L’Écho du front (review)

Prime Minister John Diefenbaker once remarked ‘that [if] a picture is worth a thousand words, a cartoon, well done, is worth a thousand pictures.’ Diefenbaker was a good judge in this regard, as he was routinely skewered by the able pens of Canadian cartoonists. But what of Canada’s Great War? Was there any room for cartoons, or humour for that matter, in the terrible war from 1914 to 1918 that has lived on in public memory as one of the most traumatic events in modern history? Despite 10 million battlefield dead, more than sixty thousand of whom were Canadians, soldiers found ways to spoof the horror and inanities of life at the front and to use humour as a shield.

Marcelle Cinq-Mars, an archivist at Library and Archives Canada, has done a great service to historians in mining the little-used trench newspapers that were published by soldier-editors for their fellow comrades-in-arms. Except for Jeff Keshen’s Propaganda and Censorship during Canada’s Great War (1996) and a recent exhibition at the Canadian War Museum, Trench Life: A Survival Guide, Canadian historians have almost completely overlooked these important sources. While no full run of papers survives – with most having been read, passed to mates, and then eventually finding their fate as ‘bumpf’ (or bum fodder, in trench slang) – the papers contain soldiers’ poetry, prose, jokes, and cartoons. The papers offer a very different view of the war, especially in contrast to the disillusionment poetry or postwar memoirs of angry participants.

In L’Écho du front, Cinq-Mars has selected about two hundred of the original cartoons published in Canadian trench newspapers, and has arranged them in fifteen thematic sections, such as women, the enemy, and conditions at the front. There are two short introductory essays: the first by Frédéric Rousseau, a professor of history at l’Université Paul Valéry de Montpellier, on trench newspapers in an international context, and the second by Cinq-Mars on the Canadian papers. The essays are in French, but the cartoons are all in English, as this was the original source material from Canada’s wartime army that was largely composed of English-speaking soldiers and was a part of the larger British Expeditionary Force. Cinq-Mars captions in French offer important contextual information in decoding the images and their punchlines, as well as revealing an impressive command of the meaning of the jokes, which often goes beyond literal translations.

Humour is notoriously hard to explain across time and to different generations. The soldiers’ humour was meant to be exclusive to their closed society, and much of it was based on inside jokes, self-referential events, and their unique circumstances on the Western Front. While some of these cartoons are decidedly unfunny or have simply lost their meaning over time, others still resonate. The Listening Post, the most popular of the Canadian papers, contains a cartoon showing three soldiers, two of whom are veterans and the third a nervous new man. One of the experienced soldiers asks the new man for a loan of five francs before he goes into the trenches, as he likely won’t need any more money where he is going. Is the experienced man taunting the nervous recruit with his likely death at the front, or is it that he simply has no use for money in the trenches? The punchline is double-edged, but harsh, as was much of the soldiers’ humour that played fast and loose with death. Cartoons like this offer insight into the soldiers’ experience, especially in how they coped with the boredom and banality of the trench experience. A cartoon from the Forty-Niner depicts a slightly wounded Canadian, arm in sling, waving goodbye to a frowning comrade working on a sign pointing to the trenches. His sign reads ‘To Hell,’ while the smiling wounded soldier is off ‘To Blighty.’ In this image, the cartoonist captures the desire of soldiers to cop a Blighty wound, a minor...