Boys and Girls in No Man’s Land: English-Canadian Children and the First World War (review)

Among the neglected groups that scholars are working to write back into history, children and youth are currently at the forefront. At the same time, military history has expanded to include analysis of the social and cultural implications of conflicts on different groups in society. Susan Fisher’s Boys and Girls in No Man’s Land: English-Canadian Children and the First World War, is a welcome result of these developments. It is an attempt to understand the place of children, especially in fiction, in First World War Canada, and to compare that with how children in that war are represented in historical fiction today.

Fisher examines children’s fundraising activities and work in support of the war effort. She also looks at textbooks and non-textual sources such as the physical environment of classrooms and the rituals of Empire Day. The main focus of the study, though, is on children’s fiction, specifically children’s fiction with a wartime subject. This is important, she argues, because writing for children provides perhaps the clearest insight into “the essence of national thinking” of the time (p. 24).

While there is perhaps little that is new in the zeitgeist she uncovers – the nature of imperial fervour is relatively well-known, the context provided helps disprove some popular myths. Fisher shows that patriotism was not born of wartime, that its language and attitudes were already firmly entrenched in pre-war Edwardian Canada. The strong sense of imperial duty that shaped the country’s response to the war, including the lessons it offered its youthful citizens, was only a logical extension of turn of the century imperialist fervour. She also notes the “strange irony” that the war remembered today as Canada’s birth as a nation was actually a war for the defence of the Empire (p. 79).

The fundamental contribution children were expected to make to the war effort was to “be good,” partly because that was easier for adults, but also because it showed they were worthy of the sacrifices that were such a key part of the discourse of the war. Her study offers clear evidence of the benefits of focusing on children’s experiences of the war. In her discussion, for example, of children’s war work Fisher challenges the interpretation that it was motivated largely by anger, part of the crusade against the “Hun.” She sees the children as compassionate: desiring to help the victims of war, and motivated by a desire to be part of the great struggle that had engrossed the attention of the adults around them. Children also seemed to find the work exciting, a chance to do something important.

She finds that writing for children was comparatively static, changing less over the course of the conflict than other wartime literature. Children’s war fiction was also notably “domesticated,” by which Fisher means both tamed, outside of the chaos of war, and home-centered. A key theme in the reliably didactic stories was the restoration of order at the familial level to resolve the problems caused by war. She draws her sources from British and American as well as Canadian fiction, and finds different national characteristics in the literature to which children were exposed. Canadian writing emphasised service and sacrifice, British focused on imperial adventure, gallantry, and racial pride, while American writing promoted the optimistic view that the new world would not be scarred by the battles of the old.

There were also important differences between boys’ and girls’ stories. The necessity of obedience was emphasised for both, but to different ends. A fictional boy needed to learn to obedient to become good soldier, while a girl so she would become good woman. Female heroine’s wartime adventures were always temporary, returning to an appropriate feminine role or context before the end of the book. At the same time, the shifts in gender divisions that have...