Source Notes
The following source notes are meant to clarify and support the political critique presented in Bolsheviki. An installation set with appropriate images based on this information could be designed for viewing by the audience.
“So I cross the street over to Mother Martin’s – before it got gentrified?”
mother martin’s
Since 1861
Like the old-time inn that stood at the crossroads and met the stranger at the hospitable hearth, so do we in the same spirit of service and cordiality welcome you.
980 St. Antoine
One block east of Windsor
Montreal, Canada
– business card, circa 1975, a personal memento of the author
On the crest of the ridge, Andrew McCrindle, with other Victoria Rifles, was guarding a large group of prisoners …
At that moment, one of the Germans spoke to McCrindle in excellent English.
“24th Battalion,” he said, indicating McCrindle’s cap badge. “The Vics, eh? I knew where your armoury is – on Cathcart Street?”
McCrindle was taken back. “How did you know?” he asked.
“I used to work in the restaurant in the Windsor Station,” the German said. “We used to go over to Mother Martin’s for a quick one.”
− pierre berton, Vimy
(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986), page 241.
“A monument to one who is buried elsewhere … Sixty-six thousand of them … ”
More than 66,650 Canadian soldiers died in the First World War and 172,950 were wounded. According to Veterans Affairs Canada, nearly one of every ten Canadians who fought in the war did not return. This statistic in ratio to the population of Canada (about eight million in 1918) meant most families lost someone in the war or had someone injured or disabled. The largely protestant anglophone community of Vielle Verdun in Montreal where I grew up had one of the highest casualty rates per capita in Canada.
Consequently, the unveiling of the municipal War Memorial statue in 1924 honouring the Dead of Vielle Verdun was an important event, according to Serge Marc Durflinger in Fighting from Home (2006). Former commander of the Canadian Corps, Sir Arthur Currie delivered the inaugural address to thousands of onlookers. Mrs. Jane Leavett, Vielle Verdun’s celebrated Silver Cross mother, unveiled the statue. She had three sons killed and one son wounded in active service.
I got a sense of the impact on those who lost brothers, fathers, husbands, and lovers from combing through old newspapers in the microfilm files of the McConnell library at Concordia University. Page after page listing the names of the latest casualties along with photograph after photograph of all those privates and corporals, lieutenants, majors, and captains, from the streets of Griffintown, Pointe-Saint-Charles, Goose Village, Vielle Verdun, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Rosemount, and Westmount, missing along with the lives that were cut short. The grief and sense of loss lingered on in those communities and became part of the way people behave.
– author’s recollection
An Unveiling
Our bequest
Is to rebuild, for What-they-died-for’s sake,
A bomb-proof roofed Metropolis, and to make
Gas-drill compulsory.
Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori
− wilfred owen
The perfect war memorial – the one which best expresses our enduring memory of the war – would show men bent double, knock-kneed, marching asleep, limping, blind, blood-shod. Either that or – and it amounts to the same thing – it should be a statue of [Wilfred] Owen himself.
– geoff dyer, The Missing of the Somme (London: Penguin, 1994), page 33.
“ … the … Kaiser? … was that the bad guy or was it Kitchener?”
It was Lord Kitchener of Khartoum who first put together the concept of concentration camps during the Boer War of 1899–1902, a consequence of a scorched-earth policy of burning farms belonging to insurgents in South Africa:
There was, it must be assumed, no malevolent motive in the establishment of the concentration camps, despite the latter-day emotive connotations of the term. The camps were set up mostly in the Free State and the Transvaal, though there were also a number in the Cape and Natal. At one time they contained as many as 160,000 inmates. A direct result of the British occupation of the Boer republics and of the scorched earth aftermath of that success, they were simply a pragmatic response to certain problems.
– denis judd, The Boer War
(London: Granada, 1977), page 161.
The exact number of Boers who died in the camps is still the subject of argument. After the war the official archivist of the Transvaal government, P. L. A. Goldman, fixed the figure at 27,927, of whom more than 26,000 were women and children. Even the British records agree on slightly more than 20,000 deaths. Since the entire Afrikaner population in the two republics was a good deal less than 100,000, the loss was catastrophic. It should not be forgotten that these were not the only deaths. A fact which passed almost unnoticed in Britain was the death of black women and children in the camps. In her book, The Brunt of War, Emily Hobhouse recorded that 13,315 Africans have died in concentration camps. This is probably a gross underestimate.
– emanoel c. g. lee,
“Medicine and the Boer War: Social and Political Consequences.” In The Prism of Science: The Israel Colloquium, Studies in History, Volume 2, edited by Edna Ullmann-Margalit
(Dordrecht, nl: D. Reidel Publishers, 1986),
pages 136–37.
One can be compassionate to the person who steals one’s watch. But human affairs involve armies at war, political parties in conflict, industrial relations and so forth – compassion does not come into these things, nor do people expect it. People who expect to find much compassion in war are fools or hypocrites. Politics can be conducted in a gentlemanly way only when they are between gentlemen – that is, not between workers and employer and owner but between men who have equal access to the same sort of power.
– edward bond and ian stuart,
Selections from the Notebooks of Edward Bond, 1980 to 1995 (London: Methuen, 2001), page 51.
“We’re already all signing up to march in the big parades … ”
Fireworks are being exploded in our honour.
The drunks are shoved into position.
The officers take their places.
The band strikes up and we march and stagger from the parade square into the street.
Outside a mob cheers and roars.
Women wave their handkerchiefs.
When we come to the corner of St. Catherine and Windsor streets a salvo of fireworks bursts over the marching column. It letters the night in red, white, and blue characters. The pale faces of the swaying men shine under the sputtering lights. Those of us who are sober steady our drunken comrades.
Flowers are tossed into the marching ranks.
Sleek men standing on the broad wide steps of the Windsor Hotel throw packages of cigarettes at us. Drunken, spiked heels crush roses and cigarettes underfoot.
The city has been celebrating the departure of the battalion. All day long the military police had been rounding up our men in saloons, in brothels. We are heroes, and the women are hysterical now that we are leaving. They scream at us:
“Good-by and good luck, boy-y-y-ys.”
They break our ranks and kiss the heavily laden boys. A befurred young woman puts her soft arm around my neck and kisses me. She smells of perfume. After the tense excitement of the day it is delightful. She turns her face to me and laughs. Her eyes are soft. She has been drinking a little. Her fair hair shines from under a black fur toque …
In a few minutes she will be gone. I am afraid now. I forget all my fine heroic phrases. I do not want to wear these dreadfully heavy boots, nor carry this leaden pack. I want to fling them away and stay with this fair girl who smells faintly of perfume. I grip her arm tightly … I remember the taunting song, “Oh, my, I’m too young to die.”
– charles yale harrison,
Generals Die in Bed
(New York: William Morrow, 1930), pages 7–10.
“ … Spells … MOTTHHHEEE-RRRR-RR!!”
Another song we used to sing down on the Avenues in Vielle Verdun:
f – is for the funny face of father
a – is for the alcohol he drinks
t – is for the tears he shed while drinking
h – is for his heart as black as ink
e – is for the eyes that mother blackened
r – is right and right he’ll always be
Put them altogether they spell “father.”
– author’s recollection
“ … no helmets in those days … ”
Dr. Harvey Cushing, one of the founding fathers of neurosurgery, writes of the bonanza of head injuries due to lack of helmets for British and Canadian troops in the first year of the war:
Boulogne, Monday, May 3, 1915
The things chiefly dwelt upon this afternoon were the group of longitudinal-sinus injuries, mostly from gutter wounds across the vault of the skull, which are characterized by a striking rigidity of all four extremities. The condition resembles the spastic paraplegia following birth injuries.
…
Our patients are down to 900, the lowest they have been, but there is a constant succession of new and interesting things … some examples of contralateral collapse of the lungs after thoracic wounds; an interesting functional disturbance involving movements and speech, in a man who had been buried … and finally … the effects of the new and unknown gas … A characteristic oedema of the larynx and conjunctivae, which comes on late, and most striking of all, the remarkable cutaneous manifestations with great patches of purple pigmentation and a most extraordinary purpuric erythema … Quite a feather in Doctor Lees’s cap for he is the first to have observed these things and to have ascribed them to a new form of poison gas.
– harvey cushing,
From a Surgeon’s Journal, 1915–1918
(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1936),
pages 57 and 157.
“ … with Jimmy Kemson carrying the tripod … worked for the CPR … ”
More than ten thousand cpr employees served the armed forces in the First World War. Employees enlisting were promised by the cpr that their jobs would be waiting for them when they returned. But returning soldiers found their jobs were not there when the war finally ended. Vast profits were made by the cpr in the transport of goods and services and the manufacturing of armaments in the war “to make the world safe for democracy.” Among cpr employees enlisted, 993 were killed and 1,952 were wounded.
– author’s recollection
The Union Jack was still flying over Windsor Station, the Montreal headquarters of the Canadian Pacific Railway, in 1963 when I worked there, a sixteen-year-old mail boy in the Auditor of Passengers and Freight Department. Old-time clerks in that office, just one or two years from retirement, had served in the First World War. One of them told me that there was a time when the whole city would stop in its tracks to observe the two minutes of silence on Remembrance Day; and all the staff and executives in Windsor Station would gather in front of the Memorial statue honouring the cpr employees in the main concourse and the company chairman would lay a wreath and make a speech. The year I was there, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month some of the clerks in my office stood up at their desk for the two minutes of silence along with the chief clerk and the auditor but a lot of the clerks, including those in the Mail Department, didn’t bother.
“Those old farts, they all crossed the picket line.”
– author’s recollection
“Well, being Irish from the Point I’m not too crazy about that shit neither … ”
The execution by the British of the Irish leaders of the Easter Uprising in Dublin 1916 not only fired up protests in Ireland but also in Montreal in the Irish community of Pointe-Saint-Charles. John Hoey, working in the Grand Trunk yards, referring to boxcars full of munitions that were being shipped overseas to England, was overheard saying that if he had his way … “very few bullets or bombs would ever get to the bloody British.” He was picked up and arrested and later released and dismissed from his job in the yards. A long-time resident of Pointe-Saint-Charles, who was a boy at the time, told me that one night some of the other Irish guys who worked in the yards got the supervisor who squealed on John Hoey in-between two boxcars and booted the shit out of him. John Hoey himself was still living in the neighbourhood when I was a kid. Of course I didn’t know at the time that he was the John Hoey. To me, he was just a strange old guy living with his family on St. Willibrord where I delivered the Montreal Star.
To me, he was just a strange old guy who always seemed to be yelling about the Queen and Prince Philip … “Like to take a piss down his leg … that dart-ty Protestant baw-stard,” he’d say.
– author’s recollection
My father, James Joseph, who served five years overseas with the Canadian Engineering Corps in the Second World War, told this story once, and only once, about being ordered to pick up pieces of the bodies of fellow soldiers, men who shared the same sleeping quarters, after a bombing raid on their barracks. My dad did not describe how he felt doing something like that, just what he did. And somehow that made the telling more chilling.
– author’s recollection
General Sir Arthur Currie, the first Canadian commander of Canada’s forces overseas in the First World War, receives glowing tributes in almost all the official accounts.
These glowing tributes notwithstanding, a lot of Canadians, veterans, and conscripts alike, had little regard for General Currie. During the last months of the war, it was widely believed in the ranks that Currie was volunteering the Canadian Corps in the most difficult tasks. Consider the comment, for example, of Sergeant Len Davidson, Canadian Engineers 7th Battalion:
“On the way home they put us on a forced march. My corporal from Montreal was there. When General Currie drove by on his rounds, somebody threw a Mills bomb at his car and blew the tire off it, because the guy was angry. The brass blamed the incident on this corporal from Montreal. He disappeared somewhere. That was why the 3rd Division didn’t go into the Army of Occupation. That’s my opinion.”
– gordon reid, Poor Bloody Murder: Personal Memoirs of the First World War
(Oakville, on: Mosaic Press, 1980), page 244.
“ … we’re working out a deal with Fritz over there who’s just as fucked up and fed up as we are … ”
Earlier cases of Christmas fraternization had caused great uneasiness among the generals on both sides: what if the soldiers simply stopped fighting each other? So concerned were some staff officers at Vimy that on Christmas Day, 1916, some units cancelled the rum ration. But the Princess Pats got an extra ration that day and proceeded to arrange a truce with their opposite numbers. Private Norman Keys, a Montrealer who spoke German, acted as a spokesman in the exchange that followed in No Man’s Land. Like his comrades, Keys was wearing his new rubber boots and fresh clothing issued that morning, and smoking a Christmas cigar – all of which impressed the Germans. Orders from above quickly put an end to the fraternizing and shelling resumed …
… When the Canadians first reached Vimy Ridge, a sign was hoisted above the German trench: welcome canadians. Another read: cut out your damn artillery. we, too, were at the somme.
– pierre berton, Vimy
(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010), page 81.
Nobody ever fired on the Vimy Front, at the time I was there. Nobody thought of war. I was told that for months nothing had happened there. Complete peace had reigned on both sides of the Line. By mutual consent the Hun and the Canuck abstained from hostilities, except for a shot or two now and then. After my recent experience this peace was almost uncanny. They always say it is impossible to start a war again after an armistice. This local peace must have been very enervating for the troops.
– wyndham lewis,
Blasting and Bombardiering
(London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1937; reprinted London: Calder & Boars, 1967), pages 200–01.
At breakfast time we would see smoke coming from the stovepipe chimneys in the dugouts behind the German trenches. That would be the signal for us to light our fires. Just after that, friend and foe would go on top of the ground looking for firewood, water, or souvenirs. We left our rifles in the trench … We waved at each other …
It was so quiet at times that our officers would come along the trench, ordering us to fire. We fired up in the air.
One evening a ration party of Scots Guards passed us in the trench. They said one of their men had been killed unnecessarily that day. It happened in the following way: a high ranking officer while inspecting the front trench noticed one of the Scots Guards fire over the parapet and duck down. The officer reprimanded the man on the spot … He ordered the man to stand up and take a proper aim. While the man obeyed the order, a sniper’s bullet caught him in the middle of his forehead.
– gordon reid, Poor Bloody Murder: Personal Memoirs of the First World War (Oakville, on: Mosaic Press, 1980), page 68.
“ ‘It’s been a great day for Canada’ …”
The men were told that they had to take the wood at the point of bayonet and were not to fire, as the 10th Battalion would be in front of them. I passed down the line and told them that they had a chance to do a bigger thing for Canada that night than had ever been done before. “It’s a great day for Canada, boys,” I said. The words afterwards became a watchword, for the men said that whenever I told them that, it meant that half of them were going to be killed.
– canon frederick george scott,
The Great War As I Saw It
(Toronto: F. D. Goodchild, 1922), pages 61–62.
As they stood fidgeting on the parade ground, the commanding officer appeared, hoisted himself onto a box, and made the kind of speech that commanding officers like to make and private soldiers don’t care to hear: “Now men, you are going to the front. You are going to get your heart’s desire – a crack at the Hun and a German helmet … ” It began to rain but the CO kept it up over a chorus of taunts and grumbles … “Tell it to Sweeney,” somebody yelled …
− pierre berton, Vimy
(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986), page 137.
We were out of the trenches for a week. A young officer gave us a lecture. He said, “We’re going to take all the villages around Ypres and then we’re going to turn around to the left and then come down the coast.” I was smiling at him … [I said,] “You know what will happen instead of taking all those villages? We’ll go up two or three yards in front of our trench.” That’s what happened.
− gordon reid, Poor Bloody Murder: Personal Memoirs of the First World War (Oakville, on: Mosaic Press, 1980), page 98.
So desolate, so meaningless were these August struggles that the record of them in histories and memoirs fills one with a certain weariness … Listlessly the men assemble at the jump-off tapes. Behind the same familiar barrage they advance through the same narrow porridge-like strip of ground. The same hidden machine-guns greet them; the same whizz-bangs open up at them … The men on both sides are lacerated and punctured, bleed and die, in numbers that baffle the imagination. Nameless new beings take their place, but nothing else changes.
– leon wolff,
In Flanders Fields: The 1917 Campaign
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), page 189.
Hump your pack and get a move on. The next hour will bring you three miles nearer to your death. Your life and death are nothing to these fields – nothing, no more than it is to the man planning the next attack at ghq. You are not even a pawn. Your death will not prevent future wars, will not make the world safe for your children. Your death means no more than if you had died in your bed …
– guy chapman, A Passionate Prodigality: Fragments of Autobiography
(London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1933; reprinted as A Passionate Prodigality: Echoes of War. London: Buchan & Enright, 1985), page 122.
“ … and I got my three-oh-three right there … and I coulda done it, shoulda done it … ”
The advance is held up for a while. The attackers are lying down taking advantage of whatever cover they can find. They are firing at us with machine guns …
At that moment Captain Clark crawls into the bay. He motions to Fry who is about to crawl over the top of the trench to come down. Fry points to his arm.
“Get the hell down here,” Clark shouts. Fry does not obey but still points to his arm.
Clark draws his revolver. Broadbent steps up to intervene. Clark turns. Fry reaches into his holster with his left hand. He fires at the officer’s back. Clark sags to the bottom of the trench with a look of wonder in his face.
It is nearly dark.
− charles yale harrison, Generals Die in Bed (New York: William Morrow, 1930), page 199.
Lt. Col. Graham Seton Hutchison tells how, during the frantic retreat of March, 1918, he stopped a rout when he encountered a group of forty men preparing to surrender to the swarming Germans. Hutchison explains:
“Such an action as this will in a short time spread like dry rot through an army and it is one of those dire military necessities which calls for immediate and prompt action. If there does not exist on the spot a leader of sufficient courage and initiative to check it by a word, it must be necessary to check it by shooting. This was done. Of a party of forty men who held up their hands, thirty-eight were shot down with the result that this never occurred again. ”
– paul fussell,
The Great War and Modern Memory, illustrated edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), page 223.
“ ‘Strike … en grève … tu comprends, Rosie?’ ”
Unsurprisingly, given the level of slaughter at Verdun, the area between Paris and Verdun was the most affected by mutiny. In the two weeks immediately preceding the mutiny, more than 250,000 French soldiers had died to gain 500 yards of ground in the Chemin de Dames. In April 1917 entire units refused to go back up the line, protesting against bad conditions and against the offensive. The mutinies mushroomed. Between April and September, an estimated 500,000 soldiers were affected, 68 divisions – over half the divisions in the French army – in 151 recorded incidents …
Many wanted to march on Paris, chanted “Down with the war” and sang the Internationale. In some units, the idea of creating soviets was discussed. In May, mutineers from the 36th and 129th regiments met and composed a resolution: “We want peace … we’ve had enough of the war and we want the deputies to know it … When we go into the trenches, we will plant a white flag on the parapet. The Germans will do the same, and we will not fight until the peace is signed”. …
…
Mutinies were not confined to the French army, however. In September 1917 there were five days of disorder among British troops at Étaples base cape. Étaples was notorious for its brutal regime and bullying officers … a report from a participant in the mutiny [said]: “About four weeks ago about 10,000 men had a big racket at Étaples and cleared the place from one end to the other, and when the General asked what was wrong, they said they wanted the war stopped”.
– megan trudell, “Prelude to Revolution: Class Consciousness and the First World War.” International Socialism, Issue 76 (September 1997), pages 67–107.
“ ‘Wouldn’t take comfort from me … ’ ”
I went in to the prisoner, who was walking up and down in his cell. He stopped and turned to me and said, “I know what you have been trying to do for me, sir, is there any hope?” I said, “No, I am afraid there is not. Everyone is longing just as much as I am to save you, but the matter has been gone into so carefully and has gone so far, and so much depends upon every man doing his duty to the uttermost, that the sentence must be carried out.” He took the matter very quietly, and I told him to try to look beyond the present to the great hope which lay before us in another life. I pointed out that he had just one chance left to prove his courage and set himself right before the world. I urged him to go out and meet death bravely with senses unclouded, and advised him not to take any brandy. He shook hands with me and said, “I will do it.” Then he called the guard and asked him to bring me a cup of tea. While I was drinking it, he looked at his watch … and asked me what time “it” was to take place. I told him I did not. He said, “I think my watch is a little bit fast.” The big hand was pointing at ten minutes to six. A few minutes later the guards entered and put a gas helmet over his head with the two eye-pieces behind so that he was completely blindfolded. Then they handcuffed him behind his back and we started off in an ambulance to a crossroad which went up the side of a hill. There we got out and the prisoner was led over to a box behind which a post had been driven into the ground … The prisoner was seated on the box and his hands were handcuffed behind the post. He asked the A. P. M. if the helmet could be taken off, but this was mercifully refused him. A round piece of white paper was pinned over his heart by the doctor as a guide for the men’s aim. I went over and pronounced the Benediction … The doctor and I then went into the road on the other side of the hedge and blocked up our ears, but of course we heard the shots fired. It was sickening …
The firing party marched off and drew up in the courtyard of the prison. I told them how deeply all ranks felt the occasion, and that nothing but the dire necessity of guarding the lives of the men in the front line from the panic and rout that might result, through the failure of one individual, compelled the taking of such measures of punishment.
– canon frederick george scott,
The Great War As I Saw It
(Toronto: F. D. Goodchild, 1922), pages 213−14.
The whole ambiguous duplicity of the chaplain’s calling was apparent as was the whole revolting sham of his function. Even more revolting because the man was sincere and kind, resigned to his sacerdotal calling with that inner toughness that a social conscience gives to the intelligent bourgeois. The guillotine, doubtless, is not Christian. But the guillotine is necessary to the Christians. The death of a convict, at a predetermined hour, “by verdict of law”, on that seesaw plank, is a horrible thing. But the justice that commands that death is sacred. The chaplain’s duty is to sympathize with the convict’s final anguish. His “social” duty is to make sure the guillotine functions properly. Christian compassion plays its part as does the oiling of the blade.
– victor serge, Men in Prison (London: Writers & Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1977), page 74.
“ ’Tis the rose that I keep in my heart.”
Years ago, I spent an autumn afternoon at the Westmount Library going through First World War memoirs and memoranda on dusty back shelves. Later as I walked back home to Verdun, a door suddenly opened and a silver-haired woman, of a genteel type now almost extinct, leaned outside and stared up the street as if she was expecting someone. From her frown of disappointment I knew then and there that she was the sister of a young officer reported missing in action fifty years before, and all these years later still expecting to see him one day walking up the street. Saw all that at one glance.
– author’s recollection
“And … I did lose it as far as my wife, Francine, is concerned … ”
My father, James Joseph, was wounded twice, both times in bombing raids. The first time by a v-1 rocket that killed the guy in the bunk above him and splintered my father all over with shrapnel. Jagged fragments of copper, brass, and steel that took years to grow completely out of his flesh. I remember, as a very young preschooler, in the kitchen after my father took his bath, picking tiny metallic bits out of the back of this silent and often bitter man. We did not know about post-traumatic stress in those days but my mother always said he came back a stranger from that war. A stranger to us and to himself.
– author’s recollection
Each week I see in the Leavesden mental hospital, the largest in England, a man whose memory is perfect, within the limits of his great age, to 1917. Thereafter he can remember nothing. An explosion had wiped out the recording mechanism from his life and hospitalized him from that day to this.
– denis winter,
Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), page 140.
“ … there’s some kind of riots in Quebec, he says … Anti-Conscription Riots they called them”
On June 28 [1917], Alphonse Verville, a member of Montreal Plumbers Local 144, [Member of Parliament] for Montreal Hochelaga since 1906, denounced conscription. “There are two major views on the War,” he told the House of Commons, “that of the exploiter and that of the exploited.”
… The next day he told the House that Labour stood for a general strike:
“When I say that organized labour will do all it can against conscription … I want this House to know what that means, it means a general strike … As for the French Canadians, they are prepared for civil war.”
– charles lipton, The Trade Union
Movement of Canada: 1827−1959
(Toronto: nc Press, 1967), pages 170−71.
Conscription became the central issue of the December 17, 1917, election. In Griffintown [Pointe-Saint-Charles] ... Doherty, the incumbent and architect of the conscription law, faced … hecklers at rowdy political meetings …
Several disturbers disrupted … with their hollering.
Home Rule for Ireland!
Home Rule for Griffintown!
…
One questioner wanted Doherty to explain why twenty-five thousand [British] soldiers were being kept in Dublin instead of being sent to the front. Doherty had no answer and said he was not responsible for that.
“Well, you want us to take their place!” the man shot back.
– sharon doyle driedger,
An Irish Heart: How a Small Immigrant Community Shaped Canada
(Toronto: HarperCollins, 2010), page 270.
“Well, yeah, we had fun with that, the first of the ‘Wanna Go Home Riots’ they called them … ”
In a small cemetery in North Wales lies a tribute to a fallen soldier of the First World War. A large sandstone crucifix marks the grave of David Gillan, a 22-year-old Canadian who answered the call to arms and fought for his King and country on the Western Front.
The simple inscription: “Died defending the honour of his country” would seem all too typical were it not for the date of his death, four months after the end of the war.
The young survivor of the horrors of the Flanders trenches was killed on Welsh soil – at the hands of a fellow Canadian.
A short distance from his grave in the church of St Margaret’s, Bodelwyddan, there is another enigmatic inscription, from the townspeople to mark the circumstances that led to his death. It reads: “Sometime, sometime we’ll understand.”
Tonight a documentary on s4c television in Wales sheds light on a mutiny that shamed the Canadian Army and embarrassed the British government. Even now, more than 80 years later, the relatives of David Gillan are unable to accept his death because their government has never revealed the circumstances.
But researchers have uncovered the events of 4 and 5 March 1919 when thousands of battle-weary veterans turned on their officers. After four years of slaughter, of being shelled and gassed in brutal trench warfare, the frustrations of 20,000 Canadian soldiers boiled over.
The mutineers wanted nothing more than to go home. They could not understand why they were not being shipped home from France and Belgium as were American troops. But a shortage of transport ships and a reluctance by the Allies to demobilise too quickly meant David Gillan and his comrades from the 1st Division were taken to a transit camp at Kinmel Park, North Wales.
Conditions were hard. The winter of 1918−1919 was the coldest in living memory, strikes meant infrequent coal for heat and a flu outbreak was sweeping the globe. Nearly 80 of the soldiers died in a pandemic that killed 20 million worldwide. They were buried in threes in the churchyard.
The discipline, the parades, the route marches, forced on the men by their officers, seemed pointless and rankled with the battle-hardened troops. The bureaucracy of the army was as bad. Men had to fill in 30 documents, answer 363 questions, and collect eight signatures before they could leave.
Five ships had been assigned for them but they were appropriated by Sir Arthur Curry, commander of the Canadian forces, to take home the 3rd Division ...
For the men in Wales, who had fought far longer, it was hard to bear. On 4 March 1919, the insubordination began. As troops in ranks were ordered to start another route march a call came from the back: “Stand packed!” Nobody moved. That night rioting broke out amid temporary buildings known as Tin Town, civilian-owned shops outside the camp. Looting spread to the camp as men drunk on stolen alcohol rampaged through it, smashing canteens, officers’ messes and ymca buildings.
The camp’s senior officer, Colonel Malcolm Colquhoun, ordered beer kegs smashed and moved among the men, trying to stop the rioting. He was treated with respect but the rampage continued. Next morning, military police arrested those they believed to be ringleaders and Colonel Colquhoun ordered all ammunition collected and locked in a bunker. The men stormed the prison and rescued some of their comrades.
Col Colquhoun ordered the rest set free but, without his knowledge, one of his officers, Lieutenant-Colonel J P French, assembled 50 men, armed them and, against orders, gave them ammunition. He marched them to a stockade where a crowd had gathered to await the release and ordered his men to fix bayonets and charge.
Two men were bayoneted to death and the atmosphere was heavy with menace. Officers made themselves scarce as three dozen men marched through the camp, waving a red flag and banging on an improvised drum. The revolt of the masses was then the greatest fear of governments across the Western world, so soon after the bloody revolution in Russia.
A keen new young officer, Lieutenant Gautier, set up armed snatch squads. David Gillan was among them. As they faced the rioters a shot rang out and he fell. The men with him opened fire on the crowd. Two more men died and five were wounded.
David Gillan’s family was robbed of the war veteran’s customary telegram and medal. His mother collapsed when she learnt of his death through newspapers. He had been shot in the back, possibly by another member of the squad.
The Canadian Army did not offer the coroner much help. Forty-one men faced court martial, and 24 were sentenced to between 90 days and 10 years. Most were freed within six months. Years later official military historians sent a questionnaire to the few soldiers still alive. One survivor wrote: “It wouldn’t have happened if the officers had only treated us like men.”
– andrew mullins, “Canada’s Shame Lies Hidden by a Tribute to the Fallen Mutiny Cover-Up,” Independent, June 24, 2000, page 12.
On Armistice Day 1918, Prime Minister Robert Borden and [Trades and Labour Congress] president Tom Moore told the workers the world was going to be a happy place to live in. The troops began to come home at the rate of 3,400 a month. In Canada jobs were not too plentiful. In the winter of 1919 unemployment was increasing in Ontario and the West. Also, the cost of living was rising – workers were complaining it cost twice as much to keep a family as before the war. For their part, the employers and landlords were basking in the sun of big profits [they made during the war]. Working class bitterness grew.
A signal was clashes with police of returned men and soldiers. At Toronto several such demonstrations took place and there were clashes with police. At Winnipeg and Halifax there were similar demonstrations. Unrest grew greater still in 1918 when – Armistice scarce over – a Canadian military expedition was dispatched to Archangel [in Russia]. This was too much. First the authorities asked Canadians to die in a war, with the Russian Tsar as a principal ally, and then asked them to defeat the government which replaced the Tsar.
– charles lipton, The Trade Union
Movement of Canada: 1827−1959
(Toronto: nc Press, 1967), pages 185−86.
Lenin, in a “Letter to the Workers of America”, pleaded for their support: “For every hundred mistakes of ours there are ten thousand great and heroic acts. But if the situation were reversed, if there were ten thousand mistakes to every hundred fine acts, all the same our revolution would be and will be great and unconquerable, because for the first time not a minority, not only the rich, not only the educated, but the real mass of workers themselves begin to build up a new life.”
– david mitchell, 1919: Red Mirage (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), page 43.
Lenin replied to a protest about the Red Terror from Lincoln Steffens, an American member of a 1919 delegation to Moscow, who asked:
“What assurance can you give that the red terror will not go on killing –”
“ ‘Who wants to ask us about our killings?’ ” he demanded, coming erect on his feet with anger.
...
“ ‘Do you mean to tell me that those men who have just generaled the slaughter of seventeen millions of men in a purposeless war are concerned over the few thousands who have been killed in a revolution with a conscious aim – to get out of the necessity of war and – and armed peace.’ ”
– charles l. mee, The End of Order: Versailles 1919 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980), pages 117−18.
[The Western Canada Labour Conference,] attended by 250 delegates representing most of the important union locals between Winnipeg and Victoria … decided on a general strike to begin around June 1, 1919, for these demands:
1. The 6-hour day.
2. Complete freedom of speech and release of political prisoners.
3. Removal of restrictions on working class organizations.
4. Immediate withdrawal of allied troops from Russia.
5. Defeat of allied attempts “to overthrow the Soviet administration in Russia or Germany” …
…
Finally, these resolutions were adopted:
1. Abolition of capitalism: “The aims of labour are abolition of present system of production for profit, and the substitution of production for use”.
2. Working class rule: “The system of [workers’] control by selection of representatives from industry is declared superior to capitalistic parliamentarism” …
3. The November Resolution a Model: … “full accord and sympathy with the aims and purposes of the Russian Bolshevik and German Spartacist revolutions”.
– charles lipton, The Trade Union
Movement of Canada: 1827−1959
(Toronto: nc Press, 1967), pages 188−89.
Middle-class officers [in Winnipeg 1919] were outraged that the Great War Veterans’ Association had taken a pro-strike position. Attempting to play on prejudice against foreign-born workers (“the alien enemy”), against the alleged unconstitutionality of the Strike Committee … these officers brought large numbers of veterans to support the city, provincial and federal governments during the strike.
War hysteria helped them identify “Bolshevists” as allies of “the Hun” and strikers as a tool of a “Red” or “alien” plot to set up a Soviet in Winnipeg. Many of these men served as Citizens’ Committee volunteers or as special police in the next few weeks.
– winnipeg defense committee, Winnipeg 1919: Striker’s Own History of the Winnipeg General Strike, 2nd ed., Norman Penner, ed. (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1976), page 110.
J. S. Woodsworth, United Church Minister, Arrested for Seditious Libel
– june 1919
The Jurors aforesaid do further present:
That J. S. Woodsworth, on or about the month of June in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and nineteen, in the city of Winnipeg, in the province of Manitoba, unlawfully and seditiously published seditious libels in the words and figures following:
“Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of my people that widows may be their prey and that they may rob the fatherless.” – “Isaiah”
“And they shall build houses and inhabit them and they shall plant vineyards and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build and another inhabit, they shall not plant and another eat; for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands. ” – “Isaiah”
J. S. Woodsworth later became one of the founders of the Canadian Commonwealth Federation, the predecessor of the New Democratic Party.
– winnipeg defense committee, Winnipeg 1919: Striker’s Own History of the Winnipeg General Strike, 2nd ed., Norman Penner, ed. (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1976), page 208.
My Scottish grandfather Andrew Boyle went missing in the Battle of the Somme. I used to think that his being missing in action was an exceptional occurrence. But in reality, it was the rule not the exception. The Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme names 72,090 British and Commonwealth soldiers, all of whom went missing in action during the battle. Of those not lost but injured, sixty per cent of injuries were from shellfire. Being shelled was actually the main occupation of an infantry soldier in the First World War.
– author’s recollection
Almost three-quarters of wounds by the end of the war were shell wounds. Men knew too well how enduring were the effects. The wounds almost always went septic because of the foreign matter taken into the body with the splinters. Low-velocity missiles like these fragments also caused more severe tissue damage than bullets, making a survivor vulnerable to gangrene. Even if a man avoided missiles, the blast would cause death by concussion at ten yards. Kidneys and spleen would be ruptured though there would be no surface marks on the body.
– denis winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London: Penguin, 1992), page 117.
“ … raise a glass to Rosie Rollins and Rummie Robidou and all those other Bolshevikis … ”
Pardons Could Be Political Minefield
Britain’s plan to pardon 306 executed Commonwealth soldiers from the First World War – including 23 Canadians – poses a political conundrum for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. His government will face pressure to support a gesture that one of the country’s leading military historians has warned is “self-indulgent” revisionism.
It could also shift the blame for the wartime deaths from men found guilty of desertion or cowardice to the officers who commanded their firing squads – including a future Canadian governor-general, George Vanier.
…
Those petitioning for pardons have argued that First World War soldiers condemned for desertion or cowardice were typically suffering from what today is recognized as post-traumatic stress and deserved medical help.
…
Cliff Chadderton, chairman of National Council of Veterans Associations, denounced the decision as one that would cheapen the exploits of Canada’s fallen heroes.
And McGill University professor Desmond Morton, one of the leading chroniclers of Canada’s military history, said the official statement of regret “turned fact into fiction” and unfairly tainted the actions of commanders who legitimately ordered executions.
“They did it for a reason,” Morton said at the time. “They did it to encourage other people to behave. If everybody who decided to flee fled, where would the army be?”
− randy boswell, Montreal Gazette, August 17, 2006, page a2.