The Vimy Trap: Or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great War by Ian McKay, Jamie Swift (review)

In their most recent collaboration, Ian McKay and Jamie Swift have produced a thoughtful critique of Canadian nationalism, demonstrating how a strategically negligible and catastrophically violent battle became transformed into the birth of a nation. In recent decades, the Battle of Vimy Ridge (1917), and the Great War itself, have been afforded an almost reverential status in popular and political discourse. This phenomenon, called “Vimyism” by the authors, crystallized over the 1980s and 1990s, and by the new millennium had permeated school textbooks, academic works, and political platforms. The object of The Vimy Trap is to recontextualize the battle, to get “Vimy’s history right,” and to bring “home the complex horrors and suffering of modern warfare, nullifying the baseless celebration of war” (11). Covering a century of historical material, the narrative is suffused with the evocative critique of Fred Varley, whose 1918 painting For What? similarly laid bare the scarcely concealed contradictions of modern industrial society. Readers, no doubt, will reflect on the same question. The Vimy Trap is openly (and refreshingly) polemical, well researched, and lucid in its cultural criticism and is likely to disrupt the martial celebrations of Vimy’s 100th anniversary.

The first chapter addresses the contours of Vimyism in the twenty-first century, underlining its mythology and “childish” nostalgia for a “day of glorious battle” (11). The Canadian Citizenship Guide’s celebration of General Arthur Currie, or the Kingston city council’s proposed “Valor District,” for example, betrayed a “provincial” or fetishized image of war, which was far removed from the “bigger picture” and “the people and conditions in other faraway places” (10). Vimy as a “trap,” the authors contend, narrows the universe of political discourse (as Herbert Marcuse might say), in effect insulating “official” narratives from critique. “The Great War had become truly great again,” a founding event in the Canadian state’s long march to nationhood (6).

But history contravenes the Vimyist mythology, as McKay and Swift go on to demonstrate. Although criticism of the Great War was sparse during the first months of fighting (the first of three “acts”), it was not long before the jubilance of 1914 was overcome by disillusionment and regret; by 1918, anti-war sentiment was rife in both right and left political camps, personal accounts, letters, and literature. The Methodist minister Samuel Chown enthusiastically enlisted before joining his radical-feminist cousin, Alice, in condemning the violence. Soldiers on the front line reflected with bitter irony on the “high diction” and grandiose gestures of far-away generals, for whom it was, indeed, sweet and proper to die for one’s country. Many veterans and other thinkers recorded their ambivalence or disquiet in novels after the war. Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed (W. Morrow and Company, 1930), the authors note, is among the most well known but hardly an outlier. Even ostensibly pro-war pieces from former Governor General John Buchan–“every sane man must be a devotee of peace” (60)–condemned the violence. There was virtually nothing to suggest that Vimy Ridge was a turning point in the war, let alone the birth of Canada. The war was understood to be an exercise in futility, not nation building.

Importantly, the authors do not funnel Harrison, Chown, or the sardonic front-line aphorisms down a pro- or anti-war dichotomy. Instead, they usefully appropriate Martin Ceadal’s five-tiered typology to reflect on the interstices of those dichotomous absolutes (117). Between militarists and pacifists were complex and contradictory responses to Varley’s For What?, and, in this respect, the monument at Vimy Ridge was exemplary. Walter Allward’s magisterial work had been designed, in his words, as a “protest in a quiet way against the futility of war” (135). Mackenzie King, among others, certainly shared this perspective, but his contempt for war became fused with an affirmation of valour...