Tea and Hypocrisy

Nations, like families, tend to see the past through a refracting glow of myth. For Canadians educated before the Trudeau years, the misty lens generally worked to filter out any evidence that Canadians were not, in fact, more respectable—orderly, pious, unassuming and honest—than our crude and noisy neighbour to the south. For later generations, the lens took on a rosier hue: we became, even retroactively, a beacon of tolerance among nations, at least by contrast. It can prove painful to renounce these cherished illusions. A contemporary class of university students, confronted with the unpalatable fact that many affluent Canadians owned slaves well into the 19th century, all but pass through the five stages of mourning.

One of history’s roles is to replace these retroactive distortions with cold, hard fact—and Desmond Morton’s Fight or Pay: Soldiers’ Families in the Great War manages to do considerable damage to both fictions. The historian’s latest work...