Historical Note

When I was a child, dear Readers, my history book told me that World War I began one summer afternoon in Sarajevo when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot. I did not question this startling fact. I even believed it. But it needs to be seen in context, since many factors led up to that flashpoint. Throughout history, nations have schemed to get more land or more oil or a route to the sea or more wealth or power. Wars are also ignited by the breaking and making of alliances, and prior to World War I there was a web of these between various European nations.

England and France had been enemies in the past, but England had pledged support to France in the event of a war with Germany. When Franz Ferdinand, the Austro-Hungarian archduke, was killed by a Serb, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, even though the Serbs had tried to make amends following the assassination. Russia then declared war on Austria. This dragged in Austria’s ally, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, who then declared war on Russia. So while the assassination of the archduke was not the beginning of the trouble, it was the signal for the troubles to erupt into violence.

Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany sent his troops into Belgium, a country he had promised not to invade, and which was officially neutral. Britain gave him three days to back out. He did not, and Britain declared war. Suddenly Austria-Hungary, Germany and the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) — the Central powers — were squared off against the Allies: Great Britain, France and Russia. In no time flat other countries were drawn in and war was declared. They all believed the fighting would be over in a matter of months.

In Canada, young men poured into recruitment offices. A high percentage of Canadian families, at that time, had emigrated from the British Isles. Young men looking for a new land filled with adventure and offering a fresh start had been turning to Canada since the end of the nineteenth century. These young people were enormously loyal to Britain and felt compelled to defend their motherland. They rushed to enlist. Prime Minister Robert Borden said that Canada must stand with Great Britain, and Opposition leader Wilfred Laurier, ever the orator, echoed Borden’s sentiments. “When the call comes,” he said, “our answer goes at once, and it goes in the classical language of the British answer to the call of duty: ‘Ready, aye. Ready!’”

Many young men saw the war as a chance for a big adventure. Nobody dreamed it would be over four years before peace would return. Nobody guessed how many hundreds of thousands of young people would die or suffer mutilation before that peace would be won. “The War to end all wars” they called it, and “the Great War.” They would have been profoundly shocked to learn that just over twenty-one years after the Armistice was signed, Canada would be engaged in World War II. If they had been able to see into the future, would they have thought things over and negotiated a more lasting peace? We cannot know, but it is worth pondering.

Men who did not enlist came under great pressure. Those of you who have read L.M. Montgomery’s books will remember the scene in Rilla of Ingleside where Walter Blythe is sent a white feather, branding him as a coward and “a slacker.” The Uxbridge newspaper ran an ad urging people to report any young man who was not doing his duty. Those who wrote in, telling of such a man, did not even need to give their names. The newspaper promised to see to it that all would be sought out.

One of the first county battalions to form, the 116th from the Uxbridge area, was recruited by Colonel Sam Sharpe, the local member of parliament. The 116th had deployed to England in July of 1916, before Eliza’s family moved to Uxbridge. The town was immensely proud of them and followed their exploits closely throughout the war years. Many such battalions were disbanded upon reaching England and the men reassigned to other units of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), but the 116th stayed together throughout the bitter years to come. The list of names on the wall of the St. Andrew’s-Chalmers Presbyterian Church includes those of men who died in the war, names like George Clark, Russel Gould, Norman Mair, Archie Page. Newspapers reported that Colonel Sharpe’s sudden death in Montreal in 1918 was a suicide — he was very close to the men he had led overseas, and perhaps could not face coming back to Uxbridge.

Any minister with pacifist leanings, like my character Sam Bates, would have had a hard time serving there at that time. Most people had no doubt that God was on the Allies’ side and prayed He would punish the Germans for their atrocities and give us the victory.

Many men who had already enlisted, and some who planned to enlist, travelled to a huge military camp in Valcartier, Quebec, where they prepared to deploy overseas. The first contingent of Canadian soldiers sailed from Quebec City for England in October, 1914. The men were eager to go, fearing that if they were delayed, the war might be over before they got there. Many of the troops spent an extremely wet winter on Salisbury Plain, quartered only in tents. There they drilled and waited to be sent over the Channel into France and Belgium to face “the Hun” — a catch-all term for the enemy. Soldiers were outfitted with the Ross rifle, a Canadian-made weapon which jammed so often after repeated firing that eventually it was replaced with the British Lee-Enfield — much to the dismay of Canada’s Minister of Militia and Defence, Sam Hughes, who had recommended the Ross rifle.

The first major battle in which Canadian troops played a decisive part was the Second Battle of Ypres, which began in April of 1915 and continued throughout May. French troops were facing the Germans on April 22 when the Germans fired off cylinders filled with chlorine gas. A great yellow cloud went up, choking the unsuspecting French troops. The men fell back, gasping for breath; British reserve divisions filled the gap.

On April 24 the Germans again used gas, this time against the Canadians — Winnipeg’s 8th Battalion, Royal Highlanders of the 13th Battalion from Montreal and Toronto’s 15th Battalion. Dr. Naismith, a chemist, advised soldiers to “Piss on your hankies, boys,” and cover their noses and mouths — urine would help weaken the gas. Worse than the gas was German shelling, which devastated the shallow, muddy trenches. The 15th was hardest hit but the Canadians retreated slowly, fighting their way back to the reserve line. The cost was tremendous — 6000 dead and wounded of the 12,000 Canadian troops actually engaged — but the British commander-in-chief gratefully reported that “the Canadians had saved the situation.”

On May 2, 1915, a surgeon from Guelph named John McCrae lost his closest friend in a battle in Belgium’s Flanders region. In the days that followed he wrote “In Flanders Fields.” This moving poem, another Canadian legacy from Ypres, is the reason we buy poppies every November to pin on our coats. In the battlefields of Flanders, once known for its wild poppies, there was really more mud than flowers.

The Battle of the Somme was a massacre that will never be forgotten in Canadian history, especially by the people of Newfoundland. On July 1, 1916, nearly 800 men of the 1st Newfoundland regiment answered roll call. That day they were ordered to charge across a stretch of ground at Beaumont-Hamel. German wire, uncut, channeled the troops into a killing ground where German machine-gunners lay waiting. They shot the Newfoundlanders down as they advanced. When the terrible smoke of gunfire cleared, the field was strewn with the dead and dying. The following morning, only 68 men were able to show up for roll call. All the rest were dead or wounded.

In Newfoundland, that day is regarded as the darkest in the island’s history. The most sickening part of it was that the men died for no glorious victory, though they fought so gallantly. Their actions gave them a reputation for showing stubborn and staunch courage under attack. When I read about this battle, it reminded me of boys playing tug-of-war — pulling back, straining forward. But these “boys” were not playing a game and their war was lethal.

I have chosen this moment to insert a reminder to you, dear Readers. There are so many thousands of casualties in these accounts of famous battles. It is almost impossible to remember that each thousand was made up of hundreds of individual men like Hugo and Jack and Rufus. But stop and consider those boys from Newfoundland killed in one day in July, 1916. How many people go to your school? Probably a few hundred. Imagine all of them plus yourself lined up for assembly. Now, imagine lining up the next morning and finding that, out of every row of ten, eight or nine are missing. The others are either dead or terribly wounded. Some have been blinded, others have lost limbs. If your school had been fighting in the Battle of the Somme that day, you would have lost almost all your friends. It is no wonder that, in Newfoundland, the date on which the rest of Canada celebrates Canada Day is not a day of celebration, but one of remembrance — Memorial Day, in honour of those Newfoundland soldiers.

In early April of 1917 the Americans joined the Allies and gave their support to the cause, though it would still be many months before American troops actually landed on Europe’s soil. But their involvement was needed, since the Germans were making ever more headway, and the Allied troops had suffered huge losses.

The next, and probably most famous, battle in which the Canadian forces engaged was the Battle of Vimy Ridge. One veteran said of this bitter fight, “we went up the Ridge as Albertans and Nova Scotians. We came down Canadians.” Vimy was a long, low ridge of land controlled by the Germans. The British had tried to capture it, and failed. So had the French. It had defeated every Allied attempt to capture it until the Canadians arrived.

The officers planned their assault for weeks. They made a large model of the ridge and made sure everyone who was taking part in the attack knew the terrain better than he knew the back of his hand. They tunneled underground and had miles of secret pathways lit by strings of electric lights. Under the command of Sir Julian Byng, the troops drilled and drilled until they all knew exactly how the assault would go.

For months, too, Canadians “spotted” each German gun emplacement. Colonel Andy McNaughton, a McGill professor in peacetime, used microphones to locate them when they fired. For a week before the attack, Allied artillery pounded the Germans, destroying their guns and trenches, leaving the defenders hungry, thirsty and exhausted. Then the guns fell silent. Suddenly, before dawn on Easter Monday, April 9, 1917, a huge barrage fell on Vimy Ridge. Canadian soldiers hurried through tunnels, and into lightly falling snow. All four Canadian divisions advanced to take the ridge, but even the preparations could not prevent terrible losses — 10,000 Canadian casualties, 3600 of them dead.

Despite the many casualties and deaths, Vimy remains a battle that gave the Canadian army a great sense of oneness and pride. Even today, as this book is written, a few veterans are still alive to hold their heads high when they say they took part in the capture of Vimy Ridge. Many hoped this victory would turn the tide and signal the end of the war to end all wars, but such was not the case. As I have Eliza’s father say, “It is easy to start a war; finishing one is another matter.”

By August, 1917, a Canadian officer, Arthur Currie, commanded the Canadian Corps. Asked by his British commander to capture the mining town of Lens, Currie went to assess the situation. If he took Lens, the Germans could rain fire down from the surrounding hills. If he took Hill 70, the high ground on the approach to Lens, he could harry the Germans holding the city. They would have to capture it back, whatever the cost. So Currie took the hill. As the Germans counter-attacked, thousands fell to Canadian shells and machine guns. Stripped to the waist in the hot sun, Canadian gunners kept firing, even when German mustard gas burned their skin and lungs. Finally, the Germans had suffered enough; the Canadians held their strategic position.

The next battle the Canadians helped to turn from a defeat into a victory was Passchendaele. It was fought over a stretch of low-lying land which heavy rains had turned into a mud soup. Some men waded through black muck up to their waists. Many drowned in the mud before anyone could go to their aid. Horses fell in the mire, sank and were lost without a trace. Gun emplacements vanished into the ooze and the men nearby were helpless. When General Currie was called upon to save the situation he argued long and hard, claiming that a victory was near impossible. The British High Command could not be moved to abandon their plans, partly because the Allies were desperate for a victory. Some French and Russian troops had even mutinied, and the Germans had to be kept engaged. Currie called for wooden platforms and lightweight railway tracks to carry people across the morass.

In the end the Canadians won the ground, but bore over 15,000 casualties, a terrible price to pay. Prime Minister Borden told the British prime minister that if he was asked to send Canadian troops into another Passchendaele, he would refuse, and not another Canadian would leave our shores to come to the aid of the Allies.

Following the Russian Revolution in the fall of 1917, the new Communist government under Vladimir Ilyich Lenin chose to make peace with Germany and pull out of the conflict, deserting the Allied cause. This was a grave concern for the Allies, since now the Germans could pull back their troops from the eastern front and move all their forces to the western front. The Americans had entered the war on the Allied side none too soon.

The armies fought on throughout the spring of 1918, with the Germans penetrating deep into Allied positions. The British, the Portugese, the French — all lost ground. Posted in front of Vimy Ridge, the Canadian Corps was not attacked. In August they joined the Australians in front of Amiens. Aircraft flew overhead to drown the noise of tanks and guns moving into position. Without warning, on August 8, the Allied soldiers attacked. Together, the Canadians and Australians rolled forward thirteen kilometres, and kept going. German General von Ludendorf called it “Die Katastrophe,” the “black day of the German army.” General Currie then insisted on switching fronts before the Canadian advance got bogged down. On more familiar ground, Canadians shattered the Hindenberg Line, battled across the Canal du Nord and captured Cambrai. The “Last Hundred Days” cost Canada 40,000 dead and wounded but it helped end the horror. At the Armistice on November 11th, the Canadians re-took the Belgian town of Mons, where the British had begun to fight in August, 1914. A plaque there reads: Here was fired the last shot of the Great War.

Europe was not the only theatre of war, of course, although it was the place where most Canadian troops saw action. Allied armies clashed with Central armies in both Africa and Mesopotamia. Over 40,000 Allied soldiers were killed on the shores of Turkey in 1915, trying to take Turkish forts at the Dardanelles, with Australian and New Zealand troops bearing losses of over 10,000 men. British liason officer T.E. Lawrence became known as the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, as he and his Arab partners used what we might now call guerrilla tactics to harry Turkish troops in the desert through 1916–1918. British General Edmund Allenby led troops in Palestine and succeeded brilliantly in driving the Germans out of their desert strongholds. In December of 1917 his forces drove the Turks from the Holy Land and freed Jerusalem from Turkish control.

Battles were fought at sea as well as on land. German U-boats were able to blockade Britain, making imported goods scarce, and threatening merchant shipping as well as military vessels. In June of 1918 a U-boat sank a Canadian hospital ship, the Llandovery Castle, machine-gunned the lifeboats and killed most of the fourteen nursing sisters aboard.

The battle of Jutland off the coast of Denmark in 1916 had pitted the British and German fleets in a massive confrontation. Though the British fleet sustained greater losses — over 6000 casualties, plus battleships, cruisers and destroyers — the German fleet suffered enough damage to stop the Germans from risking another major confrontation at sea.

The war in the air was also gallant and filled with terror and moments of glory. The British public was terrified of the night-flying German Zeppelins. The Royal Naval Air Service was charged with intercepting them, along with German planes that crossed the English Channel to inflict damage on British shores. The Royal Flying Corps defended England as well, and its pilots in Europe flew reconnaissance to advise Allied gunners where to fire to take out German weapons or troops. The two services were combined in 1918.

Up to a quarter of Royal Flying Corps pilots were Canadian. Most famous of these was Billy Bishop. Bishop was not a great pilot but he was a great marksman, and is credited with shooting down 72 enemy planes. He was not the pilot who ended the life of Germany’s famous Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, however. Another Canadian, Roy Brown, was given credit for that, although other research leans towards the theory that Richthofen’s plane was hit by Australian ground fire instead of being shot down by Brown.

These pilots were the daredevils, the war’s romantic heroes and, because so many were shot down, were looked upon like the knights of old riding forth to die. Their reputation for incredible courage lured other young men into becoming pilots. Flying was still very new then — except for the war, people at that time could go months, even years, without seeing a plane in the sky. As late as 1937, I remember running out of the house because a plane was flying over our house in Taiwan. It was still a wonder. In the early days of flying, pilots were more at risk from their own aircraft crashing, or from bad weather, than they actually were from being shot down.

The war took its toll at home too. Imported foods such as sugar were scarce, prices rose steeply, and the government urged people to cut back on using meat. You can witness most of this struggle through Eliza’s eyes as she recorded it in her journal.

What changed was the feeling that war was a high adventure. What also altered, for all time, was the picture of women, secure and protected in their homes, untouched by the cruelty of far-off battles. During the war the struggle for women’s suffrage, which had gone on for years, moved forward rapidly when women were needed to take the place of the men away at the Front. Women had been told they belonged in the home, rocking the cradle and getting the meals ready. Now they were running the family business, working in the fields, taking over the switchboards, running the office and so on. When the men returned, it was too late to order their wives back to their previous lives. Women knew how the world worked and they were ready to make decisions and mark their ballots. Women like Aunt Martha also started to drive cars — even to fly planes. The exploits of flyers like Amelia Earhart and Anne Morrow Lindbergh fascinated the public.

In 1918 my mother was sixteen when she applied to medical school at the University of Toronto. Men who would earlier have mocked women seeking to qualify as doctors now had a different point of view. These men had left home, served in the trenches and watched nurses working to save soldiers’ lives. They had learned that their former ideas were no longer suitable, and many treated women with new respect. Male medical students gave up chanting “She doesn’t know that her degree should be M.R.S. and not M.D.” Men began to treat the young women more as equals. The changes for women rippled through all levels of society. Servant girls could now make better choices for themselves. The ongoing lack of a sufficient pool of servants ultimately led to the development of labour-saving household equipment.

L.M. Montgomery was a young woman during World War I. Later, using her own diaries for background, she wrote Rilla of Ingleside. If you want to know more about how it felt to be young and living in Canada during that agonizing war, read her novel. Maud Montgomery was a Presbyterian minister’s wife and she lived, at that time, just a few miles from Uxbridge. Her diaries were an enormous help in my research for Eliza’s journal.

All wars are brutal and filled with anguish. Eliza’s war is still remembered as one of the worst. And summaries of war, such as this one, can be haunting. We are almost numbed as we read of battles won, lives lost. Let us also remember the valour as well as the squalor of the first world conflict, and never forget all those young people lost to our country.