On August 5, 1914, Maud wrote in her journal, “England has declared war on Germany.” Like most North Americans, Maud had paid scant attention a few months earlier when she had read that a Serbian had shot the Archduke of Austria and his duchess. The previous century had been filled with many assassinations and political skirmishes, but the fighting was usually localized. People in Canada, and indeed everyplace else, expected this war to be over quickly, perhaps in months, or even weeks. No one foresaw that it would spread, devouring an entire generation of young men.
On that August in 1914, Maud could not have imagined how much the war would eventually affect her husband, her community, and her own life. The war would also have a significant effect on the atmosphere in which writers worked: it would transform literary styles, alter the subjects deemed appropriate for literature, and create a new kind of reading public.
The “Great War” was to drag on for four years, killing more than 10 million young men worldwide and drawing sixteen nations and their colonies into conflict. Some 628,736 Canadians served in the war, and 66,573 were killed, with another 138,166 wounded. Many were maimed for life from gas attacks and other injuries. Over 10,000 men from the Toronto area alone were killed.
Against this international backdrop of death and destruction, Montgomery’s smaller world suffered its own pain and catastrophic events. On August 13, 1914, only eight days after the war was declared, Maud suffered the first of her personal tragedies: her second baby, Hugh Alexander, died at birth. She was overwhelmed with sorrow, and with so much grief close at hand, the Kaiser of Germany seemed far away. Little Hugh (named after her father and Ewan’s) was quietly buried in Zion Cemetery, outside Uxbridge. She wrote in her journals with the same power about her sorrow as she had written about her pleasure after Chester’s birth.
By August 31, 1914, Maud’s fierce discipline sent her back to her desk. She found herself in the grip of a lethargic depression and had to force herself to work. She finished Anne of the Island on November 20, ten days short of her fortieth birthday. “Never did I write a book under greater stress,” she recorded on November 20, 1914. Yet, in the writing, her spirits had recovered, and in spite of everything, she wrote in her journal: “Life is much richer, fuller, happier, more comfortable for me now than it was when I was twenty. I have won the success I resolved to win twenty years ago. It is worth the struggle …” (November 20, 1914).
Anne of the Island had been conceived as the saga of Anne’s college years, but when Maud was planning it back in August 1913, she found it increasingly difficult to re-enter the mental frame for this book—it seemed to belong to another century and life. As her spadework progressed, Anne’s happy college years did not have any room for the death of her baby, Hugh. But once she started, the act of writing the book was pleasurable, giving her escape from her sorrowful present. Still, it lacked what Anne of Green Gables had: the sense that she was living it, feeling every emotion, as she wrote it.
In Anne of the Island, Anne sets off to “Redmond College.” The story is loosely based on Maud’s own year at Dalhousie. Maud had herself lived in Halifax Ladies’ College, under the watchful eye of grim old maids, but Anne and her friends rent a charming little house, “Patty’s Place,” from two older women (aged fifty and seventy) who decide to cut loose from their circumscribed life to sightsee together in Europe. The “household gods” who come with this cottage are Gog and Magog, china dogs modelled on the ones Maud purchased on her honeymoon. These pagan deities seem appropriate in the house owned by two spunky older women who have flouted convention by refusing to marry and procreate. As Anne and her roommates at “Patty’s Place” laugh and study together, Maud creates a world in which young women enjoy each other’s fellowship instead of being pitted against each other in the search for desirable mates. There is a strong sense of female community and solidarity in this book. Men enter these young women’s world as potential suitors to be discussed and laughed over—just as Maud had done with Frede and Nora Lefurgey.
The book chews over some of the contemporary attitudes about female education. Older women remark that younger women just go to college to get a man, but Maud gives this a new twist: her college girls see marriage as a fate to be put off as long as possible. They acknowledge that they must eventually settle down, but they intend to have a good time beforehand. Maud depicts higher education for women as both improving and enjoyable, an activity that only old fuddy-duddies would disparage. At the end, the novel appears to reaffirm the prevalent view that a woman’s duty is to marry and procreate, not to seek an education, but at the same time it offers new views on the subject. This is a typical strategy we find in Maud’s novels: affirm the status quo, so conservative readers will not be upset, but suggest subtle and attractive alternatives to other readers.
The suitors themselves are creative variations on young men Maud had known. Anne has to choose between suitors: Gilbert Blythe shares some of the characteristics of Maud’s friend from Saskatchewan, Will Pritchard; Royal Gardner has a tendency to manage other people’s lives, not unlike Ed Simpson.
Anne of the Island seems a book out of sync with the troubled times, and in one sense it is. In it, Maud is returning to a lost world for consolation. However, judging from its lively sales during the war, thousands of readers found it comforting. Maud was good at sensing the public mood. Part of her continuing popularity arises from her ability to recreate happy and recognizable worlds where people have fun together. But Anne of the Island also prepared young women for what was coming: learning to take responsibility for themselves instead of depending exclusively on men.
Maud’s spirits improved after she finished writing Anne of the Island, though she complained of frequent fatigue. Still, exhaustion was better than the debilitating depressions that had beset her before her marriage. Frede came for Christmas again that year, and together she and Maud analyzed the war news: “We flayed the Kaiser every day and told Kitchener what he ought to do …” (January 1, 1915).
Immediately after Christmas 1914, Maud heard from her half-sister, Ila, in Saskatchewan—one of the three children born to her father during his second marriage to Mary Ann—that her half-brother Carl had enlisted. The war was coming closer to home, affecting her own family as well as her community. Patriotic fervour was spreading, especially in newspapers and in the pulpits. The newspapers urged Canadians to feel a duty to the “Empire” and to Great Britain (the “dear old mother country”), as well as a duty to uphold the values of the civilized world against the forces of the Kaiser and the German army. Ministers urged patriotism as a means to save Christian values from the “forces of Evil.”
Religion had been losing its hold on people in the first part of the twentieth century. By World War I, the power of the ministry was already in decline, even in rural parishes like Leaskdale. Religion had always provided a source of shared assumptions about social order that located and bonded people in time and space. The late nineteenth century’s assault on religion—in the name of “higher criticism” and scientific inquiry—had greatly weakened the Church’s authority. Increased literacy had enabled people to read more and think critically about their own culture and history, and with the rapid development of science, the clergy no longer held the only keys to the “great unknown.”
To the clergy, the war now provided a way of demonstrating the materiality of evil: it was embodied in the German Kaiser (who was “raping little Belgium”). Those who fought against Germany were soldiers of the Lord saving the world for future generations. The soldiers who “went west” or “over the top” were likened to Jesus, dying so that others might live. Serving in war was the supreme “self-sacrifice.” Even if this war was not fought over religion, the language and rhetoric of religion was used to mobilize people to fight.
“There were few stauncher supporters of the war than Canada’s clergy. For them, the atrocities committed by the enemy demanded that the Allied nations become agents of divine retribution, cleansing the earth of those who defiled Christendom with their crimes,” writes historian Jonathan Vance.19Ministers preached that enlisting was “a duty of conscience, of religion.” Like so many wars of ancient history—and modern times—this one was depicted as a holy war against “Evil” and “Evil-doers.”
While religion appealed to young men’s moral sense, there were other reasons they enlisted. Some were motivated by a genuine sense of patriotism and principle, outraged by the descriptions of barbarism they read in the newspapers. Many other young men rushed to sign up for the war in hopes of adventure, seeking a “piece of the action” before the war was over; people speculated that Britain and the Allied Forces would bring Germany and the Kaiser to their knees in short order, possibly in a matter of weeks. Still others were drawn to the war through recruiting rallies stage-managed to pressure them into signing their names. Ministers like Ewan assisted at these rallies, and, in many cases, conducted them.
These recruiting meetings were held in local venues, usually churches. Entire families attended them because they were informative and entertaining, and such diversions were in short supply in rural communities before the development of radio and television media. Once there, people heard visiting speakers talk of the brutality of the Germans, the savagery of enemy attacks, and the glories of serving one’s country. Women sang patriotic and inspirational songs. “Signing officers” were positioned at the exits to take signatures. Ministers hovered, too, as symbols of God’s authority. Able-bodied young men could not exit without feeling shame if they had not signed their names. Once a young man had put down his name, he was committed. Signing up was easy, even a little unreal; no one wanted to be called a “slacker.” And the war had truly stirred up deep feelings of loyalty for the “Old Country,” as well as a renewed reverence for the God of Righteousness in a world that had begun to secularize.
In 1915, Everywoman’s World asked certain high-profile authors to answer two questions about war: “What will be the outcome of the war for the world at large?” and “What will it be for women in particular?” They introduced Maud’s comments with the note that “L. M. Montgomery, writer of graceful romances, strikes a sterner note in her message to … [our] readers.” Maud felt much quiet skepticism over religion—she saw it as a social institution more than a religious one—but she retained a deep-seated reverence for the idea of God. Her comments on these two questions are interesting:
I am not one of those who believe that this war will put an end to war. War is horrible, but there are things that are more horrible still, just as there are fates worse than death. Moral degradation, low ideas, sordid devotion to money-getting, are worse evils than war, and history shows us that these evils invariably overtake a nation which is for a long time at peace. Nothing short of so awful a calamity as a great war can awaken to remembrance a nation that has forgotten God and sold its birthright of aspiration for a mess of potage.…
In regard to women, I do not expect that the war and its outcome will affect their interests, apart from the general influence upon the race. But I do hope that it will in some measure open the eyes of humanity to the truth that the women who bear and train the nation’s sons should have some voice in the political issues that may send those sons to die on battlefields … 20
Although much of this statement seems to be appropriate for a minister’s wife, there is also the hint of a quiet call for women’s suffrage. Maud was not a public crusader for women’s rights like some women activists—Nellie McClung, for example—but in her writing and speaking she often contended for women’s interests with hushed but eloquent force.
In March 1915, Maud was delighted to find she was pregnant with a third child. But hard on the heels of the good tidings came frightening news. In April, Maud received a telegram saying that her cousin Frede, now an instructor at Macdonald College (and regarded as one of their best teachers), was dying of typhoid fever. Maud rushed to Montreal. A miracle—as soon as Frede saw Maud, she began to recover. This was Frede’s second brush with death: in 1902, she had been so sick that one Prince Edward Island paper carried a notice that she was mortally ill. The already powerful bond between the cousins was now stronger than ever.
Maud did not start another novel during her third pregnancy in 1915. Perhaps she feared that too much stress might result in another stillborn child. Instead, she began to collect and write material for a book of poetry. She treated herself to a restorative six-week trip to the Island through June and the first half of July. It was a summer of bad weather and she was uncomfortable with her pregnancy. Her life seemed less settled because of the war, and she was often overwhelmed by wildly fluctuating mood swings. She visited her old home in the moonlight (in the dark, so her Uncle John F. Macneill would not see her) and wrote:
For a space the years turned back their pages. The silent sleepers in the graveyard yonder wakened and filled their old places. Grandfather and grandmother read in the lighted kitchen. Old friends and comrades walked with me in the lane. Daffy frisked in the caraway. Above me my old white bed waited for me to press its pillow of dreams.… I could hardly tear myself away from the spot. Perhaps the charm it had for me was not a wholesome one … It may not be well to linger too long among ghosts, lest they lay a cold grasp upon you and bind you too closely to their chill, sweet, unearthly companionship. (June 27, 1915)
She was glad to return in July 1915 to her busy life in Leaskdale.
In Ontario, Maud could remember the best of the old life and write about it, but when she was back in Prince Edward Island in person, she increasingly found herself pulled in two ways: when she was with people—and this was most of the time—she enjoyed herself; but when she was alone, she was easily drawn back into the past, remembering her morbid unhappiness during periods of debilitating depressions. The resurging memories dogged and alarmed her.
On October 7, 1915, Ewan Stuart Macdonald was born. From the very first, everyone declared that he took after Maud and her family as much as Chester had taken after Ewan’s side. This delighted her, and she believed that he favoured her own late father (whom she continued to idealize). But she had little time to rhapsodize over Stuart as she had over her first-born son.
Maud felt a lingering depression through the fall of 1915 and the winter of 1916. Perhaps it was an aftermath of childbirth; certainly it was accentuated by worry over the war, as well as over her many responsibilities. For a woman who was nursing a new baby, her schedule was very busy. She was president of the local branch of the Canadian Red Cross Society, which met every second Tuesday in Leaskdale Church. She worked hard with the local Presbyterian Women’s Guild, using her performance skills at fundraising events.
The Uxbridge Journal noted: “Nearly every battalion in France has a woman’s club at home working directly for it.” Women were very active in the war effort in rural communities like Leaskdale. They cared—they knew each boy who had gone overseas. They organized patriotic meetings to raise money for supplies for the battalions from their area. Registration was taken for “Women’s Emergency Corps,” recording the names of women ready to do the work at home of men who had enlisted. Maud’s friend Mrs. Norman Beal organized a large benefit for the support of the 116th Battalion. The proceeds purchased supplies. The Women’s Red Cross Society put on fundraising box socials, pie socials, and concerts so they could buy materials to make bandages and yarn for knitting socks. The war effort consumed the community. Maud taught her Sunday School classes, went on pastoral visitations with Ewan, and entertained as necessary.
When Stuart was three months old, his exhausted mother did not have enough breast milk for him. She had been beset by repeated breast inflammations, he was not gaining weight properly, and she feared for his survival. And for weeks Ewan had suffered from bronchitis—a very serious illness before the advent of antibiotics, given that it could develop into pneumonia. He was unable to preach.
It was not until March 1916, when Stuart was six months old and had been put on cow’s milk, that he began to thrive. Then Maud was able to resume the literary activities that she enjoyed. She travelled to Toronto for a string of festivities: an afternoon tea given in her honour by the Canadian Women’s Press Club; a reception and tea hosted for her by Mrs. Norman Beal and her mother-in-law; a reception honouring her by the Salisbury Chapter of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire (I.O.D.E.); a special tea for her given by Mrs. Talling, with the Reverend Dr. Marshall Talling doing the “honours of the house.”
Meanwhile, the war was beginning to make a deep impact on Canadians. The German army was rolling across Europe, seemingly unstoppable on its way to world domination. People were frightened that if Germany conquered England, Canada would become a German colony. Older men, as well as boys, now wanted to fight. Frederick George Scott, Canon of the Anglican Church in Quebec, a man well over fifty, was one of the many older men to enlist and serve on the front as a chaplain.21
The Reverend Edwin Smith—Ewan’s acquaintance, who had left the Island shortly before Ewan did—took a leave of absence from the Presbyterian ministry to serve in the British Navy. Other mature, married men of Ewan’s generation also enlisted. Sam Sharpe, the Uxbridge town solicitor, divested himself of his business interests and mobilized a county battalion in the Uxbridge-Scott Township area. Sharpe had been a prominent lawyer and businessman in Uxbridge and a Member of the Provincial Parliament. A graduate of Osgoode Hall Law School and the University of Toronto, Sharpe was married (but without children). By Christmas 1915, Lieutenant-Colonel Sharpe had enjoined 20 young men to enlist in this 116th Battalion, and he trained them for war. He eventually commanded over 250 men.
The example of a prominent man like Sharpe, who gave up a comfortable life and business, inspired others in the community. Canadians wanted to do their bit for the “Old Country”; loyalty to Britain was everywhere. In Zephyr, Robert F. Brooks was one of the most successful farmers in the area, with a hundred-acre farm. He noted that he had no wife or family dependent on him: “They need me ‘over there,’ and I’ve got to go.” Newspaper clippings describe the auction sale of his top-quality farm animals and equipment. Brooks’s sacrifice was the talk of the entire county. Neighbours bid up the prices to show their own patriotic spirit.
Even Stuart Forbes, the lackadaisical missionary supported by Ewan’s parishes in Honan, China, simply vacated his post and headed to Europe to fight. He did not bother to notify Ewan of his departure, and the whole missionary business ended as a defeat and a humiliation for Ewan.
Ewan’s contribution to the war effort thus far had been to organize or to help at recruitment meetings.22 He soon had a new task, however: comforting the heartbroken families when their sons were maimed or killed. The bad news came by telegram, and the telegram’s arrival was normally announced over the telephone. Because all the country homes were on “party lines,” every time a phone rang, everyone on the party line could listen in. The mere ringing of a telephone began to fray already taut nerves. Nearly twenty young men from Scott Township were killed before the war was over.
In the case where a son had been slated to take over his father’s farm and look after his parents, the death was more than emotionally devastating—it was a disaster for the entire family. Maud suffered over the loss of local boys as much as Ewan did: she had taught many of them in Sunday School or directed them in church programs, and every loss was personal. And each time she and Ewan had to comfort families over their loss of a son, she relived her own intense grief at the death of her second baby.
Maud’s faith was increasingly tortured: although she believed in the concept of sacrifice, she found it hard to believe that this was God’s plan for these young men. She knew she would not want her own sons to go and was thankful that they were so young, a sentiment that wracked her with shame. These feelings resulted in considerable internal conflict, which she dealt with by turning her powerful emotions into stories or poems.
Newspapers were full of the war news, and Maud’s vivid imagination was fired by the exaggerated propaganda. Maud’s diary entry of January 1, 1915, states that Frede, who had visited again over Christmas, had returned to Montreal, and Maud would miss talking to her about the war. “Ewan refuses to talk about it. He claims that it unsettles him and he cannot do his work properly.” She follows up this revealing—and totally unexplored—statement about Ewan with, “No doubt this is so; but it is rather hard on me, for I have no one else with whom to discuss it. There is absolutely no one around here who seems to realize the war.” She adds: “… it is well they do not. If all felt as I do over it the work of the country would certainly suffer. But I feel as if I were stranded on a coast where nobody talked my language.” Fortunately, the women with sons dying in the trenches could not read Maud’s private thoughts about their seeming complacency.
Despite her doubts, Maud continued to see the war in dramatic terms, and she believed those who sacrificed their lives were heroes, no matter how much personal pain the war caused. Increasingly, the war was all that she thought of and wanted to talk about. Her journals show that she was absolutely consumed by it, wracked by it, tortured by it, obsessed by it—even addicted to it. All Ewan could do was walk to the local store to fetch her the newspaper every day, and he did this faithfully. But what did Ewan feel? Why did he refuse to talk about it, when he otherwise tried to please his wife? His refusal could not have been just because he was “busy.” Did he feel guilty because he was not one of the older men, including ministers, who had enlisted, like Canon Scott and Edwin Smith? Did he squirm over his complicity in sending young boys to war while he stood safely in his clerical collar in the pulpit, preaching the virtue of giving one’s life to destroy evil? He did believe that the German Kaiser was evil incarnate and that fighting was necessary, but it could not have been easy for a thoughtful man like him to comfort families whose sons were now dead. As a minister who had studied religious wars in history, he could see how religion had been used throughout history, especially in Scotland’s bloody past, to urge people to battle, and justify murder and killing.
Ewan made his own small war effort: in August 1916, he helped found a War Resources Committee, partly to aid bereaved families. He became more subdued, obviously troubled deeply about the war, his relation to it, and the impact on those he knew. Whatever the complexities of his marital situation, the husband who had been displaced by a baby was now displaced by the war.
In November 1916 that Maud’s first book of poetry, The Watchman, was published. “The Watchman” was the name of the highest sand dune on the Cavendish shore, the local topographical peak, and the title poem presents a “watcher of the world,” looking over the onslaught of war. She finished the poems collected in The Watchman at the end of March 1916, after working on the collection for some time. This was her own personal response to the war—to enfold it in poetic metaphor, which provided a feeling of control over a frightening new world. She was deeply involved with this book on an emotional level.
During the war years, she read and reread many history books, seeking historical perspective on the repeated occurrences of war throughout the ages. Maud’s vivid imagination led her to visualize war’s horrors and feel tormented by these images. She agonized over what appeared to her to be humanity blindly repeating the same mistakes. She was obsessed with the war, but she could not stop herself. She put up a map of Europe and followed each advance of “the Enemy.” Towns in Poland with names she was unable to pronounce became as familiar as Toronto, Uxbridge, and Leaskdale. When she became too overwrought, she locked the door of her bedroom and paced the floor. Once again she was a helpless prisoner of her agitated moods.
Nevertheless, the Macdonalds’ Christmas Day in 1916 was a very happy one. Frede was with them again, as she so often was. The Watchman had been published in November. The church enjoyed its annual Christmas concert. For a week, the Macdonalds had a wonderful time, laughing, eating good food, visiting, and playing with the babies. Again, laughter filled the house. One maid said of Frede, “She was funny as all get-out.” After Frede’s departure, Maud wrote in her journals, “We had a delightful week and I think I can live comfortably on it through the winter” (January 4, 1917).
Her overall mood, however, remained anxious and contemplative. She wrote the next day that “I have been contented in my marriage, and intensely happy in my motherhood. Life has not been—never can be—what I once hoped it would be in my girlhood dreams. But I think, taking one thing with another, that I am as happy as the majority of people in this odd world and happier than a great many of them.”
One suspects that Ewan had many similar feelings—content with his family, but at the same time unconnected to a woman whose intensities were so powerful, and whose broader inquiries into the human heart left little time for worrying about what was in his. And what was there, in his heart? Confusion? Shame? Jealousy? Disappointment? Were there only flat, impoverished emotions, with something truly missing (as Maud had come to believe)? Or was his flatness a function of an underlying depression? Ewan was merely discouraged by the demands that were made on him: writing sermons to make sense of a confusing, changing world; producing erudite sermons that could take him to bigger and better parishes to please Maud; and finding some way to feel heroic himself, since his wife lived in a world where heroism was important. He saw that Maud was a model to many people, and he was just a country parson—a good enough man, certainly; an intelligent man without question; but a man lacking the gifts of self-assurance, the boundless energy, and natural charisma to take him where his wife wanted him to go. He no doubt felt threatened by it all, and yet he stood in awe of the woman he had married.