Writing on the Great War at the Centenary: Recent Books on Canada’s First World War

More than a century now separates us from the opening salvoes of the First World War, yet the conflict continues to stimulate new scholarship, discussion, and public debate in Canada. Most recently, the Never Forgotten National Memorial Foundation has garnered national attention, much of it highly critical, for its proposal to build an ostentatious 24-metre tall war memorial on the Cabot Trail at Green Cove, Nova Scotia. The prospective memorial site would be dedicated to all of Canada’s war dead—not exclusively those of the 1914-19 conflict—but the design is very clearly inspired by the iconic figure of Canada Bereft (more commonly referred to as Mother Canada), a central piece of statuary on the Vimy National Memorial in France. This is likely no coincidence, as many twenty-first-century Canadians look to the Battle of Vimy Ridge and the First World War more generally as vital transformative experiences in their nation’s history, ones which ostensibly fostered Canada’s coming of age as an independent nation.

National progress, transformation, growth, and development have been recurrent staples in Canadian First World War historiography for at least the past 20 years. Canadians, of course, had been writing about the war virtually since it began in 1914, but it was not until the 1990s that scholars (rather than official military historians or regimental chroniclers) began to examine the war experience in substantial depth, making particular use of a vast repository of documentary evidence from the RG (record group) 9 fonds (Department of Militia and Defence), in the collections of Library and Archives Canada. Two early groundbreaking studies, When Your Number’s Up: The Canadian Soldier in the First World War (1993) and Surviving Trench Warfare: Technology and the Canadian Corps, 1914-1918 (1992), by Desmond Morton and Bill Rawling respectively, have examined the war largely through soldiers’ eyes, underscoring what the authors saw to be the evolution of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) from a band of enthusiastic amateurs in 1914-15 to an army of hard-bitten (if reluctant) professionals in 1917-18. As Morton puts it, “the fifty months from August 1914 to November 1918 witnessed a remarkable transformation in almost everything that affected the soldiers” and the new tactics of 1918 “fitted Canadians like their well-worn tunics” (Morton 1993, viii-ix). Shane Schreiber built on this interpretation a few years later in Shock Army of the British Empire, his study of the Canadian Corps in the Hundred Days campaign of August–November 1918, which argues that Canadians succeeded on the battlefield through pragmatism and innovation. Tim Cook, one of the nation’s leading First World War scholars today, has also written about the war in transformative terms, most notably in his comprehensive and widely acclaimed two-volume history of the CEF (At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1914-1916 and Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917-1918).¹

Questions surrounding national, social, and military progress, transformation, and coming of age are instrumental to Catching the Torch (Gordon 2014), The Greatest Victory (Granatstein 2014), Old Enough to Fight (Blade and Boileau 2013), and A...