We're Not Dead Yet: The First World War Diary of Bert Cooke (review)

The Great War has been overshadowed by the Second World War in historical writing and popular memory. The success of the Veterans Charter and other government policies ensured that there was a peace dividend for those who fought and sacrificed in the 'good war' against the Nazis. The same did not occur after the Great War, with a debt-ridden Canada struggling to find a place for its returned veterans. There was no 'land fit for heroes,' as leaders and propaganda had promised. Only, seemingly, lies and profiteers. This sense of disillusionment often affected and infused the memory of the Great War. In countries around the world, veterans published their wartime and postwar memoirs, often bitter accounts of their trying experiences in the trenches. The unending death and the wastefulness of the conflict overshadowed many of the legitimate reasons that millions had initially gone to war.

Antiwar writers such as Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Wilfrid Owen offered poignant and powerful denunciations of the war through prose and poetry. Yet while these British elites were erudite and passionate, they clearly did not represent the millions who served in the British and Dominion forces. A Cambridge University–educated officer and a farmer turned private from Saskatchewan were not likely to see the war in the same way, or capture that experience similarly in print afterwards.

Aside from the poetic reflections of the war, there has also been a steady publication of soldiers' memoirs, which continues to this day. Private Bert Cooke's edited diary is one such work and, like the man, it is neither flashy nor poetic. For the most part, it is an account without bitterness. Unlike many of the published memoirs that invariably involved looking back on the war through the difficult years of the 1920s and 1930s, Cooke's offering was written during the war, although apparently edited afterwards. It provides a stoic observation on life as a private in the 75th Battalion.

Cooke had arrived in Canada from the United Kingdom in 1913 at the age of thirty-three. He opened up a delicatessen in Toronto. While anxious to set roots in the city, he found the pull of the war too strong, and like hundreds of thousands of other Canadians and recent British immigrants, he left his family to serve Crown and country. Yet Cooke was also a boot-maker, and his skills were recognized within the battalion, especially after its nearly thousand men spent months marching through fields and cobbled streets in Canada, England, and then France. Cooke was considered too important to allow into the front lines, so he spent much of the war at battalion headquarters with other essential tradesmen, such as armourers and cooks. His view of the fighting was limited, but he offers much insight into the structure of the battalion, the morale of the men as they trudged in and out of the trenches, and the always lively experience of soldiers interacting with the civilian population behind the lines.

Historians will still find much to sink their teeth into in Cooke's memoir. However, there are better Canadian memoirs available, and should the readers of this journal be looking to assign one for an undergraduate class, or simply to delve into the experience of the trenches at the sharp end, the recently published (in many cases reissued) accounts by John Becker, Victor Wheeler, Donald Fraser, Donald Macpherson, Deward Barnes, Agar Adamson, and J.R. Johnston all offer more insight into the war experience.

There are only a handful of Canadian veterans left from the Great War. Yet just as we are on the cusp of seeing the historical memory of the war pass from veterans to historians, there has been a recent surge in the publication of soldiers' memoirs. Many of these accounts, including this one, have been issued by veterans' descendants. While historians remain indebted to the...