1914 in 2014: What We Commemorate When We Commemorate the First World War

At the website of the Department of Canadian Heritage, the first line of the summary history of the First World War reads, “When Britain declared war in August 1914, Canada – as a British Dominion – was also at war.”¹ This is accurate and echoes an analysis widely used in writing and teaching about 1914.² But it is equally true that Canada was an autonomous state in 1914. It could have chosen to contribute a few troops, or none. Actual Canadian participation in the war was a Canadian decision produced by the Canadian political institutions of that time – a point usually less emphasized than the description of a nation “automatically at war.”

Can we speak of a Canadian choice about the war in 1914? There is little on which to build a counterfactual consideration of how a Canadian decision for neutrality might have been reached. Indeed, the only plausible sequence seems to start with Britain opting to avoid the European war. Non-involvement was a very real option for Britain in August 1914, actually preferred by the British Cabinet until the very last moment, as recent accounts of the origins of the war all show.³ Britain, to use a phrase more 2014 than 1914, had agency. It chose to join the First World War after having very seriously considered not doing so.

Not surprisingly, British commemoration of the war in 2014 has produced a widely covered debate about that choice and its consequences.⁴ The historian Richard Evans has called the war “a victory for no one … the seminal catastrophe of the entire period,” and says of British soldiers who believed they fought for civilization, freedom, and a better world, “They were wrong.”⁵ On the other side, Professor Gary Sheffield finds that Britain’s First World War was just and necessary, “a war of national survival, a defensive conflict fought at huge cost against an aggressive enemy bent on achieving hegemony in Europe.”⁶

There were certainly pacifist and uncommitted and reluctant Canadians in 1914, but there was no individual, faction, or social movement able to force the country into a serious debate about Canadian participation.⁷ Prime Minister Robert Borden understood the war as “the suicide of civilization,” but he and his government supported Canadian participation unconditionally. So did opposition leader Wilfrid Laurier and the Liberal Party. In August 1914 even the nationalist Henri Bourassa endorsed Canadian participation. Canada, not having had a debate in 1914 about entering the war, is unlikely to have one in 2014 about how a self-governing country could allow its foreign and military policy to have been made so uncritically.

Given the absence of debate, in 2014 as in 1914, about why Canada participated in the war, the commemorative impulse seems likely to be defined by efforts to empathize with the violence, danger, suffering, and loss experienced by individual Canadians caught in the war, regardless of its causes or consequences. Early twenty-first-century citizens are already well prepared for that kind of commemoration. The habits of poppy-wearing and remembrance of the dead each November; the genealogy boom and its focus on recalling individual lives; the huge influence of the U.S. Vietnam Veterans Memorial upon ideas of commemoration; the emphasis placed by popular social history and historical fiction on individual experience; the enthusiasm of media for personalizing historical topics – all these encourage Canadians to note the centenary principally by engaging with the ordinary soldier or civilian, and particularly with those killed in action.

Similarly, most Canadian literary and creative work about the war – Timothy Findley’s The Wars, John Gray’s Billy Bishop Goes to War, Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road, Frances Itani’s Deafening, Paul Gross’s film Passchendaele- portrays the war almost as a natural phenomenon, something Canadians endured rather than as something to be solved, explained, or relieved by the actions of the protagonists. Leading nonfiction treatments of the war, from Pierre Berton’s Vimy and Sandra Gwyn’s Tapestry of War to Tim Cook’s two-volume Canadians Fighting the Great War...