Fernwood for agreeing to publish this book. Im also enormously appreciative of the dedication, determination and talent of editor Candida Hadley, who had a keen understanding of how this subject should be treated and of its significance for the contemporary world. Im grateful for her encouragement and numerous editorial suggestions, all of which were right on target.

As always, Im appreciative of the support of my family, Laura Macdonald and Ben and Matthew Macdonald-Dale, whose good cheer and good company mean more to me than they likely realize.

The Past as a Part
of the Present

Every February in Ottawa, the city where I live, one of the main attractions of our annual Winterlude festival are the magnificently detailed, magically translucent ice sculptures on display at Confederation Park. People flock by to see artisans wielding chain saws and chisels, as they bring to life a host of majestic animals and mythical creatures: dragons, dinosaurs, harp-strumming birds, seahorses, polar bears, unicorns, smiling Buddhas and winged creatures set to take flight above the snowy landscape. Frozen facsimiles of international landmarks celebrate the differences between cultures, as well as their similarities. Glittering, transparent athletes and dancers hint at the fun that can be found on a cold night in the dead of winter. Its a very fragile grandeur a sudden spike in the temperature could erase all those characters carefully crafted features but that makes this spectacle all the more awe-inspiring: something beautiful yet doomed, like life itself.

In February 2014, Confederation Park was the site of an ice creation that seemed to break with the spirit of fun and fantasy surrounding it. Veterans Affairs Canada, the federal veterans ministry, had commissioned a sculpture to commemorate the hundredth anniversary (still six months off) of the declaration of the First World War. The result was a massive, hundred-block sculpture depicting a train car with a scattering of soldiers leaning out of its windows, en route from their homes in Canada to the European killing fields of the Great War.

The sculpture was formally presented to the public at an illumination ceremony on a cold Thursday evening, a week or so into the Winterlude festivities. Before the lights hanging above the replica troop train were illuminated, officials marked the occasion with speeches, wreath laying, solemn readings and mournful hymns. A sizable audience of veterans and current-day members of the Armed Forces were welcomed by the sound of bagpipes. The mood was appropriately solemn for an occasion marking the beginning of a war that, as MP Parm Gill, the parliamentary secretary to the Veterans Affairs minister, remarked, resulted in the deaths of over 66,000 Canadians and Newfoundlanders.

There will be more ceremonies like these in the years to come. The Canadian government has announced its plans to individually celebrate, between 2014 and 2020, the major Great War battles in which Canadians took part (the Somme, Beaumont-Hamel, Vimy Ridge) and to collaborate with France on the commemoration of twentieth-century battles that involved both countries, with events that will continue two years beyond the centenary of the wars end. But what will those commemorations say about World War One and the legacy it left for future generations? What will they communicate about the meaning of that war?

Veterans Affairs Minister Julian Fantino hinted at the answer with his statement that the hundredth anniversary represents a unique opportunity to reflect on our countrys long and proud military history. The speakers at the Winterlude ceremony similarly indicated that these commemorative exercises will be about more than loss, grief and mourning. They will also bring into focus the political purpose of those terrible events and highlight how those 66,000 gruesome deaths provide important lessons about self-sacrifice for Canadians today. Chief of Defence Staff General Tom Lawson suggested to those gathered at Confederation Park that there is a continuity between the nobility of those WWI sacrifices and Canadas current muscular approach to international affairs. Veterans embarked on troop trains such as this to defend freedom and democracy, he said. Todays Canadian Armed Forces members often do the same in the name of Canadas contribution to a better and safer world.

That image of the Great War as a just and noble cause as a costly struggle against tyranny, waged to protect our cherished democratic ideals, and a reminder of Canadas continuous commitment to do right in the world is, of course, far from unanimously endorsed. Throughout most of the twentieth century, common notions of the meaning of World War One have been conditioned by novels like All Quiet on the Western Front and films like The Grand Illusion , Gallipoli , For King and Country and Paths of Glory passionate indictments of the horrors of war, often created by or based on the reflections of disillusioned soldiers. These accounts do not see the Great War defined by its noble purpose but rather by its futility. They commit to public memory the spectacle of thousands of men dying in horrendous ways in the seemingly absurd pursuit of some tiny patch of ground. They document in a war latterly defined as a struggle for democratic ideals the routine executions, often by officers from aristocratic families, of common soldiers who balked at rushing headlong into machine-gun fire.