At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1914–1916 (review)

For decades, historical acknowledgement of the Canadian Corps’ signal achievements on the battlefields of the First World War suffered because of the absence of a proper official history, and G.W.L. Nicholson’s cef, published in 1962, only partially addressed this shortcoming. At the Sharp End, the first volume of Canadian War Museum historian Tim Cook’s two-volume account, carries us a lot closer to the goal, though it doesn’t quite reach it. The author makes it clear at the outset that his purpose lay not in writing a comprehensive military history of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, but rather an account from the perspective of the nameless Canadian infantryman ‘at the sharp end’ of battle. In vivid – sometimes rather too vivid – prose, Cook evocatively and often poignantly presents the grim experiences of 1915–16, from Second Ypres to the Somme. His research is superb, the author having clearly mined the cef records and first-person accounts, many of the latter from the previously unused Canadian War Museum collection, as well as the rich scholarly literature produced over the last twenty-odd years. Unquestionably, one of the most notable strengths of the book is Cook’s superb ability to personalize the story, where his diligence in the archives paid impressive dividends.

While At the Sharp End is over 600 pages long, which might well have made plowing through the text almost as interminable as the war itself, Cook has broken the book down into forty largely self-contained chapters that not only cover every battle or significant skirmish but also offer intriguing short studies of subjects such as battlefield medicine, snipers, raiding, and leave. Overall, Cook offers little that is really new. A great deal of the material can be found in an article, chapter, or unpublished thesis somewhere else, but nowhere was it conveniently at hand in a single volume. Furthermore, there is little that is provocative in the analysis. His interpretations on the big questions – Currie at Second Ypres, responsibility for failure at St Eloi, Sam Hughes’s malign influence on the army’s professionalization, or that old standby – the rabble to army ‘learning curve’ paradigm – are orthodox. One exception is a modest (and welcome) rehabilitation of General Richard Turner’s reputation as a divisional commander. The errors in the text are mostly of the minor irritant variety – surely liquids don’t become gases when cooled (262), and only Ontario refers to its provincial legislators as members of the provincial parliament (403). And in a history book appropriately replete with contemporary references to petrol tins and the like, why use a term that would have stumped both Generals Currie and Byng – the irritating ‘infanteer’?

For those wanting to read in some depth about the contributions of the senior officer corps, staff work or training, or the exploits of the artillery or engineers, this book will disappoint. But given the nature of fighting in the First World War, by far the largest group of soldiers was ‘poor bloody infantry,’ and Cook does their experience justice. Ordinary Canadians reading At the Sharp End will be engrossed, and students and academics will find it a treasure trove of human interest and recent scholarship, with an impressive amount of the latter the author’s own work. Along with the promised second volume covering 1917–18, this will deservedly become the standard history of the Canadian arms in the First World War.