Percy Willmot: A Cape Bretoner at War, 1914–1919 (review)

This book groups more than one hundred First World War letters written by soldier Percy Willmot, a recent British immigrant to Sydney, Nova Scotia, to his unmarried sister, Dorothy, who had followed him to Sydney in 1911. Percy is a perceptive chronicler of events around him, and he shows an engaged interest in the war and Canada’s role in it. But his letters are mainly about the experiences of Cape Bretoners at home and in uniform and, especially, are concerned with his sister’s welfare and her activities on the home front.

Obviously patriotic, and with most of his immediate family still in Britain, Percy enlisted in November 1914 at the age of thirty. Without a love interest from 1914 until 1919, just before his death, Percy comes off as something of a tragic, lonely figure. Dorothy was twenty-three at the time and Percy’s letters show him to have been exceptionally possessive of her, sometimes bordering on the obsessive. Whatever the case, he wrote her immediately upon enlisting in Sydney, ‘I am glad to see you are brave and quite content that your brother should give his life in the service of his country’ (43). Not long after, he wrote, ‘I am, for the first time in my life, animated by an unselfish motive – a real patriotic ardour and the love of the dearest, sweetest sister in all the world’ (50).

Percy joined the 25th Battalion, an infantry unit recruited in Nova Scotia. Many of the men were Cape Bretoners and they maintained close ties of kinship and friendship, further welded by shared regional and, frequently, occupational identities. Percy’s letters, extraordinarily detailed about the lives of individuals from the battalion, their families, and those remaining back home, are a gold mine for those interested in local family and even commercial history. In fact, the letters should be approached as much from a genealogical perspective as a historical one. Moreover, Bryan Tennyson, the collection’s editor, has identified virtually everyone mentioned in Willmot’s letters. Still, for those interested more in Canadians’ experiences at the front, the letters will, unsurprisingly perhaps, be found wanting.

Tennyson occasionally overdoes the building of an evolving historical context, relying on published historical accounts, and seems somewhat absorbed in his delivery of a cavalcade of biographical and genealogical information of limited interest. Fortunately much of this is consigned to the endnotes, though there is some ‘filler’ in the text as well. Worse, much of the material in Percy’s letters is achingly dull and frequently repetitive; quite a number need not have been included in the published collection. Percy himself wrote in January 1916, ‘I haven’t much of interest to say to anybody and I fear that my letters must grow less and less interesting.’

Percy served for most of the war as a sergeant in the battalion orderly room in a staff position that kept him away from the firing lines. Still, he was in close proximity to combat and felt its painful effects. The 1916 Somme campaign devastated the 25th Battalion and, of the horrific loss of life, Percy would write Dorothy in October 1916, ‘I feel that I am fast becoming a hardened and calloused old Soldier. The loss of dear friends is a matter of every day occurrence and awakens little deep feeling’ (142). The magnitude of the human catastrophe inured him to death, and began in him the slow process of dehumanization so prevalent in the trenches.

On 14 April 1917, in the immediate aftermath of the Canadians’ famous capture of Vimy Ridge, Percy wrote Dorothy, ‘This is the battlefield that will go down in history as the magnificent achievement of the Canadian Corps’ (159). Perhaps supporting the enduring view that the capture of the ridge became an instant milestone on the road to Canadian national affirmation, Percy wrote, ‘As the guns spoke, over the bags they went – men of [Cape Breton] sons of [Nova Scotia] and [New...