Battles of the Imagined Past: Canada’s Great War and Memory

The Great War of 1914–18 raged for four long years, directly killing some nine million on the battlefield and leading to the death of millions of civilians through starvation, disease, and genocide. The fighting left another twenty million soldiers wounded in body and spirit. The war remade Europe, destroyed old empires and carved out new nations, unleashed the power of communism, created the conditions for fascism, and in its dying embers provided the sparks for the Second World War. The Great War casts a long shadow, as the war’s meaning over the last hundred years has been represented, reinterpreted, sometimes twisted, and at times abused. The debate over the memory of the war now seems especially lively and played out in popular culture and politics and with public apologies for past deeds, mixed with exhortations for future nationalistic-driven celebrations and commemorations.

As our three contributors have observed through their critical analysis of some aspects of the recent Great War historiography, these old battlegrounds remain deeply disputed. While our contributors have focused on the use of the war as a nation-building tool, the recent trend of historians to provide a voice to the previously marginalized, and the changing interpretation of the war in Quebec, I will offer some linking and contextualizing thoughts. Over the last hundred years, there appears to have emerged three dominant narratives on Canada’s Great War, as played out in Canadian society, forged and remade with succeeding generations of participants, myth-makers, cultural creators, and historians. This memory goes far beyond the scholarship forged by historians. The three narratives – that of the war as a terrible and useless slaughter, the war as a nation-building event, and the war as a divisive event – will be described below, along with a fourth narrative that is suggested for consideration. This article will then examine three broad areas of scholarship – the overseas fighting experience, the home front, and the memory of the war – before offering a few thoughts on the coming centennial commemorations during the period of 2014–18.

Central to Canada’s collective memory of the Great War is the sheer waste of lives. From a nation of eight million, Canada saw more than 620,000 serve in uniform. Of those, the more than 66,000 killed during the war and in the immediate years following it cut a terrible swath across the country, while another 172,000 wounded veterans were a constant reminder, in scarred flesh, blinded vision, missing limbs, and lasting psychological trauma, of the ongoing cost of war.¹ With this carnage, it is not surprising that the principal defining narrative strand today for most Canadians is of the war as an appalling massacre that wiped out a generation. While the gut-wrenching losses are undeniable, in the war’s aftermath, as Jonathan Vance eloquently reminded us in Death So Noble, the war was not constructed as a senseless conflict.² The losses at the front were perceived and then articulated to mean something to those who lived through it. This was a just war and the sacrifices of the nation had been in a worth-while cause. Yet over time the war’s meaning has changed, and at least from the 1960s, and for many as far back as the late 1920s, the war’s dominant narrative was remade into a conflict of pointless carnage. This theme runs prominently through almost every single cultural product since the late 1920s, and especially in the writings of war poets and soldiers’ memoirs, as well as films, plays, novels, graphic novels, television series, and feature films.³

There is also a second, equally powerful strand of memory, embraced by many Canadians, and highlighted in Humphries’s article, which seems to contradict the first. The Great War is situated in many historical works and pedagogical products as the crucible in which the nation was forged. While Canada had been confederated fifty years earlier, these collective stories suggest that it was not until the fire of battle made the nation that Canadians emerged as a distinct people. The war...