The Overlooked Majority

The labyrinth-like trenches of the Western Front loom large in our collective memory of Canada’s Great War. Those underground cities, teeming with citizen soldiers living in mud and filth, were relentlessly pounded by high explosive shells, raked by machine-gun fire and corrupted by lung-searing chemical clouds. The wartime poetry and prose, along with post-war cultural products such as novels, television series and films, have focused heavily on that ribbon of death, the 700-kilometre long trench system that wound snake-like from Switzerland to the North Sea, and that barely moved throughout the course of the four years of battle.

Yet the Great War is also widely accepted as a total war where societies were engaged in and directed toward the pursuit of victory, at any cost. For Canada, then a British Dominion of only eight million, the war ushered in enormous political changes, such...