Lest We Forget

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 been rationales for enlisting, but they were not forces powerful enough to boost a terrified boy over enfiladed sand-bags at the crack of dawn after eight hours of deafening artillery barrage had not only concussed his own brains but had also alerted the enemy to greet his assault with literally millions of bullets and bombs.

As Tim Cook explains in Shock Troops, the second volume in his two-volume magnum opus titled Canadians Fighting the Great War 1914–18, the forces that were powerful enough were “morale, leadership, discipline, soldiers’ agency [i.e., ‘simple pleasures’ such as leave, medals, rum ration, etc.], and a belief in the cause.” With the meticulousness that characterizes both volumes, Cook, a curator at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, proceeds to spend no fewer than 17 pages in detailed analysis of each of these factors. But like the memoirists, he comes back to the one overwhelming stimulus: “The soldiers’ selfless acts can only be understood in terms of the bond of camaraderie between brothers-in-arms.”

This is convincing but not satisfying. John Ellis, in Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I, echoed that each man “would rather be dead than be revealed to their fellows as cowards.” Ellis also pointed out that “the sheer momentum of the forward rush” swept men forward in “a logic of its own.” The young men of 1914–18 had been raised on the romance of battle and had been playing at soldiers since being handed toy rifles in the cradle; they were not so stupid as to be unable to recognize the difference between play war in the backyard and real war in the Flanders mud, but the same principles of bravado and camaraderie applied to both.

Well and good, but why would all of this prove so uniquely unifying to the Canadian soldiers? If every army in the Great War embraced this type of camaraderie, what made the Canadians extraordinary?

Cook does an outstanding job of showing how each and every battle in which Canada participated built a link in the psychological creation of our nation. As we coalesced into an efficient attacking force, our allies began isolating us as the world’s premier shock troops. We had the helpful hands of the British and other imperial troops (and to a lesser extent the French) hoisting us onto the podium, but we perched there alone among all nations. It is the story of that journey from innocence to experience that Cook tells in these two volumes.

In 1914, we were woefully underprepared, inexperienced and naive. And we were not especially quick learners until Ypres: once we took Vimy, however, we proved to be the quickest studies in the field, the best prepared, the most battle hardened and the least naive (or perhaps the most cynical).

Our early defeats at St. Éloi and Mont Sorrel taught us important lessons in discipline, preparedness and flexibility. While carefully paying tribute to the phlegmatic sturdiness of the British troops, Cook explains why the Canadians surged past them into the hammerhead of war:

Shock Troops, slightly more so than At the Sharp End, is a day-by-day, even minute-by-minute account of every Canadian battle on the Western Front, and the details never pall. I have always become fatigued by the time Great War memoirs reach “the Last Hundred Days”; Cook is the first writer to keep me riveted through the descriptions of Amiens, Le Quesnel, Arras, Cambrai, and so on. He does it by personalizing each battle with the stories of the Victoria Cross heroes (just as he personalizes the earlier battles through quotations from memoirs) and by providing us with lucid tactical explanations that assist the reader in keeping a grasp on battle developments. For example, this simple and effective clarification as to why the Germans could never mount a successful counterattack during the Last Hundred Days: “The tempo of the Canadians’ assault played havoc with the enemy’s ability to react in a timely way and with concentrated forces.”

Personalization is Cook’s strength. He fills the lulls between battles with examinations of every aspect of life in the Canadian Corps, sometimes a bit too much for the momentum of the story (there are six consecutive such chapters in the middle of At the Sharp End). We learn exactly what our soldiers were wearing and carrying—27-kilogram packs on men who weighed barely twice that!—and that their average education level was only grade 6, that 80 percent were unmarried, that they were covered in pimples from lack of nutrition and clean water, and that in four years they exchanged a startling total of 85 million letters with loved ones across the Atlantic Ocean. We even discover the bizarre fact that until 1916 it was unlawful for an imperial soldier not to have a moustache!

Chapter 17 of At the Sharp End, entitled “Living in a Sewer,” shows us that that is exactly what the trenches and dugouts were: rat-infested under-ground cesspools of unbreathable stenches and stagnant poison gases, suffocating claustrophobia, slimy mud walls mortared with putrefying corpses and constant, unrelenting fear.

Two volumes totalling 1,328 pages are a formidable feat of writing, and Cook is a muscular yet precise writer. He does not try to be a poet, but his extremely intense empathy with his subject frequently bursts into incandescent prose:

As the story reaches the thousand-page mark, Cook does not flag, but he does come to rely a bit heavily on pet phrases, especially “at the sharp end” and “surgical precision,” and he writes improbably that the Canadians at Cambrai “surrounded it on two sides.” Once the Canadian Corps consolidates its “creeping barrage” tactic in the Last Hundred Days, Cook is trapped into repeatedly stating that “the barrage was brutally effective, but strongpoints that had avoided destruction remained intact all over the front.”

Having written the definitive study of official war historians (the surprisingly interesting Clio’s Warriors), Cook is acutely sensitive to the gaps, faults and pressures in attempting a definitive military history. Hard decisions must be made on which topics will receive minimal treatment, and here it is once again the navy, air force, home front and non-European theatres that get the short end of the stick—but deservedly so, since none of them were as profoundly important to Canada and to the Great War as the Western Front.

Cook’s focus, then, is on “the combat effectiveness of the Canadian Corps … and how that effectiveness was shaped by technology, tactics, command, discipline, and morale.” This requires that he “reconstruct the history from the ground up and understand the complex interplay among divisions and brigades, as well as sections and even individuals.” Cook grasps the truth that explaining any such interplay requires balance and fairness, and he works hard to ensure such a balance is not slanted by his unabashed admiration of the Canadian infantry.

Thus we get very even-handed evaluations of the reviled General Douglas Haig and the over-whelmed General Richard Turner. We also get a sensitive and penetrating sketch of General Arthur Currie and his completely unexpected adroitness in battle strategy and in the international politics of the Allied Command; Cook shows how these factors led Currie to protect his troops by sacrificing other British troops, even as his own men believed he was butchering his troops to ingratiate himself with the British.

Cook also has a deep understanding of how tactics, strategy and technology evolved in the blast furnace of an unprecedented form of warfare. He shows how the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War set military strategists to wonder “how to overcome the power of the defensive” and to reach the tragically erroneous conclusion that “resolve” and “élan” rather than modern weapon technology would do the trick. Commanding officers in 1914–16, hidebound by these wrongheaded ideas and by outmoded tradition and hierarchy, repeatedly chose “glamorous” tactics that guaranteed slaughter. For example, “the idea of the sanctity of ground—and the corresponding belief that to lose ground was to signify defeat—were drilled into officers’ heads on both sides, and counterattacks were therefore constantly ordered to recapture lost ground.”

While the British high command did not tolerate criticism and as a direct result repeatedly caused the preventable destruction of their own troops, Canadian officers listened, learned and adapted, saving thousands of lives by doing so. Chapter 1 of Shock Troops does an excellent job of tracing the recasting of the “attack doctrine” during the winter of 1916–17 and how Canadians “developed a methodical system of waging war that over-came the stalemate on the Western Front.” But as Cook wisely notes, “no matter what tactics were employed or how much firepower was brought to bear, in the open it always came down to flesh and blood against steel and fire.” By the final days, the Canadians could win by either approach: “brute force” or “careful planning.”

This is real army history: Cook lists each section of each Canadian Division and gives the background on its commanders, the geographical base of its members, its nickname, its numerical strength, and so on. In this, he is echoing our Great War memoirists, nearly all of whom diligently list the names of fellow soldiers—often nothing more than a surname, sometimes their hometown, most times their battery number and where they were killed—without any apology, because the point for them is that their fallen comrades shall not be forgotten.

“It is too much to say that Canada was born on the slopes of Vimy Ridge in 1917, as surely Canada had been confederated for fifty years at that point,” concludes Cook. What Vimy and our other great victories did was to establish the sense that “something ‘Canadian’ existed beyond the political federation of provinces and localities.” He adds, with a fine mixture of pride and sorrow, “never before, and never again, would Canada field a force that out-performed all other armies in terms of combat effectiveness.”