One of my bookcases is precariously bowed with over a hundred books on the Great War, the majority of them first-person memoirs by Canadian soldiers. These are first-hand accounts of how Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele made Canada a nation and a people. And not only those two battles, but also Ypres, Festubert, St. Éloi, Mont Sorrel, the Somme, Amiens, Canal du Nord, Cambrai.
Examination of what Duff Crerar called “the forging of a nation in the smithy of war” persistently raises two questions in my mind. Given the unique horrors of Western Front trench warfare and the staggering casualty rates (82 percent for Canadian infantry), what force on earth could possibly have kept driving these soldiers over the top into certain death? And why did the entire experience stimulate such an exceptional nationalism amongst the Canadians?
Most memoirists are very emphatic in rejecting home-front claims that they were fighting for country, king and God. Those might have...
James Roots, although currently living in Kanata, Ontario, is a born and bred Torontonian. He learned photography from his father, one of Toronto’s most popular wedding and portrait photographers for half a century.
Advertisement
Advertisement