Black Soldiers in a White Man's War: Race, Good Order and Discipline in a Great War Labour Battalion by Gordon Douglas Pollock (review)

Gordon Douglas Pollock sets out, in Black Soldiers in a White Man's War, to write a detailed history of the No. 2 Construction Battalion's participation in the Canadian Expeditionary Force effort during World War I, as well as a demythification of that participation. The book succeeds admirably in achieving these related goals, restoring to the men who served in the unit a humanity that embraces the successes and failings of ordinary lives during extraordinary times.

The No. 2 Construction Battalion was intended to provide an opportunity for Canadians of African descent to serve king and country during the global crisis that erupted in 1914 and that implicated the whole of the British Empire in critical and thoroughgoing ways. Yet problems emerged from the very beginning. Recruitment was sluggish, desertions and illness further depleted the unit's strength even before departure for Europe, and racism induced military officials to decline to deploy the unit for its intended use laying and repairing railroad tracks near the front. Instead, the battalion joined elements of the Canadian Forestry Corps harvesting timber in the Alps, far from the war zone. Chronic indiscipline led to the separation of fifty of the worst-offending "undesirables" from the main body of the unit, who then served in rear areas of the British front on the Somme, isolated from both their compatriots in the No. 2 and the white civilian population. In all, one in every three members of the battalion faced serious disciplinary punishment, and one in every twenty faced more serious charges before a court-martial. This record exceeds even that of the notoriously undisciplined Québecois 22^nd Battalion, and so it is quite probable that the No. 2 faced more punitive measures than any other unit in the cef. Pollock's assiduous research has uncovered detailed information about the violent nature of many of these offenses against military discipline (though many were for simple insubordination and absences without leave), as men in the unit came into conflict with other soldiers stationed in France and with each other.

None of this has prevented the development over the century since the end of the First World War of a mythology that celebrates the No. 2 as the heroic embodiment of Black contributions to the Canadian war effort. Their service has been misrepresented, with claims that they performed dangerous duties, including mine-clearing, near the combat zone. As Pollock puts it, such myth-making has transported the men "from their posts in the forests along the Swiss border and southern Normandy, to be entrenched in the front lines. And there they have remained in popular imagination ever since" (189). Yet it is not Pollock's intent to replace these legends with a story that denigrates the service of the men of No. 2. He credits the popular (mis)understanding of the battalion's service with properly "extolling the triumph of Black men gaining the right to serve their country with dignity, despite Canada's inherent racism" (186). His final verdict on the men, "Less than saints certainly, they were considerably more human than the plaster figures of poetic and popular imagination" (194), results from taking the humanity of the men seriously, seriously enough to delve deep into archival sources that provide us with rich detail about their lives and experiences.

Pollock has made impressive use, in particular, of the recruits' attestation papers. Now digitized and easily accessible, these documents provide personal and demographic information for every member of the cef. Using these, as well as papers generated by the unit's officers and records of disciplinary bodies and courts-martial, the author is able to reconstruct the personal, day-to-day experiences of the men. He demonstrates how racism shaped these experiences, as well as other structural elements of the...