War on the Home Front: The Farm Diaries of Daniel MacMillan, 1914–1927 (review)

March 3, 1916 – I had a recruiting officer call on me today . . . wanting to know if I had any notion of going and having a crack at the Germans. I am considerably over age – fifty-three the twenty-second of this month. He thought if I proved otherwise fit I could perhaps pass for some years younger. However, I feel my age in some respects . . . and I really think I can do my bit better here on the farm than any other place.

– Daniel MacMillan, War on the Home Front

In North America these days, historians are more likely to be protesting or writing about war than directly experiencing it. Sans this context, a book with the title War on the Home Front might refer to that old joke of gendered, domestic battle lines. But as more and more of the domestic costs of war are felt by Iraqi, Afghani, Canadian, and American families, it's obvious there's nothing at all funny about war. Similarly, as New Brunswicker Daniel MacMillan struggled to work his family's farm during and after the First World War, the diary he kept, now available to the broader public in War on the Home Front, makes apparent the tightly woven and gendered fabric of war and civilian life.

Williamsburg, near Stanley, above Fredericton, is the farm and woods-working country Daniel MacMillan wrote from. The book's introduction, written by Acadiensis editors Bill Parenteau and Stephen Dutcher, aids the diaries in revealing both war and postwar periods. Much as the novels Trente arpents and Grain have done for fiction readers for years, MacMillan's diaries illuminate the early twentieth-century rural past. Consider, for example, these excerpts from 28 May, and 12 and 14 November 1922:

Donald Hossack [returned soldier], who has been giving less or more trouble at the upper end of the settlement for the past year or more, finished up . . . by setting fire to William T. Craig's buildings [sawmill] . . . a number of men gathered and kept him there until the officers of the law arrived and took charge of him. Scott McNeil of Maple Grove and Schell Humble took him to the hospital in Saint John . . . This is really a case which should have been attended to before this, as Donald gave sufficient evidence that something was wrong with his mind on several occasions . . . Today Schell Humble and I weighed twenty ewes which I have decided to let go . . . I have kept fourteen of the youngest, bred from the run [perhaps run should be ram?] I bought from the government in the fall of 1918. Charlie [MacMillan's brother] intended to sell the whole flock, but it is likely I will stay here this winter. I thought I would try and take a few over the winter. It seems too bad that such conditions were brought about as to compel the giving away of these ewes, as that is about all it amounts to, 2 ½ cts. per lb. live weight . . . I helped drive away twenty head of sheep this morning. Poor things, some of them I have taken care of for seven and eight years. Sheep is a line of stock that I always liked. There is not the work attached to taking care of them that there is to cows . . . Then the poor things are so lovable, so shy, so trusting.

(94–5)

In their introduction – in a turn of phrase echoing Danny Samson's groundbreaking 'History looks different from the countryside' assertion, made in Contested Countryside – Dutcher and Parenteau state, 'The Great War looked different from the countryside' (10). Indeed. When observed and analyzed from a rural perspective, the First World War, that early twentieth-century imperialistic adventure – the one we tell our students made Canada a country – really is a whole other...