A Township at War by Jonathan F. Vance (review)

Jonathan Vance is one of Canada's most gifted historians; he also grew up in East Flamborough Township, near Hamilton, Ontario. His study of the township through World War I is very personal. The result is part family history, part local history. It is also a rich cultural study, a beautifully detailed scrapbook that explains Canadians' continued connection with a war that is now over a century past. It also challenges our understanding of what the war really meant to many Canadians.

Vance's roots run through the small township centres like Carlisle, Mounts-berg, Freelton, and Waterdown that overlook Lake Ontario. Talented local photographers detailed a pre-war township preoccupied with church picnics and swimming holes. Photographs of railway construction and burned-out mills speak of the township's possibilities before 1914. The war came slowly to a township that responded with recruiting drives, tag days, concerts, and funds raised in amounts that would humble their ancestors. The 129th (Wentworth) Battalion, which was part of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, travelled overseas with many East Flamborough men, but, like so many units, it was broken up for reinforcements in the United Kingdom. The commanding officer returned home to pay off a long queue of regimental creditors.

Family connections are at the heart of this book, and the author gently weaves his own through the narrative. On the weekend that Canada entered the war, Stan Sawell of Millgrove took a road trip with his friends to Muskoka. When the country began to register men for active service, Stan travelled through the township south of Dundas street, clipboard in hand, compiling a census of his friends and relatives. "Almost everyone knew Stan." He later penned several accounts of his time on Vimy Ridge. Stan was wounded in 1918, but he survived the war. He married Elizabeth Fleming from Aldershot; their youngest daughter married a Vance. Stan never met his wife's brother, William Fleming, who enlisted in Winnipeg after coming to Canada from Scotland. After writing an optimistic letter home, he died from wounds in May 1915. When Willie's family came to Canada a year later, they kept a condolence letter in a family bible that the author remembers in his Waterdown home. (Willie Fleming was an older brother to Isabell Fleming, the author's grandmother). The letter's reference to John XI ("I am the resurrection, and the life") were the only words in the bible that were "worn and soiled, as if fingers have run over those two verses again and again." In those lines, Vance can trace his own family's enduring grief.

The church bells of East Flamborough pealed when the war ended, but the soldiers' return to East Flamborough brought uncertainty and decline. Few local veterans joined the local chapter of the Great War Veterans' Association (headed, of course, by Stan Sawell). Many struggled to find work; others like Bert Mason saw their marriages end amidst struggles with alcohol. Despite strong objections, the citizens of Waterdown built a memorial hall in 1923. Still, the plaque of soldiers' names was strewn with errors. Children still climb on the remains of a captured artillery piece, installed in 1920, behind an old school: "It hardly looks now like a tangible demonstration of anything-except perhaps neglect." The Canadian memory of the war, so well detailed in Vance's Death So Noble (1997), was far from simple in East Flamborough township.

In the end, the author maintains that the strong kinship networks of rural Canada created a very different wartime experience than for those living in the cities. The numbers of war dead were far less in the townships, but their impact was more widely felt. For those of us who have taught about Canada and World War I, the book offers a sobering corrective. Vance's careful reading of letters, council minutes, church records, photographs, and newspapers reveal little talk of labour protest, votes for women, or opposition to conscription. Those looking for insights into these issues may...