True story: in the summer of 2008, during which time I was in the thick of reading the novels and plays that make up the corpus for this study, I went to see a movie with some colleagues. In one of the trailers, images of muddy men shooting rifles and a wind-blown woman reading letters competed with voice-overs of a man saying things like, “I don’t fight for glory or medals—I only fight for you,” and a woman declaring, “I used to believe in things like sacrifice”; as the operatic music swelled, certain phrases appeared on the screen: “They fought for their country”; “Every war has its stories”; “This is our story.” Before the trailer had ended, I nudged the person sitting beside me and made a guess: “This movie is going to be called Vimy.” When the title Passchendaele appeared on the screen I grinned at my colleague, as if to say, “See? I was close!” My colleague, being an American, had very little idea what I was on about. Another story: sometime in late 2009, another colleague of mine offered to lend me her copy of the DVD of Passchendaele, as she thought I’d probably want to examine the film in the context of my research. I declined at the time, pronouncing (somewhat grumpily) that I just didn’t have the energy for another portrayal of a plucky Canadian soldier who against all odds—which include both mud and the stupidity of officers—manages to do his duty and relate to those back home that war is hell, though somehow a necessary hell. My colleague responded: “Oh, so you have seen the movie.” But I hadn’t yet. For me, Paul Gross’s big-budget film about the Great War from a Canadian serviceman’s perspective marked my own sense that perhaps Robert Wiersema had been right in 2005: perhaps these historical events had been reimagined too many times in the space of ten or so years to produce anything more than a sense of déjà vu. As it happened, the release of Passchendaele coincided almost precisely with the end of the recent rush of Canadian First World War reimaginings.
The reviews for Passchendaele are fairly uniform: critics tend to praise the battle scenes for their gritty authenticity (which is considered all the more remarkable given the relatively meagre budget of $20 million), while panning the romance plot for being too clichéd and heavy-handed. As Jay Stone, writing for Canwest News Service, notes, “this is a romance—a conventional one at that—that happens to be set in 1917, and while it provides frighteningly authentic battle scenes, it slogs just as dangerously through knee-deep schmaltz.”1 Similarly, Cassandra Szklarski, writing for the Telegraph-Journal, praises the film for being “a valuable depiction of one of Canada’s most important battles,” after suggesting that “the courtship ultimately bogs down the first half of the film, also undermined by a stagey portrait of wartime Calgary that comes across too much like a televised heritage moment.”2 In press material put out before the film’s major release, Gross, the film’s writer, director, and lead actor, stated that he was more interested in the personal story than in the military one: “I’ve always been interested in the intimate casualties of war: What it does to families and communities. What it does to love, I suppose.”3 Gross’s interest in love, community, and the space away from the war is comparable to the thematic concerns of most, if not all, of the texts examined in this study, which have often been praised for considering the way the military war is associated with other sorts of conflicts, objectives, fears, and losses.
On the home front, Sarah Mann, the female lead in Passchendaele, portrayed by Caroline Dhavarnas, loses her job as a nurse because she was born in Germany; her speech to Gross’s character, Michael Dunne, about the way the war “tore [their] lives in half” recalls the discord felt by the German immigrant population portrayed in Urquhart’s The Stone Carvers. The ethnic diversity of the platoon Michael reluctantly comes to lead just before the momentous battle at Passchendaele recalls the group Thiessen portrays in Vimy: it includes one First Nations representative (“Highway,” played by Michael Greyeyes), who refers to himself as a “Skin”; one francophone Canadian (“Godin,” played by Justin Michael Carriere); and various Anglo-Canadians, one of whom is clearly from a rural background as he can comfortably kill and pluck a chicken with his bare hands. Home front machinations depicted in the film concerning recruitment and war propaganda—including the continual rehearsal of the story of a Canadian NCO who was crucified against a barn door by German soldiers—as well as representations of cowardly, arrogant military superiors, personified in the character of Dobson-Hughes (played by Jim Mezon), correspond with similar disapproving explorations of political and military incompetence and callousness in Hodgins’s Broken Ground and the war novels of Alan Cumyn. The film’s explicit contrasting of the stunning Calgary landscape with the brutalized background of Flanders reflects the gulf in understanding between the war insider and the war outsider, a concern that prevails in such texts as Swan’s The Deep, Itani’s Deafening, and Kerr’s Unity (1918). Even the scene of Michael Dunne and Sarah Mann having sex in an unused tent on the night before the battle recalls representations of similarly desperate attempts to revel in sexual passion in a place of death in Broken Ground, The Stone Carvers, The Sojourn, and Three Day Road.
Yet none of these thematic explorations as they emerge in Passchendaele are deemed complex enough by film critics to mitigate the somehow misplaced love story that interrupts a gritty war movie. It may be that the contemporary war film—especially one that attempts to represent battle as realistically as possible (in the manner of Saving Private Ryan)—cannot abandon the conventions of its genre for a full seventy minutes without causing a sense of dislocation. Jay Winter has argued, however, that while film representations of historical events cannot sensibly be referred to as portraying “memories,” the mediation of individual and group remembrances in film is “never mechanical … Film disturbs as many narratives as it confirms.”4 The questions then become these: What narrative was Passchendaele trying to tell, and why were so many critics ambivalent in their response to it? And is that ambivalence a signal that the narrative presented is disruptive, or simply all too confirming? What is interesting about Gross’s film, and its reception, is the way the inclusion and subsequent popular rejection of a romance narrative reveals a refutation of the narrative of personal heroism and glorious sacrifice in war evident at the end of a decade of Canadian First World War reimaginings.
Stone argues that the plot of Passchendaele is grounded in the conventions of romance, though what he is referring to is the love story of Michael and Sarah rather than the quest narrative associated with the prose romance, the very sort of narrative that was popular with Canadian writers such as Ralph Conner and William Benjamin Basil King during the war years. Dagmar Novak asserts that the plots of Conner’s and King’s novels “follow a similar pattern; the hero descends into a lower world where he battles against evil, then re-emerges victorious in life or in death. They are replete with heroes and heroines who display fortitude and a capacity for courage and self-sacrifice that is truly extraordinary.”5 Michael Dunne is such a hero, though, as Gross writes and plays the character, he is also the epitome of Canadian unpretentiousness and no-nonsense dependability, not to mention just about the highest-functioning neurasthenic one could ever hope to meet in a First World War narrative. In a scene where he faces a kind of military tribunal to explain why he went AWOL—during which he is threatened with a charge of desertion and the punishment of execution—he has sufficient nerve to suggest that the story of the crucified Canadian soldier is a myth, that “a man in a trench—he’s gonna see what he needs to see.” He is unfazed by the news that Sarah’s father fought for the German army and that she herself is suspected of being a saboteur, taking the time to punch one of her xenophobic neighbours in the nose. He refuses to parrot the patriotic line, even to military superiors, and tells Sarah’s brother, David, that he isn’t going to find “romance … in a trench.” When David finally manages to sign up, Michael follows him to Flanders (using the name McCrae, an allusion that seems contrived, even for this film), and ends up saving him, single-handedly dragging David’s near-crucified body back across no man’s land, while Canadian and German soldiers alike stare in bewildered awe at Michael’s valour. Significantly, there seems to be no self-reflexivity about the fact that, though Michael forcefully disputes the myth of the crucified Canadian soldier during his tribunal, Gross’s film culminates in precisely this image. Michael gets David to safety just in time for Canadian relief soldiers to arrive and win the battle. And despite his forthright explanation to Dobson-Hughes that dry matches are the most important thing to a soldier, in case “you are in a barrage and you think a smoke might steady you up,” and the recurrent emphasis on the image of the real soldier and his cigarettes, Paul Gross does not smoke.
The issue here is not simply the clash of two sets of generic conventions, but that there are two competing attitudes toward the war—one that Michael Dunne articulates in words, and another that he articulates in action. Szklarski notes that “Gross … manages to juggle smart, sober themes on the futility of war and heroic personal sacrifice without treading too heavily on the morality of armed conflict.”6 Sitting in a sopping trench with David, Michael gives a speech that relies on images and ideas culled from First World War mythology: “Look around you. You see any poets in this shit? We’re all in a slaughter yard and there isn’t a single guy here who knows why … It’s something we do all the time because we’re good at it. And we’re good at it because we’re used to it. And we’re used to it because we do it all the time.” The reference to the lack of “poets” in this speech, of course, is meant to bring to mind the work of British soldier-poets, while the neat tautological structure in Michael’s simple meditation on why humans go to war reveals Gross’s desire to align his film with that legacy. This is the attitude toward the war that critics of the film are eager to attend to, though the anti-war stance implicit in this attitude is not sustained. As Cobley might argue, the position that humans are simply doomed to be “good” at war is its own kind of complicity with such activity. Furthermore, the generic “we” that Michael uses in his speech transforms into a much more specific “we”—namely, the Canadian Corps, whose “taking” of Passchendaele is meant to register as heroic rather than ironic, of a piece with the “reluctant coming-of-age” narrative that Palmateer Pennee suggests has become all too gratifying.7 Even with its inherent contradictions, however, the attitude to war expressed in this speech remains tolerable because it sidesteps the romance paradigm of the singular hero, the “extraordinary” man. When Michael takes up the cross bearing David’s body, he oversteps the boundaries of acceptable myth. While a tacit approval of the idea that war is a necessary and perhaps unavoidable evil finds purchase, showy individual valour does not. Paradoxically, the scene in which Michael kills an unarmed German soldier by sticking a bayonet into his skull—an event based on a real-life incident that haunted Gross’s grandfather—is deemed straightforwardly meaningful, while scenes that figure Michael as a hero–Christ figure produce only discomfort.
A look back over the texts examined in this study might offer an explanation for this discomfort. What becomes clear when we do so is that, in general, contemporary Canadian literature about the First World War subordinates the ideal of personal heroism to the ideals of community and duty toward that community. Works such as Thiessen’s Vimy and the novels of Alan Cumyn focus explicitly on the distinctive bonds and shared sense of purpose felt by common infantrymen; and particularly in the case of the community represented in Vimy, that shared sense of purpose is meant to be a sign of the nation’s potential for the glorious tolerance of diversity. It is also significant that many of these texts avoid the issue of personal military heroism by representing other kinds of war work, the kind of “soldiering” (to use Donna Coates’s phrase) that privileges a commitment to duty over a commitment to fighting.8 In Swan’s The Deep, Thiessen’s Vimy, and Urquhart’s The Underpainter, the efforts of nursing sisters are highlighted; The Underpainter and Itani’s Deafening additionally present men involved in military service that does not involve combat—George Kearns is responsible for carrier pigeons, and Jim Lloyd is a stretcher carrier and field medic. In Urquhart’s second First World War novel, The Stone Carvers, both Tilman Becker and Giorgio Vigamonti refer to their status as former infantrymen, Tilman having taken part in the Battle of Vimy Ridge and Giorgio having been promoted to corporal only “because [he] was neither missing nor dead.”9 Urquhart, however, presents taking part in the massive communal undertaking of carving the Vimy Memorial as the most important war work done by Tilman, Giorgio, and also Klara Becker. Thus, the representation of both front line and home front activity is significant not because it confirms a plot of personal heroism or because an individual type of activity makes a statement one way or the other about the toll of war; rather, such activity operates as an articulation of citizenship.
As discussed in detail throughout this study, the figure of the officer—a figure generally associated with obtuseness and arrogance in British representations of the war—is given complex treatment in such works as Hodgins’s Broken Ground, Poliquin’s A Secret Between Us, and Vanderhaeghe’s Dancock’s Dance. Both Hodgins’s Matt Pearson and Vanderhaeghe’s John Carlyle Dancock are represented in terms of their struggle to find the sort of leadership qualities that will best serve their units, and it is significant that in both cases the motley group that ultimately comes together under such leadership is a non-military community. And, of course, Poliquin represents in Lusignan a Canadian officer who is totally lacking both bravery and a code of sacrifice, thus skewering at every turn the myth of personal heroism. Finally, in terms of other representations of soldiers who may, on the surface, be viewed as embodying the ideal of personal heroism so central to Paul Gross’s character in Passchendaele, the depictions of military medal winners in Massicotte’s Mary’s Wedding, Kerr’s Unity (1918), and Hodgins’s Broken Ground reveal only hesitancy about being so distinguished. In the context of Massicotte’s dream space, the historical personage of Lieutenant Gordon Muriel Flowerdew, who was awarded a Victoria Cross for leading the charge at Moreuil Wood, is buried beneath the fictional mask of Charlie Edwards, a man who will not admit to being a hero and who can only say of the charge that “it wasn’t … poetry.”10 Kerr’s returned soldier Hart refuses to let Beatrice make much of his Victoria Cross, insisting “they were just tossing these things out like jelly drops at a parade.”11 Finally, and most complicated, is the case of Xavier Bird’s Military Medal, which he receives only because he is mistaken for Elijah Whiskeyjack during his recovery from injury. Xavier’s comment to himself that “there is something appealing in being the hero”12 is fraught with complexity, both because Elijah’s own “heroism” is represented as a kind of crazed bloodlust and because Xavier’s comfort in being taken for a hero occurs at a point when he has lost, in literal and metaphorical terms, his claim to a personal and cultural identity. Thus, the version of the “best Canadian self” that is depicted in most contemporary Canadian reimaginings of the war is not a romance hero, but rather someone who does his or her duty, on and off the battlefield. Paul Gross’s character, though also dutiful, does more than just “his bit,” and for this reason oversteps the boundaries of the cultural narrative defining distinctively Canadian military activity.
The timing of Passchendaele’s release also seems a crucial factor in providing a context for discomfort. Much was made in the press surrounding the film’s opening, as well as in the featurette titled “The Road to Passchendaele” included in the DVD, of the participation of the Canadian Armed Forces in the making of the film. Gross notes that “having real soldiers on the set gave the project a real sobriety, because in war people can [be] and are killed … There is a direct line between the soldiers of the Canadian Expeditionary Force who fought at Passchendaele in the First World War and the men and women who are fighting in the sands of Afghanistan right now.”13 In fact, Gross’s willingness to construct a tale of personal heroism may be associated with his desire to explicitly mark war activity as more than simply duty. The idea of “the direct line,” however, is problematic. As the character Michael Dunne himself asserts, “lines are tricky. They’re so goddamn many of them … lines you don’t even know about, lines you can’t see ’til you cross them.” Canada deployed its first troops to Afghanistan in 2002, participating significantly between 2003 and 2005 as part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul, but the role of those troops changed significantly in 2006 when Britain took charge of the mission and Canadian forces were placed in Kandahar as part of counter-insurgency activities.14 This shift had two outcomes: first, Canada’s involvement in the war began to register serious opposition in Parliament, and second, more and more Canadian soldiers began to die. Between 2002 and 2005 there were eight Canadian casualties of the war in Afghanistan—including four soldiers who died as a result of “friendly fire”—whereas between 2006 and 2011, there were one hundred fifty combat-related deaths.15
In her study of Findley’s The Wars in a post-colonial context, Donna Palmateer Pennee explores the way Canada has variously defined itself in relation to the concept of war:
The Vietnam War figured “Canada” as a pacifist haven in the period of anti-American cultural and economic nationalism in the 1970s. The Cold War similarly gave Canada a moral edge: during the Cold War, Canada rose to middle power status, building on the international recognition gained for its roles as ally and mediator during and after World War II … War continues to facilitate meanings or identifications of “Canada” in the early twenty-first century: think of the anger and judgment at (Canadian) soldiers’ death by friendly (U.S.) fire … think of the left-liberal pride at Jean Chretien’s refusal to join the U.S. and Britain in the war against Iraq because it was not sanctioned by the UN. But think, too, of how difficult it is to maintain a not-American identification after the shame of Rwanda or Khandahar.16
Palmateer Pennee asks, “How do we reconcile such repeated definitional moments for ‘Canada’ produced by complicities in the atrocities of war with decades of ‘Canada’s’ signature as a peacekeeping, mediating nation in foreign affairs?”17 A recent collection of essays titled Afghanistan and Canada: Is There an Alternative to War? positions itself as a call “to end Canada’s military involvement in a wasteful and costly war,”18 often citing Canada’s status as a “middle-power country that as a peacekeeper, has always been highly respected on the international stage.”19 In the late 1990s and early twenty-first century it was still possible to locate a moral substance within the lessons learned in the First World War, and to celebrate the kinds of Canadian values that were forged on its various fronts—quiet, dignified fortitude, a sense of duty toward community, an ability to appreciate justice, and a recognition that even though Canadian fighters were a force to be reckoned with on a battlefield, war should mostly be avoided in favour of mediation. But by the time of Passchendaele’s release in late 2008 a straightforward identification with those cultural myths was no longer sustainable. While the reluctant father figure Matt Pearson, or the earnest and experienced field medic Jim Lloyd, or the fiercely loyal Ramsay Crome might have been acceptable purveyors of the national military spirit in the years leading up to Canada’s increased participation in Afghanistan, by 2008 it was no longer possible to figure Michael Dunne as this sort of emblematic figure, because the so-called national spirit was no longer an illusion that could be so easily articulated or accepted.
As the end of Canada’s participation in Afghanistan in 2011 is digested, various controversies have subjected Canada’s war record to intense scrutiny. Those controversies include the detainee abuse scandal of 2007–9; the 2010 military trial of Captain Robert Semrau, accused of killing a wounded insurgent and found guilty of disgraceful conduct; the financial cost of the war, which far exceeded government estimations; and continuing complaints about the work of the Veterans Affairs Department. Furthermore, as Ian McKay and Jamie Swift point out in their biting critique of the “rebranding” of Canada as a “Warrior Nation,” popular conceptions of Canada’s military history have become a matter of intense political manoeuvring, as “the ‘Canada’ that shimmers in the imagination of right-wing politicians, militarists, and new warrior historians … is one based on blood and soil, sanctified by battle deaths and engaged in a perpetual war with the tyranny and terror championed by less-evolved peoples.”20 McKay and Swift, writing in 2012, lament:
Not two decades ago, Remembrance Day, as it was generally observed in public schools, was in good measure about peace. Little children recited poems about the horrors of war; school assemblies mourned the lives cut down by violent conflict—sometimes even Japanese and German lives. In the rebranded Canada as Warrior Nation, Remembrance Day is mainly about war, with proud homage paid to our valiant soldiers who, it is claimed, created Canada’s freedom. In the cult of the soldier, all Canadians who died in the service of the Anglosphere … indiscriminately receive the “big hero” treatment.21
Though Gross’s “big hero” representation of the Canadian First World War hero fell flat, with Passchendaele receiving mostly mixed to unenthusiastic reviews and ending up as a commercial failure, McKay and Swift’s point about the way such rhetoric has moved into classroom discourse is important. As Noah Richler notes in his recent book, What We Talk about When We Talk about War, the Dominion Institute—renamed in 2009 the Institut Historica–Dominion Institute—published an education guide “as part of its ‘Passchendaele in the Classroom’ initiative for teachers using the film as an educational tool.” Richler notes Gross’s fervently patriotic tone as expressed in the guide, including his assertion that “‘our notion of what it means to be Canadian was forged in the crucible of the Western Front.’”22 Without a doubt, as the centenary of the First World War looms, literary representations of and popular discourse about Canada at war will be looked at with fresh eyes, as critics continue to interrogate—perhaps with increased political urgency—how remembrance of the “Great” war is discursively deployed.
Paul Ricoeur in Memory, History, Forgetting writes that “faithfulness to the past is not a given, but a wish. Like all wishes, it can be disappointed, even betrayed.”23 The texts explored in this study work to find productive meaning in the remembrance of the First World War, looking to the past with a mind to call attention to forgiveness, healing, the agency of citizens, a return to familial or community wholeness, and a sense of promise for a future that cherishes love. Such emphases ensue, however, on the grounds that the events of the First World War were so cataclysmic, so appalling in their capacity to produce chaos and loss, that efforts of remembrance—of faithfulness—are necessarily, almost conventionally, painful and complex, yet also culturally productive, like Xavier Bird’s healing journey up the river to home. Writers are safely able to locate productive meaning in the First World War precisely because of their sense of assurance regarding the proper kinds of effort Canadians put into collective remembrance and also regarding the kinds of myths we have learned to reiterate, like Lusignan, writing the letter he knows is expected of a soldier who had been at Passchendaele: “I added three or four pages on the cold, the mud, the blood in the trenches, things … that I managed to write about with ease.”24 Richler suggests that, as both a “creation myth and a cautionary tale,” the story of Canada’s participation in the First World War has become too comforting, a reiterated wish that relies on the notion of our progress through the crucible of war to our “stronger, finer” selves.25
During the years between 1995 (the publication year of Major’s No Man’s Land and the production year of the first performance of Dancock’s Dance) and 2007 (the publication year of the English translation of A Secret Between Us and the production year of the world premiere of Vimy), the prevailing notion concerning the First World War was that the series of events was behind us, and that our greatest worry might be sorting out how best to commemorate the imminent death of the last Canadian veteran of the war. In the past several years, however, “war” as a concept and as a daily set of political affairs and physical consequences is ever more complex than our remembrance of the First World War. Thus, to a great extent our response to Canada’s participation in the First World War—that first mechanized war of the modern era, with all its associated horrors—is associated with nostalgia for a past that, amazingly, seems entirely comprehensible and that has not been betrayed. It is no surprise that a political campaign, such as the 2010 “How Will You Remember?” campaign organized by Veterans Affairs Canada, insists there is a “direct line” from Canada’s First World War participants and Canadian UN peacekeepers to—as the descriptive transcript to the widely broadcast television vignette puts it—Canadians “who continue to serve our country today.”26 It is precisely because the myths we have reiterated about Canada’s participation in the First World War, as a productive set of activities in the forging of Canadian values, have proven to constitute a fervent, collective wish, that such linkages are possible and pervasive.
In his conclusion to Speculative Fictions, Herb Wyile notes with enthusiasm that “the historical fiction keeps on coming,” and mentions the publication of Broken Ground as an example of the continuing interest in the genre.27 The recent publication of the essay collection National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada in 2010 further establishes the way writing about Canada’s past has captured the imaginations of authors and literary critics alike, arguably more than ever before. As I write this conclusion, however, I am more cautious about the probability that the outpouring of Canadian First World War narratives might continue; as I mention above, Passchendaele appears to have functioned as the finale to a decade-long phenomenon. This cautiousness is not solely, or even primarily, related to the problem of “premise fatigue”; rather, it is mainly associated with a sense that it has become more difficult for Canadian writers to make productive use of this part of our past, and to explore even the possibility of “promise, certainty, and goodness.”28 War is something real for Canadians again. It is not surprising that a novel such as David Bergen’s The Matter With Morris, nominated for the 2010 Giller Prize, focuses on the trauma associated with a Canadian soldier killed by “friendly fire” in Afghanistan or that Christie Blatchford’s Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life, and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army, winner of the 2008 Governor General’s Award for non-fiction, captured the reading public’s attention so intensely. Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists (which won the 2010 Giller) and Anne Michael’s The Winter Vault, novels that feature war as a topic and the memory of war experience as a central issue, deal with more recent military events: the Vietnam War and the post–Second World War period, respectively. Jane Urquhart in her most recent novel, Sanctuary Line, returns once again to the topic of Canadian military activity, but has shifted her attention away from the First World War to consider Canada’s participation in the war in Afghanistan. Attention has thus moved toward events that are part of “living history,” especially for a post-boomer demographic, and away from something like the First World War, which can function only as what Halbwachs would call “historical memory.” In the final moments of Kerr’s Unity (1918), the ensemble cast sings an ironic song about Canada’s “hundred years of progress,” a song that ends with an implicit call for further reflection on what our memory of the war might mean:
Oh, Canada!
Oh, Canada!
Oh –
Curtain.29
Paradoxically, as the centenary of the First World War approaches, those events themselves may have become a closed book.