Firing Lines: Three Canadian Women Write the First World War by Debbie Marshall (review)

Ever a champion of women's voices and historical experiences, Debbie Marshall uses her new book to "provide a wide-open window into the complex, compelling characters" of three prominent female journalists of the early twentieth century–Mary MacLeod Moore, Elizabeth Montizambert, and Beatrice Nasmyth– and to "bring them to life again for a new generation of readers" (276). To do so, she draws primarily upon the women's voluminous published work (books, newspaper columns, and magazine articles) and private correspondence, lightly buttressed by secondary material to help place the women's experiences in context. Readers follow the progress of the First World War as lived by MacLeod Moore, Montizambert, and Nasmyth–often in their own words–and as compiled and framed by Marshall. All three subjects do indeed come to life within the narrative as vital, determined, and industrious.

Firing Lines is best described as creative non-fiction: in a style more literary than scholarly, it touches on the histories of Canadian women in journalism, major battles of the Great War, England and France at war, and wartime civilian society–but it is not "a history of" any of those things. Nor is it straight biography, although it does contain much biographical detail. And although it deals with Canadian women in wartime, it is not about Canada during the war–all three women decamped to Europe after August 1914. The structure of the book reflects the curious blend of its eclectic components. Part One offers three chapters of biographical background, one for each woman. A bit less genealogy and local colour and more explanation of how easy or difficult it was for each woman to break into the male world of early twentieth-century Canadian journalism would be welcome, but the distinctive backgrounds and personalities of each woman are well established. Part Two follows them collectively through the war, cutting back and forth between the three as they pursue their journalism, war work, and personal lives closer to the Western Front than most Canadian women did. Of particular note is the women's joint participation in the first tour of the lines of communication in France by Canadian women journalists, and Nasmyth's role in the successful election campaign of Canadian Nursing Sister Roberta MacAdams, both in 1917. Part Three separates the women's narratives again and offers glimpses into the women's post-1918 lives, suggesting that nothing in subsequent years quite matched the sense of purpose, excitement, or professional success they experienced during the Great War. Nor did their reputations outlast their lives, as noted by cbc journalist Anna Maria Tremonti in a thoughtful foreword reflecting on the (seeming) absence of professional foremothers to her generation of late twentieth-century female war correspondents.

The whole is told in a series of short vignettes, richly imagined, vividly described, and written in a highly accessible style. Scholars of women and war, or of the Great War more broadly, will not find many new insights unless they are specifically interested in these three women or their writing (but, it should be added, there is reason to be interested in both). Scholars will also wish there were fewer descriptions of delicious buttery scones and a more rigorous analysis throughout the book, and will miss the insightful discussions of gaps and silences in the historical record that distinguished the author's previous work on Roberta MacAdams. However, Marshall must be applauded for the way she has embedded her subjects in a fully realized wartime world that includes the sensual pleasures (and, later, deprivations) of French pastries and fashion, and the importance of romance and family ties, alongside the terrors of Zeppelin raids, the slaughter in the trenches, and the challenges of carving out a professional space in the world of wartime journalism. Firing Lines tells an engaging wartime story through the eyes of women; there is nothing quite like it on the shelves of Canadian historical writing about the...