Between Commemoration and History: The Historiography of the Canadian Corps and Military Overseas

With few exceptions, Canadian historians remain divided between those who write the social and political history of the home front and those interested in what happened overseas.¹ While historians of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (cef) and its soldiers have been influenced by shifting interpretations in the British field, our historiography has also been characterized more by consensus than debate.² The home front and battlefield literatures have essentially evolved independently of one another. While most historians of the former emphasize the divisive nature of the Great War and question whether older colony-to-nation narratives can capture the diversity of the Canadian experience, historians of operations and the cef experience have sometimes been less critical, writing in a positivist, nationalistic tradition, which retains the nation-building narrative as a core focus. In large measure this is because military historians are more often motivated by a commemoration impulse, which then shapes the nature of their studies and the questions they ask. This paper focuses on the historiography of the cef and the Canadian experience overseas. It argues that in emphasizing national narratives, the importance of commemoration, and the unifying aspects of military service, while minimizing the significance of divisions defined by “race,” class, gender, and region, we continue to implicitly cast the Great War as a nation-building event. At the hundredth anniversary, we should ask whether integrating home front and battlefield literatures might shed new light on these old problems while shifting our analytical framework from one of national commemoration to transnational comparison.³

Our impulse to commemorate the war as a nation-building event goes back to the height of the conflict itself and Robert Borden’s decision to purchase influence with Britain through blood sacrifice, which cast the fight as a national crusade for a greater role in imperial affairs.⁴ In Death So Noble, Jonathan Vance argues that when this mission failed, Canadian families and the state gave meaning to the deaths of 60,000 Canadians by constructing a myth of purposeful sacrifice.⁵ Christ-like Canadian soldiers had died, went the new story, to preserve Christian civilization. The narrative gave meaning to the slaughter and cast the Canadian Corps as a unifying force that won Canada recognition and respect on the battlefields of Europe. Just before the unveiling of Canada’s national memorial at Vimy Ridge in 1936, Colonel A.F. Duguid, the dominion’s first official historian, told the Canadian Historical Association that it was at Vimy that the Canadian Corps “was consolidated into one homogeneous entity; the most powerful self-contained striking force on any battle-front.” For Duguid, the formation of an elite Canadian fighting unit was a profound national accomplishment, and he believed that it was the duty of historians to preserve “the tradition of self-sacrifice, and the transmission to posterity of that precious heritage so dearly bought in battle overseas during the most momentous years in Canadian history.”⁶

At the war’s fiftieth anniversary, the Canadian Corps’ prowess on the battlefield remained a significant point of national pride, despite another major war in the intervening years. As John Sweetenham explained, “From Vimy on, the record of the Canadians was one of unbroken success; and this in a war where failure was common and the reputations of generals were shot to pieces.”⁷ As Canada moved further away from the British sphere of influence in the 1950s and 1960s, the story of the Canadian Corps shifted to one in which colonial soldiers out-performed British regulars and in the process earned a new degree of autonomy on the battlefields of France and Belgium. By the seventy-fifth anniversary, Desmond Morton and J.L. Granatstein pushed this basic argument further, suggesting that “even though Canadians fought as allies of the British, for Canada the Great War was a war of independence.” To be sure, Morton and Granatstein acknowledged that the road to independence was marred by political turmoil at home, but the divisiveness caused by conscription, the labour revolt, and ethnic internments were products of this national...