JONATHAN F. VANCE
It was 2 June 1919. The armistice had been concluded barely six months earlier; the peace treaty to end the Great War had not yet been signed. But on that sunny summer day, the people of Binscarth, Manitoba, came together to honour the eighteen men and one woman from the area who had given their lives in the war. They had chosen that day because on the first weekend in June 1916 the village had lost five of its young men, all killed in the bitter fighting around Sanctuary Wood. Three years later, they congregated before their memorial, a soldier standing at attention, carved from white Italian marble and placed on a plinth of red granite. It had cost $1,625.00 to erect, all of it raised through local subscription. The plot of land and the spruce trees that adorned it had been donated by townspeople; the metal ornamental fence was also a donation, crafted by a local veteran and blacksmith. The memorial was truly a community effort, motivated by the sorrow of a village.
Four years later, in August 1923, the citizens of Elmira, Ontario, gathered for a similar ceremony. The occasion this time was the Old Boys’ and Girls’ Reunion, held to celebrate the incorporation of the town and to mark the ninth anniversary of the beginning of the war. Linking the two events, and forming the centrepiece of the weekend’s activities, was the unveiling of the war memorial erected by the citizens of Elmira and Woolwich Township. The Union Jack fluttered down to reveal another white marble soldier, virtually identical to the one in Binscarth. Below it were the names of fifteen local men who had given their lives in the Great War.
On a cool Sunday afternoon in September 1927 the ceremony was re-enacted at Arcola, near the Moose Mountains in southeastern Saskatchewan. Some 1,500 people, better than twice the town’s population, clustered around a small patch of grass off the main street; to one side, aligned in neat ranks, stood nearly sixty local veterans. With the Estevan Brass Band providing musical accompaniment, the province’s lieutenant-governor, Henry W. Newlands, drew the flag to reveal the same white marble statue of a soldier standing at attention. Beneath the figure, a plaque listed the names of twenty-three local men (including two pairs of brothers) who had died during the war. Newlands complimented the townspeople for keeping alive the memory of these ‘dead war heroes with such a splendid monument’ and then invited the mayor, W.F. Youngblud, to accept the memorial on behalf of the citizens of Arcola.1
Three towns, three virtually identical memorials – a citizen of Elmira would not have felt out of place at Arcola’s unveiling, while a farmer from Binscarth might have experienced a welcome sense of familiarity before Elmira’s monument. Had these people travelled farther afield, they would have recognized their own memorials in dozens of towns across the country – Dorchester, New Brunswick; Huntingdon, Quebec; Burks Falls, Ontario; Gladstone, Manitoba; Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, to name but a few – and might have been comforted by a feeling of community with other Canadians. For the standard monument served a dual purpose. On the one hand, a mass-marketed marble soldier could express local distinctiveness and individuality; the placement of the monument in the town, the names on its pedestal, the inscription selected all identified it as belonging uniquely to one community. But at the same time, as Daniel Sherman tells us, the choice of a standard figure allowed people to situate ‘a sense of loss they shared with the whole nation in the particular context of their own community.’2 The soldier could represent any of the local boys listed on the plinth (or even, in Binscarth’s case, Nursing Sister Margaret Lowe), but his uniform identified him as a member of Canada’s national army, and his similarity to other memorials across the country affirmed that the town shared at least one common experience with a larger collectivity: death in war.
This sense of personal grief was the most significant common denominator linking the war memorials at Binscarth, Elmira, and Arcola. Indeed, that single experience, the death of a loved one, came to underpin Canada’s memory of the war, giving it a very specific character. Certainly the memory reflected a desire to understand the war on a rational level, to come to terms with its impact on Canada’s economy, politics, society, and culture. But perhaps more important, the memory sought to convey meaning on a less rational level; in short, it endeavoured to provide consolation. Never before had so many Canadians died violently in such a short period of time; never before had so many families shared the tragedy of losing two, three, four, or more relatives in quick succession. Death and mourning cast a darker shadow over post-1914 Canada than it had at any other time. What could assuage the grief? For many Canadians, the answer was expressed in the nation’s collective memory of the war. They believed passionately that the fallen had died to save Christianity and western civilization from another dark age, and that the men and women who answered the country’s call were ennobled by the experience. At the same time, the nation itself was raised to a higher level of existence because of its sacrifice in Flanders. Whether these assumptions would stand up in the cold light of critical enquiry was irrelevant. For that generation, at that time, the belief that their loss had meaning and purpose enabled them to cope with grief.
Because the human toll of the First World War, 60,000 dead and 140,000 wounded, was so catastrophic, it is easy to forget that Canadian society was not unfamiliar with the phenomenon of sudden, mass death before 1914.3 Despite Victorian notions of progress and the overweening optimism of the Edwardian era, life in the early twentieth century remained nasty, brutish, and short for parts of the population. Little thought was given to safety in the workplace, and Canada’s factories took a steady toll of lives. Vessels frequently disappeared off Canada’s coasts, each taking with it a few men at a time. Even more dangerous were the nation’s mines, which were hit by a series of disasters in the decades before the First World War. In 1891 a coal dust explosion ripped through a mine in Springhill, Nova Scotia, killing 125 men. It is not insignificant that the miners’ memorial in Springhill stands near the memorial to the dead of the First World War; Springhill, like many other Canadian communities, clearly had far too much experience mourning the sudden death of young men before 1914.
Just as tragic were the disasters that killed less selectively. Man-made disasters, such as the streetcar accident in Victoria that left fifty-five people dead in 1896 or the 1910 train derailment in Sudbury that claimed forty-three lives, along with natural disasters, such as the July 1911 fire that killed seventy-three people in Porcupine, Ontario, or the June 1912 tornado that took forty-one lives in Regina, ensured that mass death was never very far from the minds of Canadians. The fact was deeply impressed on Haligonians in April 1912, when their city became a de facto morgue for the victims of the Titanic’s sinking. Just months before the beginning of the war came an even bigger tragedy, at least as far as Canadians were concerned: the sinking of the Empress of Ireland in the Gulf of St Lawrence, with a toll of 1,012 lives.
Disease, too, remained a potent killer. The generation whose sons and daughters went to war in 1914 had seen cities ravaged by epidemic diseases, like the 1885 Montreal smallpox epidemic that killed as many as 5,800 people. Even into the twentieth century, the burgeoning urban centres were plagued by such intractable social problems that the threats to life were actually increasing for certain parts of the population. Between 1900 and 1914, for example, the mortality rate in urban Ontario climbed steadily.4 But the available statistics are far from conclusive; short-term spikes in the death rate must be balanced against a long-term decline. Furthermore, one should not read too much into such statistics: as George Emery has shown, they are subject to a degree of social construction.5 David Cannadine has suggested that those whose children came of age during the First World War were the first generation who could reasonably expect their children to outlive them. To have this comforting certitude wrenched away from them during the Great War was therefore a more profound shock than it might otherwise have been.6 Historians of revolutions tell us that social upheavals are most likely to occur when a population’s rising expectations are not met. Cannadine persuasively implies that the same notion can be fruitfully applied to the First World War: the impact of children’s deaths on parents was especially profound because it was precisely the opposite of what they had come to expect.
By the same token, the natural or man-made disasters of the pre-war era had a limited impact on the public consciousness because they were infrequent and tended to be localized. The destruction of the town of Frank, Alberta, by a rockslide in 1903 certainly moved Canadians deeply, but their sympathy was detached because for most the experience was so far removed from their own. Death in the First World War was of a very different order. On any given day, dozens and perhaps hundreds of households might receive the fateful telegram that bore the news dreaded by all. The war was no respecter of class, or region, or religion, and the constancy of death may well have imparted an odd sort of unity to Canadian society as so many people tried to come to terms with the same experience. David Cannadine has argued that post-war society became a ‘cult of the dead’; at the very least, we must admit that the losses of 1914–18 constituted a profound psychic shock, and made mourning an almost universal condition.
In conceptualizing the nature of that mourning, it is essential to understand its context. Two approaches have dominated the historiography: one looks back at the First World War from the modern age, seeing in it the roots of modernist idioms, cultural forms, and modes of expression; the other looks forward to the war from the Victorian age, emphasizing the persistence of nineteenth-century traditions, values, and sensibilities. This debate has produced an immense literature that has most recently leaned towards situating the war at the end of the age that preceded it rather than at the beginning of the age that followed it.
Certainly with respect to the nature of death and mourning, it is more helpful to place the Great War within the context of Victorian attitudes. David Marshall has shown that perceptions of death underwent a fundamental transformation in Canada through the nineteenth century. In the first half of the 1800s death was something to be feared and loathed; clerics preached a message of divine judgment and eternal damnation and urged the unrepentant to mend their ways before death overtook them. As the decades passed, however, this message began to change, as clerics realized that it offered little comfort to grieving relatives. In its stead, an avowedly consolatory image of death emerged. Death became a beautiful event, a passage from a life of strife to one of peace, happiness, and tranquility. It was not an end but a beginning, a new departure that should be welcomed by the moribund and celebrated by the survivors. As Marshall argues persuasively, the public demanded consolation, and this new vision of death provided it.7
Faced with loss on an unprecedented scale during the First World War, Canadians embraced this consolatory image of death. To use Marshall’s phrase, they continued to draw the sting from death by affirming that their loved ones had died for a reason. The scale, hideousness, and apparent pointlessness of death in the Great War might seem to militate against such a response, but for many Canadians, the circumstances of the war in fact offered considerable scope for consolation. Victorians had coped with grief by believing that the dead had gone to a better place; the bereaved of 1914–18 could comfort themselves in the belief that their loved ones had died to defend western civilization and Christianity and to found a new nation from the ashes of war.
When news of the Armistice reached Canada on 11 November 1918, the first impulse of many Canadians was to celebrate. For almost four years, they had lived in the pressure-cooker of war. The stakes had been enormous: right must triumph, or the world would be plunged into another dark age of German Kultur and Schrecklichkeit (frightfulness), when Christianity, freedom, and justice would be banished from the earth. Also, there had often been cause for pessimism. Some people may have harboured secret doubts over the winter of 1917–18, when the triumph of the Allied armies seemed far from assured; others may have experienced a crisis of faith in March 1918, when Offensive Michael brought the German armies closer to victory than they had been at any time since 1914. The Armistice, however, restored that faith. Canadians could now see the defeat of the Central Powers as an affirmation. God had fought on the Allied side to preserve Christianity and western civilization from oblivion; the victorious conclusion of the war was proof. So, after the street parties, bonfires, and parades were over, Canadians heeded their second impulse and expressed their gratitude. Amateur poets across the country earnestly took up their pens to give thanks to God for the nation’s deliverance. It seemed only fitting to offer up prayers on that momentous occasion; for, as Montreal poet C.L. de Roode proclaimed in his Armistice Day poem, ‘Cette victoire, c’est la victoire de Dieu!’8 The poet and tireless self-promoter Wilson MacDonald concurred, reminding readers of the proper course of action once the merry-making had subsided: ‘Let us pour out our thanks in praise to Him / Who gave the peace we know.’9 Many Canadians took MacDonald’s advice to heart and congregated in chapel, church, or cathedral to join together in prayer, at least in those cities where the raging influenza epidemic had not brought a ban on public gatherings. For Canadians who were prevented from worshipping together, newspapers obligingly printed the texts of sermons from clergymen across the country. One way or another, people found a way to express their gratitude for the divine assistance that had brought the victory in a just war.
Validated in battle and sanctified by the church services of November 1918, this interpretation could now form the foundation of Canada’s collective memory of the war. Despite any post-war concerns about petty national or political motivations behind the war, it affirmed that the very survival of western civilization had been at stake. L.M. Montgomery’s characterization of the war as a ‘death-grapple between freedom and tyranny, between modern and medieval ideals … between the principles of democracy and militarism’10 lost none of its resonance in the post-war years; it remained the norm to interpret the war as a struggle to save Europe from another dark age. Tales of German atrocities retained their appeal in post-war Canada (Claudius Courneloup, a veteran of the 22nd Battalion, was not alone in continuing to insist that he had joined up ‘pour la sainte défense des veuves, des opprimes et des orphelins’11), and continued to be held up as justification for the nation’s involvement. All of the values that Allied propaganda had emphasized during the war remained sacrosanct in Canada’s collective memory afterwards – freedom, liberty, justice, democracy, truth, humanity. They could be found on war memorials, in school textbooks, in vaudeville songs, in poems and novels, and even in advertising, offering constant correctives to the few voices that deigned to suggest that the war had been fought for narrow political or economic motives.
Warriors’ Day Parade, 1920, CNE. Each day at the CNE was designated for special activities, and after the First World War, the first day was declared Warriors’ Day. (City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 727)
Nevertheless, in 1926 Sir Arthur Currie, the former commander of the Canadian Corps, began to wonder if the ‘just war’ thesis was becoming stale. In his capacity as adviser to the Canadian Battlefield Memorials Commission, he vetted the inscriptions that would appear on Canada’s official memorials in France and Belgium and expressed concern that they might record that the war had been fought, not ‘for civilization’ (which carried with it connotations of a noble and timeless struggle), but for ‘the Allied cause’ (which suggested short-term and perhaps tawdry political objectives). ‘Is it possible,’ he enquired of Colonel H.C. Osborne, the secretary-general of the Canadian agency of the Imperial War Graves Commission, ‘that the presence of Miss Agnes Macphail at Ottawa makes you wish to eliminate from your monument any reference to fighting, or would such a reference be held to be at variance with the sentiments of Locarno?’ Osborne’s reply was mollifying: ‘The idea that the Delilah of the House of Commons is cutting all our locks and taking the fight out of us is fine. However, it isn’t true.’12 What he might have said was that, in the collective memory of the war, Currie’s concern was largely irrelevant; most Canadians would have accepted ‘civilization’ as a synonym for ‘the Allied cause.’
The other synonym for ‘the Allied cause’ was, of course, ‘right,’ and this notion elevated the war above secular concerns such as democracy and freedom and into the spiritual realm. Not only did the collective memory interpret the war as a ‘death-grapple’ between civilization and barbarism; it was also another episode in the eternal struggle between right and wrong. ‘Braves fils canadiens de Gaule et d’Albion,’ wrote Quebec poet Alonzo Cinq-Mars. ‘Vous aviez accepté la noble mission / De défendre le Droit contre la Barbarie.’13 With similar rhetoric, the Brantford Expositor used the unveiling of the city’s war memorial to remind its readers that ‘the men of the Empire enrolled under the glorious banner of “God and My Right,” for the most righteous crusade in the history of mankind.’14
Perhaps the clearest expression of this interpretation of the war is the prevalence of the St George and the dragon motif in Canada’s collective memory.15 Popular during the war with British and German propagandists alike, this centuries-old icon became a sort of visual shorthand for the meaning of the struggle: in spite of the modern weaponry and mass tactics, the Great War was like a medieval morality tale in which the good and virtuous knight triumphed over the forces of darkness, simply because his cause was just. The St George and the dragon motif was particularly suitable for use in war memorials, which sought to convey the strongest possible message with the simplest symbolism. For example, Percy Nobbs used it as the centrepiece of a memorial window to twenty-three members of the Delta Upsilon fraternity in Montreal who died during the war, and the figure of St George also graces the war memorial window in St Thomas’s Church in Toronto. In the Peace Tower in Ottawa, he can be seen in the central window of the memorial chamber as well as on the 1915 title page of the Book of Remembrance. In each case, the motif’s impact lies in the fact that its meaning would have been so widely understood.
Given that the Allies represented the forces of good, it was axiomatic that Canada’s soldiers were fighting with divine sanction and even with divine assistance. This notion is explicit in many Canadian war memorials, like the one in Quyon, Quebec, which declares that ‘God gave the victory.’ According to the Ontario Reformer, because of its tripartite construction the Whitby monument was ‘in keeping with the great Three in One by whose aid we have been able to overcome these trials.’16 The memorial inscription in Douglas, Manitoba, went a step further, placing God alongside Canadian infantrymen at the front:
They died unnoticed in the muddy trench,
Nay! God was with them, and they did not blench,
Filled them with holy fires that naught could quench
And when he saw their work on earth was done
He gently called to them
My sons, my sons.
On a slightly different level is the continuing resonance in post-war Canada of battlefield tales of visions or apparitions. Typically, they were based on purportedly eyewitness accounts by soldiers who had seen visions, most frequently of Jesus Christ (sometimes referred to as the White Comrade), angels, St George, or an army of medieval archers, which had comforted them and motivated them to fight on when their spirits were waning. In ‘The White Comrade,’ Katherine Hale tells of a glowing figure who visits desperately wounded soldiers on the battlefield as their spirits are ebbing. Any suggestion that the tale was fanciful was, in her view, absurd: ‘You know the angels that appeared at Mons! / Many have seen bright angels in the field.’17 Francis Cecil Whitehouse’s poem ‘The Archers of Mons’ finds British soldiers in a desperate position, about to be overrun by German hordes; they are in danger of losing not only the battle, but their faith: ‘“There is no God!” they cry, and bite their lips, / “There is, indeed, no God!”’ Suddenly, an army of ghostly bowmen appears in front of them, giving them the heart and strength to fight on: ‘a Heavenly Guard, / Or old Crusaders sent once more to Earth / For His good purposes! / They – were the Will of God!’18 For Whitehouse, whether or not this incident actually occurred was probably irrelevant. It was simply a literary device to verify what many Canadians knew to be true: that divine intervention had enabled Allied soldiers to triumph because their cause was just.
Many Canadians went a step further, however, by averring that, because Allied soldiers fought in defence of all that was good and right, they shared in a community of sacrifice with Jesus Christ. In this discourse, the comparison between the fallen soldier and Christ was made so direct and explicit that the distinction between the two became blurred. Canada’s fallen soldiers were not simply labourers, clerks, and farmers who had died in battle; according to ex-soldier A.E. Johnson, they were ‘joint heirs with Christ because they bled to save / His loved ones.’19 When Ottawa journalist Grattan O’Leary observed in 1931 that Canada’s soldiers had died ‘for a free earth and as a ransom for mankind,’ he placed their sacrifice on a par with ‘One who gave His life as a ransom for many.’ It was precisely the same metaphor that Mackenzie King had used eight years earlier, when he drew a parallel between the losses of the Great War and ‘the tragedy of 1900 years ago, when the best life which the world has ever known was sacrificed.’20 Writers and speakers extended the metaphor by comparing individual soldiers to Christ as a rhetorical technique to demonstrate their sterling qualities. McGill University professor John Macnaughton characterized as a kind of Christ Guy Drummond, the son of a wealthy and influential Montreal couple who was killed in action at the Second Battle of Ypres. Barry Dunbar, the protagonist of Ralph Connor’s Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land, saw the doomed and selfless Corporal Thom as ‘just a common man, but uncommonly like God.’21 In dedicating the memorial to George Baker, Canada’s only member of Parliament to be killed in action, Mackenzie King asked listeners to ponder ‘the God-like greatness of the human spirit’ that found expression in Baker’s life and death.22 No matter how it was used, the message was the same: the Great War had brought forth a new generation of saviours.
Here, the collective memory of the war implicitly accepted the transformative power of war. Not all Canadians of the Edwardian era had the potential to reveal ‘God-like greatness.’ It took the test of battle to sort out the wheat from the chaff, to determine who was wanting in character and who would join, as King put it, ‘that great company of the defenders of the right, the great Christian warriors of history.’23 It went without saying that the fallen had passed the test; merely by dying they had proved their mettle and elevated themselves to saviour status. But survivors, too, could share in the curative power of war. They would never attain the stature of the dead, but they could demonstrate a magnitude of spirit that would forever set them apart. Furthermore, past conduct was not necessarily an indication of true character, and the memory of the war was careful to stress that saviours were found in the most unlikely places. ‘There is many a man who came over in the first place a tough nut,’ Lieutenant Colonel D.H.C. Mason told the Canadian Club of Toronto, ‘who kicked around the world and fought his own way, who has learned that there is something bigger than that to fight for.’24 Clarence Basil Lumsden, a Military Medal winner of the 25th Battalion, described one of those tough nuts in a short story entitled ‘Two Men.’ One was a pious, dutiful fellow who utterly failed the test of battle. The other was a hell-raiser who drank and swore too much; in the heat of battle, he redeemed his past ills and covered himself with glory by rescuing a wounded comrade.25
For such men, the war was a refining fire that ‘revealed the pure gold’ of Canadians,26 and indeed this became the most popular metaphor to describe the experience of battle. Soldiers, ‘like crude ore, went through the fire, and came out pure metal,’ observed one memorial booklet; all that remained were the finest qualities.27 The theme was implicit in the memorial cross in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. The dedication program echoed the press account of the Nova Scotia Highland brigade by informing spectators that the rough-hewn base recalled the province’s rough and hardy sons, while the polished stone of remembrance suggested how ‘the infallible human spirit was fashioned into heroism amid the fires of war.’28
Of course, war could work the same transformation on the nation that it worked on its citizens; the nation, too, could emerge from the crucible of war in finer form, in a process that was cast in the language of Christian salvation. In the imagery of a 1919 Victory Loan brochure, the war had been Canada’s agony of the cross; emerging in November 1918, the nation had reached the resurrection morning. ‘My Canada,’ wrote the poet A.M. Stephen, was ‘formed from the chastening soil of fire and tears / On Europe’s battle mounds, of iron and flame.’29 As Stephen’s lines suggest, place came to have immense significance in this discourse, and the names with which Canadians had become so familiar during the war came to be endowed with immense symbolic importance afterwards. Valcartier, where the First Contingent had assembled before sailing for Europe, was transformed into ‘the cradle of our national life.’ Vimy Ridge was referred to as the nation’s Golgotha, because it was the site of the ‘sacrificial death’ of so many of Canada’s young men. Flanders, proclaimed John Macnaughton, was ‘at once a Bethlehem and a Calvary,’ because it was the site of Canada’s martyrdom and its birth. Ypres became ‘that place where Canada’s soul, newfound, was born again.’30 The transformation of these geographic locations into sites redolent with spiritual and moral significance was representative of Canada’s entire collective memory of the war. All of the negative connotations of these places – the muddle of Valcartier, the hell of Ypres, the sucking mud of Flanders – could be effaced in favour of a positive, uplifting interpretation. The specifics of what had actually occurred during the Great War became less important than the symbolic meaning with which the conflict was endowed.
On one level, this entire process might suggest the invisible hand of elite manipulation in Canada’s war memory. It might be argued that defending western civilization and Christianity was nothing more than defending the status quo, while the ideology of war as a transformative force, on either the individual or the national level, was a thinly veiled attempt to convince people to subordinate their own interests to those of the social and political elites. The fact that the entire memory played on emotion rather than rationality might make it seem even more sinister. But ironically, this is the very reason why it is so profoundly unsatisfying to see the collective memory simply as a product of elite manipulation. It assumes that the just war thesis, the defence of Christianity, or the creation of a new nation were ends in themselves. On the contrary, in the minds of Canadians who created and nourished the collective memory of the war, they were only means to a very different end: consolation, the same goal that had underpinned the response to death since the mid-Victorian era. Grief, not western civilization, Christianity, or the new nation, was the foundation of Canada’s memory of the war.
The centrality of grief and consolation is clear in what were perhaps the most visible manifestations of the war memory in the interwar years: the proliferation of war memorials and the observance of Armistice (later Remembrance) Day. It is tempting to see these demonstrations as political, and there is no question that they were deeply contested: local elites squared off against each other over the design and location of war memorials; arts organizations attempted to exert centralized control over commemoration; lobby groups battled over the most fitting way to mark the annual observance of the war’s end; and pacifist organizations derided both war memorials and Armistice Day as dangerous manifestations of militarism. But underlying these disputes was mutual agreement on their significance; regardless of how much bickering went on over commemorative practices, both sides of the debate accepted without question that such practices were central to the emotional response to the war. To borrow a phrase from American historian James Mayo, commemoration might be seen as a political landscape, but it was first and foremost a landscape of consolation.31
Canadians were no strangers to war memorials, and monuments from earlier conflicts dotted the country. The War of 1812 was commemorated most famously by the Brock Monument, which towered some 180 feet over Queenston Heights in the Niagara Peninsula. Less well known is the column erected in Allan’s Corners, Quebec, where Lieutenant Colonel Charles de Salaberry and a small force of regular soldiers, militiamen, and Abenaki warriors routed an American invasion force at the Battle of Châteauguay in 1813. The old St Paul’s Cemetery in Halifax was graced by Canada’s finest memorial to the Crimean War, a massive stone arch erected in 1860 in memory of two local boys who died while in British service; parks in various other Canadian cities were adorned with cannons captured from Russian artillery units in the Crimea. The battles for New France, the rebellions of 1837–8, the Fenian Raids, and the rebellions of 1870 and 1885 each yielded a handful of memorials, but it was the South African War of 1899–1902 that produced the most concentrated burst of memorialization the country had yet seen. In a little over a decade, a rush of patriotic fervour and gratitude produced a wide variety of monuments across the country, from the splendid mounted horseman in Calgary to a more modest tribute to local soldier Corporal W.A. Knisley erected by the townspeople of Cayuga, Ontario.32 Indeed, Knisley’s memorial bears more than a passing mention; for it marked a shift in memorialization away from great captains. Knisley’s only claim to fame was dying in the service of his country, but in the years following the First World War, that sacrifice would be what counted.
Taken together, these conflicts produced only a few dozen memorials, and it was evident very early in the Great War that commemoration would soon be taken to a whole new level. In 1915 A.Y. Jackson gloomily mused that before too many years had passed monuments to the war would ‘disfigure every town and village in the country.’33 Later writers have been equally dismissive of efforts at memorialization. James Stevens Curl had high praise for some of the Great War memorials, but lamented that the typical post-1945 monument would ‘cause even the strongest to quail at the triviality of its mediocre language … The terrors of death are made more terrible by the insults of present-day designs for funerary memorials.’34 However, to judge memorials on aesthetic grounds was mistaken. Certainly every community wanted a memorial that was attractive, but aesthetic considerations were important only up to a point. What mattered for most communities was that the memorial spoke to the grieving heart, not to the discerning eye.
Unveiling of the war memorial at Harbord Collegiate, Toronto, ca. 1920 (City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 978)
In this regard, it is important to understand the role of the memorial in the mourning process. Because of the nature and scale of the war, most Canadian families had no grave they could conveniently grieve at and so were denied access to an important source of consolation.35 The Imperial War Graves Commission, established in 1917 to administer the burial of the British Empire’s 1 million dead, steadfastly refused to allow the repatriation of bodies. Canadians who died in England while on active service could be brought home for burial (in the end, only about 5 per cent of the nation’s war dead were buried in Canada); all others had to remain in IWGC-maintained cemeteries near the old battlefields. By the early 1920s most of the cemeteries were open to visitors, but cheap excursions organized by British and French tour companies were of little help to Canadians who had neither the time nor the money to undertake a costly and protracted transatlantic voyage. There were organized pilgrimages, and low-income Canadians could apply for subsidies to join the 1936 pilgrimage for the unveiling of the Vimy Memorial, but Canada had no program comparable to an American plan, which provided one free trip for a family to visit the grave of a relative in Europe.36 For most Canadians the journey to a loved one’s grave was simply not possible. Furthermore, since thousands of Canadian soldiers were listed as missing in action with no known burial place, many Canadians had no grave to mourn at.
For countless Canadians, the local war memorial came to fill that void; it provided a site for mourning to people who had no other site. The word cenotaph, after all, is derived from the Greek words meaning empty tomb, and many memorials, such as those in Bolton, Ontario, and Fredericton, New Brunswick, used a tomb shape to underline the meaning. Furthermore, much of the discussion surrounding the process of memorialization took as its starting point the notion that the community was erecting, not a piece of art to which aesthetic principles applied, but a substitute grave. For this reason, memorial committees often took great pains to solicit the opinions of grieving family members and to accord the greatest weight to their opinions. The memorial committee in Rimouski, Quebec, proclaimed proudly that the families of local soldiers had been well represented in their deliberations. In Kitchener, Ontario, a group of soldiers’ mothers strongly opposed plans to erect a memorial carillon, insisting that bells did not constitute a fitting memorial. Despite some grumbling that they should not rule the process, the mothers prevailed and the carillon idea was dropped. When Winnipeg’s committee rejected a memorial design submitted by Elizabeth Wyn Wood, the committee chair, R.D. Waugh, rationalized the decision on similar grounds, observing that the design ‘did not convey to the relatives of our boys and girls who made the supreme sacrifice, that indescribable feeling of grief, pride and gratitude which only those who have suffered can understand … [it] made no appeal whatever to the bereaved relatives, and therefore, was a complete failure as a suitable memorial.’37
A suitable memorial, in Waugh’s view, was one that spoke directly to grieving family members, who would use the monument as the substitute for a grave they might never see. For this reason, many communities decided that their memorials should be dedicated, not to all who had served, but only to those who had died. In Guysborough, Nova Scotia, for example, the public notice announcing a fund-raising campaign stated that only the names of the dead would be inscribed on the monument; local veterans had to make do with being listed on a roll in the court house.38 Even the most inclusive memorials established a hierarchy; pride of place went to the names of the fallen, with the names of returned soldiers being squeezed in on the sides or rear of the plinth.
Nowhere were these matters more hotly debated than in Toronto. As it was originally erected, the cenotaph paid tribute to all who had served, whether or not they had made the supreme sacrifice, but in 1925 the city’s Board of Control circulated an enquiry to local veterans’ organizations to determine if the inscription should be changed, to refer only to those who had died. Veterans’ organizations, local militia units, and women’s groups expressed wholehearted support for the proposed change, and in November 1925 the city council decided to alter the inscription.39 The decision, however, did not go unchallenged. Saturday Night noted that ‘the prevailing sentiment among objectors to the inscription … seems to be that only those who fell in battle deserve commemoration and that they were necessarily more brave and self-sacrificing than those who survived.’ This was nonsense, declared the editor, for every day a veteran died from wounds or illness sustained during service. ‘Do they merit no memorial?’ he queried. ‘To think so is to yield to that false sentimentality which makes a fetish of death.’40 Despite such objections, the fetish of death won out. Toronto’s cenotaph is still inscribed ‘To Our Glorious Dead.’
The same consideration was also behind the decision, taken by most smaller Canadian communities, that the memorial must list the names of the fallen. Obviously, this practice served a variety of purposes. The listing of names was a means to ensure the preservation of the memory of the fallen; if they were recorded in stone, they could not be forgotten. It would also bear witness to a community’s contribution; the number of names on a memorial was a quick and easy way to determine if that town had acquitted itself well in the nation’s time of need. But on another level, the names were essential because the memorial was to serve as a substitute grave; they allowed grieving relatives to make the direct link between the monument and the fallen who meant so much to them.
This conclusion is strengthened by the rituals connected with memorials, which mimicked those commonly associated with burial sites. It was customary to assert that memorials sat on hallowed or consecrated ground, adjectives that were typically applied to cemeteries. A speaker at the unveiling of the memorial in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, for example, referred to it as a shrine. Relatives of the fallen were also accorded special privileges in unveiling ceremonies, just like the next of kin at a graveside service. They frequently occupied the best seating areas, and in many cases a relative was invited to perform the official unveiling. Usually, the local committee chose a mother, or occasionally a sister – fathers were only rarely called upon to perform unveilings.
Finally, it was not unusual to see memorials bedecked with floral tributes, often wreaths or flower arrangements of the same sort that would be left on a grave. Indeed, many communities observed Decoration Day, an American occasion dating from the U.S. Civil War, which involved the ritual placing of flowers on the graves of local heroes. In the early 1920s Decoration Day (observed on the Victoria Day weekend) was a significant event in the calendar of many communities, and large and impressive ceremonies were held in cities such as Montreal and Vancouver, usually organized by the Last Post Fund, the Great War Veterans Association, and the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE).41 A number of community groups and municipal organizations even suggested that the federal government institutionalize the ritual by formally proclaiming Decoration Day a statutory holiday.42 This action was never taken, so Decoration Day remained the preserve of local groups like the James Baby Chapter of the IODE, which took it upon itself to decorate the graves of local heroes around Windsor, Ontario.43 Perhaps ironically, the practice was also adopted by anti-war organizations. In Toronto in 1930, while thousands of people paid tribute to the fallen at the cenotaph, a small group of pacifists laid flowers on the graves of nurses, firefighters, policemen, and other ‘heroes of peace.’44
However, it was on Armistice Day, much more than Decoration Day, when the local cenotaph was most important; if the local war memorial was a grave, then Armistice Day was a funeral. Just as most Canadians were prevented from seeking consolation at a grave, the vast majority of them had been denied the healing that went with a funeral; Armistice Day was a stand-in, allowing them to act one out every year. It was a time when Canadians from across the country would stop their daily labours, come together, and pause in common remembrance of the fallen.
Indeed, all of the rituals performed on 11 November suggest that it was conceived of as a substitute funeral. The hymns and scripture readings, typically used in service after service across the country, emphasized that lives were not lost in vain. Hymns like ‘O Valiant Hearts’ and ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’ and readings such as Psalm 46 (‘God is our refuge and strength’) and 2 Timothy 2:3 (‘Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ’) provided justification for death in war either by reflecting on historical antecedents or by placing it in the context of the eternal struggle between good and evil. Either way, the message was that death, however tragic, had meaning and purpose. The sermons and addresses, too, were frequently indistinguishable from eulogies, in that they attempted to cast death in the most favourable light, as Victorian clergymen had learned to do. The growing popularity at Canadian Armistice Day services of Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’ (‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them’), itself strongly influenced by the tradition of English consolatory verse, also reflects the perception of Armistice Day as a kind of funeral.45
Virtually every other aspect of the typical Armistice Day service can be seen in the same light. The moment of silence, the centrepiece of the ceremony, was intended to replicate the ritual performed at soldiers’ funerals at the front. The relatives of the fallen again enjoyed pride of place, just as they would at a funeral. The poppy quickly became a fixture in early November, as a replacement for the black armband that traditionally had been a part of funereal garb. As Marie Sylvia wrote, the poppy became a tangible promise that the memory of the dead would not be allowed to fade: ‘Honneur! Honneur à toi, sang des heros vainqueurs! / Ton souvenir sacré restera dans nos coeurs!’46 There were also floral tributes, a funerary ritual that allowed members of the community, whether or not they had personally experienced loss, to take an active role in the ceremonies. Indeed, this practice was jealously guarded: the Rev. F.C. Ward-Whate of Toronto reacted angrily to a British government suggestion that no wreaths be laid at war memorials: ‘We can’t forget and we won’t forget,’ he promised, making the implicit assumption that a floral tribute was a kind of mnemonic device. All of these rituals suggest that, through the interwar era, 11 November evolved into Canada’s national funeral. ‘This is the day of the Dead,’ wrote an amateur poet from Vancouver on Armistice Day 1929. ‘This is a day of mourning.’47
It is no wonder, then, that many people felt the name change from Armistice Day to Remembrance Day, which came into effect in 1931, was entirely fitting. As Sir Arthur Currie remarked in a speech in Toronto’s Massey Hall, Armistice Day referred to a specific point in history, ‘the closing incident of the war.’ Remembrance Day, on the other hand, was more general and called on people to honour a memory of the lives that were sacrificed.48 In short, Armistice Day suggested a historical anniversary; Remembrance Day suggested a communal funeral.
Of course, it is possible to find politics at work on Armistice Day in the valuation of the sacrifice to the nation and the entrenchment of Christian values. There was also some criticism of the day for fostering an unhealthy and dangerous militarism. Still, even the sharpest critics of Armistice Day realized that they had to tread carefully. The ceremony, after all, offered a way to make ‘public and corporate those unassuageable feelings of grief and sorrow which otherwise must remain forever private and individual.’49 It was an integral part of the healing process, and few critics wanted to pick away at old scars. Just as it is considered unseemly to speak ill of the dead at a funeral, it was not proper to speak ill of the dead on 11 November.
So, when representatives of the Working Class Ex-Service Men’s League appeared at the Toronto cenotaph in 1933 to lay a wreath that read ‘In Memory of Those Who Died in Vain,’ they were clearly offering a critique of the war, but they were also admitting the sanctity of the fallen.50 Laura Goodman Salverson, whose two novels on the Great War encompassed both a traditional and a modernist interpretation, argued in a 1937 Remembrance Day article that peace and democracy made an ‘honourable face to put upon a selfish wilfully engaged war of economic conquest,’ but she, too, was careful to point out that her critique implied no disrespect to the dead. ‘That they died under false colours,’ she added, ‘does not make their sacrifice less great. It merely multiplies our obligations.’51
Salverson and the Toronto workers, though they may not have realized it at the time, in fact shared significant common ground with the most vocal proponents of Canada’s collective memory of the war. Both discourses were underpinned by a recognition of deep and profound grief. Regardless of whether the fallen had died in a righteous cause or had been sent to pointless deaths by stupid politicians and avaricious financiers, the real tragedy of the war was that so many young men and women had died. Grief became the sine qua non of post-war Canada, whether or not one agreed with the dominant memory; it could be used to justify either a restatement of the myth or a critique of it. In each case, the dead underpinned both the positive, traditional memory of war and the negative, modernist memory.
The centrality of grief and the need for consolation explain why Canada’s memory of the war is punctuated by observations that seem, at first glance, to be strangely contradictory. For example, in 1934 official historian Colonel A.F. Duguid, in an assessment of Canada’s war film Lest We Forget, averred that the film ‘portrays the stark reality of war, its futility and its terrors, so that this method of settling disputes between nations may be dreaded and avoided,’ but he took pains to stress that such frankness did not dim the glory of the fallen. On the contrary, the film paid them tribute with its ‘scenes of self-sacrifice and heroism, of devoted service and of patriotic effort … of self-forgetfulness and of loyalty.’52 The London Free Press, for its part, also applauded the film for conveying the ‘feeling that war is a sickening, stupid and silly affair … [of] death and the destruction of everything that is beautiful,’ but it, too, reminded readers that Lest We Forget also praised the fallen for their ‘heroism and self-sacrifice, endurance, cheerfulness in suffering.’53
By the same token, Sir Arthur Currie often insisted that he never saw any glamour or glory on the battlefield: ‘war is simply the curse of butchery, and men who have gone through it, who have seen war stripped of all its trappings, are the last men that will want to see another war.’54 In 1924, at the dedication of War Memorial Hall at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph, Currie returned to the theme: ‘There is no glory in it [war], as we understand it, in its methods or its results. The roll of the drum or the waving of the tattered flag no longer stirs the heart, as a perfect means of solving difficulties.’ But this reality in no way compromised, he went on, ‘the glory of sacrifice for the ideals involved.’55 The following year, former divisional commander Sir Archibald Macdonnell spoke in similar terms at the unveiling of the war memorial in Saint John, New Brunswick: ‘Modern warfare has lost that glamour which in centuries past stirred the imagination of people. When whole nations are aligned on the battle fields in a long mass of muddy burrows, war becomes horribly monotonous, yet officers and privates face the same dangers and they share the same fate. This memorial is not only the artistic expression of the gratitude of the people of this city to those whom they dearly loved, it is also a pious memento to all those young Canadians who, during four years of cruel agony, so prized liberty that, to save their country, no sacrifice was for them too great.’56 The speeches are cut from the same cloth. They begin with a rejection of traditional assumptions regarding war, in terms that might almost be called modernist. Yet they end with an affirmation of the value of the conflict and a restatement of the notions that the traditional view had stressed: the glory of sacrifice for an ideal and a seemly piety towards the fallen who had died for liberty and their country. All the code words are there. Despite the muddy burrows, the monotony, and the cruel agony, war brought out the finest qualities of humanity.
It was not only old soldiers who were comfortable with this balancing act. When the Globe reviewed the exhibition of works of art from the Canadian War Memorials Fund, it praised the collection for hammering home the fact that ‘war, in itself, is futile, horrible, sordid and evil’ while at the same time proving that it was marked by ‘individual heroism, devotion, sacrifice and nobility.’57 The Regina Daily Star, in considering the first volume of Duguid’s official history, admitted that the war was ‘a series of mishaps, misconceptions, misunderstandings, misinformation,’ but insisted that it had been ‘redeemed in its most sordid stages by the gallantry, the almost superhuman courage of those pawns in the game, the common soldiery.’58 It would be possible to cite countless other examples of the same mental process at work: an admission of the horrors of war accompanied by an insistence that they were not borne without nobility or purpose. What appears to be a paradox is, in fact, an entirely understandable human response to an unparalleled tragedy. There may have been disagreement about the meaning of the war, but there can have been no disagreement that the real tragedy was the loss of 60,000 Canadian lives. Providing consolation for that loss, rather than rational explanation for the war as a whole, was the goal of the nation’s memory of the war.
In 1933 Sir Andrew Macphail was invited to give a Remembrance Day address to the Westmount Women’s Club in Montreal. The venerable doctor from Orwell, Prince Edward Island, by then something of a grand old man of Canadian letters, had already made significant contributions to Canada’s memory of the Great War. He had edited the best-selling collection of John McCrae’s poetry in 1918 and in 1925 published a history of the Canadian Army Medical Corps that created a minor storm in political and military circles. Macphail was never one to shy away from controversy, but when asked to speak on the occasion of Canada’s national funeral, he usually declaimed on the value of the sacrifice or the soldiers’ joyful recollections of their service. On this occasion, however, Macphail injected a discordant note to remind his listeners that the fact of personal loss underpinned 11 November and Canada’s entire memory of the Great War. ‘Are you women who are mothers of twelve-year-old boys,’ he wondered, ‘quite sure that you will not be called upon six years hence to face the problem that faced the mothers of 1914?’59 Macphail died in 1938 and so did not live to see how eerily prophetic his comment was. Exactly as he predicted, Canadians in 1939 would be forced to embark on a quest for consolation for the second time in a generation.
The author would like to extend thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canada Research Chairs program for financial assistance, which made this research possible, and to Janet Maybury, Joel Porter, and Gordon Vance for their research assistance.
1 Regina Leader, 26 September 1927, 2.
2 Daniel J. Sherman, ‘Art, Commerce, and the Production of Memory in France after World War I,’ in John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).
3 I am grateful to Suzanne Morton for her thoughts on these matters.
4 Rosemary R. Gagan, ‘Mortality Patterns and Public Health in Hamilton, Canada, 1900–14,’ in Urban History Review 17, 3 (February 1989), 161–75; N.E. McKinnon, ‘Mortality Reductions in Ontario, 1900–1942,’ in Canadian Journal of Public Health 36, 7 (July 1936), 285–98.
5 George Emery, Facts of Life: The Social Construction of Vital Statistics, Ontario, 1869–1952 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993).
6 David Cannadine, ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain,’ in Joachim Whaley, ed., Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa, 1981), 217.
7 David Marshall, ‘“Death Abolished”: Changing Attitudes to Death and the Afterlife in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Protestantism,’ in Norman Knowles, ed., Age of Transition: Readings in Canadian Social History, 1800–1900 (Toronto: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 370–87.
8 C.L. de Roode, ‘La Victoire,’ in Victoire! (Montreal: A.P. Pigeon, 1919), 3–4.
9 Wilson MacDonald, ‘Peace,’ in Song of the Prairie Land and Other Poems (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1918), 142–4.
10 Letter of 12 January 1916, quoted in Owen Dudley Edwards and Jennifer H. Litster, ‘The End of Canadian Innocence: L.M. Montgomery and the First World War,’ in Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperley, ed., L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 32.
11 C. Courneloup, L’Epopée du Vingt-Deuxième (Montreal: La Presse, 1919), 16.
12 National Archives of Canada (NAC), Arthur Currie Papers, vol. 12, f. 37, Currie to Osborne, 4 January 1926; reply, 11 January 1926.
13 Alonzo Cinq-Mars, ‘Ypres,’ in De L’Aube au Midi (Quebec: Édition de la Tour de Pierre, 1924), 6–7.
14 Brantford Expositor, 20 May 1933, 21.
15 See Alan R. Young, ‘“We Throw the Torch”: Canadian Memorials of the Great War and the Mythology of Heroic Sacrifice,’ Journal of Canadian Studies 24, 4 (Winter 1989–90), 5–28.
16 Ontario Reformer, 5 June 1924, quoted in Robert Shipley, To Mark Our Place: A History of Canadian War Memorials (Toronto: NC Press, 1987), 143.
17 Katherine Hale, The White Comrade and Other Poems (Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild and Stewart, 1916), 15.
18 Francis Cecil Whitehouse, ‘The Archers of Mons,’ in The Coquihalla Wreck and Other Poems (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1932), 6–7.
19 A.E. Johnson, ‘With a Vagabond around Vimy,’ Maclean’s, 1 April 1924, 16–17.
20 Hamilton Public Library, Clippings file, f. Armistice Day, speech over CNR broadcasting chain, 8 November 1931; House of Commons Debates, 9 February 1923, 181.
21 Quoted in E.B. Osborn, The New Elizabethans: A First Selection of the Lives of Young Men Who Have Fallen in the Great War (London: John Lane, 1919), 281; Ralph Connor, The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land (New York: George H. Doran, 1919), 257.
22 NAC, W.L.M. King Papers, series J5, vol. 21, f. 8, reel C-2792, speech dated 29 February 1924, 11574.
23 Ibid.
24 Canadian Club of Toronto, Addresses Delivered before the Canadian Club of Toronto, 1918–19 (Toronto: Warwick and Rutter, 1919), 311.
25 Clarence Basil Lumsden, ‘Two Men,’ in Acadia Athaneum 45, 5 (May 1919), 216–19.
26 NAC, J.L. Ralston Papers, vol. 165, f. 1, address at Pictou war memorial, 11 July 1935.
27 UBC Special Collections, A Short History of Captured Guns: The Great European War, 1914–1918 (Vancouver: n.p., n.d. [1934?]), finis.
28 Quoted in Shipley, To Mark Our Place, 134.
29 The Victory Loan 1919, brochure (Ottawa, 1919), 28; A.M. Stephen, ‘Canada,’ in Canadian Bookman 7, 3 (March 1925), 44.
30 Canon F.G. Scott, ‘The Significance of Vimy,’ in Empire Club of Canada, The Empire Club of Canada Speeches, 1936–1937 (Toronto: Empire Club, 1937), 57; quoted in Osborn, New Elizabethans, 281; Major A. Graham, quoted in Manitoba Free Press, 21 April 1919, 8.
31 James M. Mayo, War Memorials as Political Landscape: The American Experience and Beyond (New York: Praeger, 1988).
32 Lieutenant W.H. Nelles is also mentioned, but it is clear that Knisley is foremost in the town’s mind.
33 Quoted in Maria Tippett, Art at the Service of War: Canada, Art and the Great War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 76.
34 James Stevens Curl, A Celebration of Death: An Introduction to Some of the Buildings, Monuments and Settings of Funerary Architecture in the Western European Tradition (London: Constable, 1980), 337.
35 Pat Jalland, ‘Victorian Death and its Decline, 1850–1918,’ in Peter C. Jupp and Clare Gittings, eds, Death in England: An Illustrated History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 247.
36 NAC, R.B. Bennett Papers, reel M-1463, f. W-15, vol. 2, Bennett to John R. MacNicol, MP, 2 February 1934.
37 Quoted in James H. Gray, The Roar of the Twenties (Toronto: Macmillan, 1975), 262.
38 Public Archives of Nova Scotia, Horatio Crowell Papers, MG23 vol. 27, f. 10, ‘Soldier’s Record Sheet, Soldiers’ Memorial, Municipality of Guysborough, with notice of Soldiers’ Memorial,’ undated.
39 City of Toronto Archives, Board of Control minutes, 28 October 1925; City Council minutes, 2 and 3 November 1925.
40 Saturday Night, 14 November 1925, 1.
41 Serge M. Durflinger, Lest We Forget: A History of the Last Post Fund, 1909–1999 (Montreal: LPF, 2000), 69–70; Montreal Gazette, 24 May 1924, 6.
42 NAC, Bennett Papers, reel M-1463, f. W-127 ‘Decoration Day,’ letters from City of Stratford, Ontario Municipal Association, Premier of Saskatchewan, City of Kitchener, various dates [1930].
43 Windsor Municipal Archives, Hon. James Baby Chapter, IODE Papers, MS7 f. 14, Windsor GWVA to Baby Chapter, 25 April 1924.
44 Globe, 11 November 1930, 14; Thomas Socknat, Witness against War: Pacifism in Canada, 1900–1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 127.
45 John H. Johnston, English Poetry of the First World War: A Study in the Evolution of Lyric and Narrative Form (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), 107.
46 Marie Sylvia, ‘La fleur des soldats morts,’ in Vers le Beau (Ottawa: private, 1924), 104–5.
47 S.C. Cain, ‘Two in One,’ Vancouver Sun, 9 November 1929, 9.
48 NAC, Canadian Legion Papers, MG28 1298, vol. 7, f. 8, Massey Hall, 13 November 1931, quoted in circular no. 31-2-57, 19 November 1931.
49 Cannadine, ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning,’ 222, 227.
50 NAC, Brooke Claxton Papers, MG32 B5, vol. 1, f. ‘Armistice Ceremony 1933,’ article from Atlantic Sun, 16 November 1933.
51 Laura Goodman Salverson, ‘Remembrance Day,’ in Canadian Association of Railwaymen Journal, 3, 11 (November 1937), 242.
52 NAC, A.F. Duguid Papers, MG30 E133 ser. II, vol. 7, f. 22, memo from Duguid, 12 December 1934.
53 NAC, Department of National Defence (DND) Records, vol. 1746, f. DHS-5-5A, article from London Free Press, 4 April 1935.
54 Arthur Currie, ‘The Last Hundred Days of the War,’ in Empire Club of Canada, Addresses Delivered to the Members during the Year 1919 (Toronto: Warwick Brothers & Rutter, 1920), 305.
55 OAC Review, 36, 11 (July 1924), 340.
56 NAC, Archibald Macdonnell Papers, MG30 E20, vol. 1, address of 10 June 1925.
57 NAC, A.E. Kemp Papers, MG27 IID9, vol. 1, f. C-7, pt 1, article from Toronto Globe, 30 October 1926.
58 NAC, DND Records, vol. 1506, f. HQ 683-1-30-18, article from Regina Daily Star, 28 June 1938.
59 NAC, Sir Andrew Macphail Papers, MG30 D150, vol. 6, f. 2, address to Westmount Women’s Club, 10 November 1933.
