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| The Flag by Byam Shaw (1919) |
These reflections were inspired by the two-day conference “1914-1918
The Making of the Modern World” held at the Toronto Munk School of
Global Affairs on July 30 and 31, 2014. Speakers presented papers on a
wide variety of topics, both national and international, on military,
political, social and artistic themes associated with the Great War and
its legacy. The conference concluded with a visit to the residence of
the Lieutenant Governor, David Onley, at Queens Park and later that
evening with an emotional evening of military formations, music and
speakers at Varsity Arena packed with 6000 people. I will not attempt to
address all topics and speakers but will focus on one thread, albeit
never explicitly stated: the frequent disconnect between how veterans
and civilians experienced and recalled the war and the contemporary and
later attempts to depict it in art and popular culture.
Apart from commemorations, my impression is that most public awareness about the Great War is derived from films –
All Quiet on the Western Front,
Paths of Glory,
Gallipoli to name just a few – or from novels such as Pat Barker’s
Regeneration trilogy and Sebastian Faulks’
Birdsong.
What they all have in common is their anti-war message, that this war,
as opposed to the Second World War, was not only a tragedy but a waste.
Even Margaret Macmillan in her masterfully-delivered keynote overview on
the origins and legacy of the war used the word “waste” to signify the
human losses and the problems that it created: among them, that without
the war, Russia would have evolved into a constitutional monarchy and
the Bolsheviks would have never come to power; without Germany’s defeat,
Hitler and Nazism may not have occurred, and no Second World War. And
the problems in the Middle East that continue to bedevil us are in part a
legacy of the war.
Another take on the war delivered by historian, Jonathan Vance, drew upon his seminal monograph,
Death so Noble: Memory, Meaning and the First World War
(UBC Press, 1997) to profile John Daniel Logan, and then to extrapolate
from his life the values that not only shaped him but those of his
English-Canadian fellow veterans and civilians alike between the world
wars. Prior to the Great War, Logan acquired a superior education, wrote
poetry and literary criticism, taught and worked in advertising. None
of these accomplishments provided him with financial or emotional
satisfaction. It was only when he joined the army in 1916 at the age of
46 and fought at Vimy and Passchendaele that he found his métier in
life. He enjoyed not only the comradeship of his unit but he drew
spiritual sustenance from the ultimate sacrifices made for the cause.
After the war, Logan assembled two collections of poetry that were
inspired by the vision of a heroic death that was sublime and beautiful,
expressed in the lofty language that we usually associate with British
writers such as Rupert Brooke before his death or J.M. Barrie before his
disillusionment. But Logan never lost his belief in the spiritual
dimension of a sacrifice willingly made, regardless of the brutality
inflicted upon the body by shrapnel, artillery or gas. War was the
supreme adventure, a great glorious undertaking demonstrating that life
was less important than death. He never changed his mind about that; the
poems he wrote before 1916 were similar to those he wrote after. And
yet before we stereotype him as pre-war Victorian, Vance reminded us
that Logan was dismissive of the jingoistic war poetry and promoted the
aspirations of women poets. He likely would not have appreciated D.W.
Griffith’s heavy-handed propaganda war film,
Hearts of the World,
of which we were shown a clip by another speaker, the film scholar,
Seth Feldman, who provided an excellent overview of contemporary and
more recent films about the war. But Logan did believe that the “trial
of war” would invigorate Canadian culture.
Logan’s belief in noble sacrifices for a righteous cause, not the waste
of human lives, reflected the sentiment of much of the English-speaking
population during and after the war (unlike French Canadians who could
only remember the war with bitterness and its associations with the
rancorous 1917 conscription crisis). Theirs (the English) was a just war
against an evil tyranny and they hearkened back to medieval and
Victorian texts and imagery to commemorate it through war memorials,
stained glass windows in churches that deified as Christ-like soldiers
and Armistice Day proceedings. In her PowerPoint of war paintings, art
historian Maria Tippet featured a popular painting,
The Flag by
John Byam Shaw that represents the sacrifice made by the Canadian
soldier depicting the body draped with the Canadian red ensign placed
between the paws of the British lion and surrounded by people for whom
the sacrifice had been made. The peace and serenity that suffuses the
dead soldier is how Canadians wanted to remember those who willingly
sacrificed their lives. By contrast, F.H. Varley’s
For What? is a
controversial, modernist painting in which dead soldiers are heaped
unceremoniously in a cart to await burial beneath a row of crosses. The
image, like the title, conveys the pointlessness of the war, a
perspective vehemently rejected by most English-Canadian veterans and
civilians because, as Vance quoted a politician, it would mean
surrendering to desolation. One can only imagine what veterans and the
public would have thought of the savagely satirical drawings and
paintings of the German Expressionist artist, George Grosz, or his
national compatriot, Otto Dix, who spent four years in the trenches and
rendered his experience into unflinching, stark etchings and paintings.
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| For What? by Frederick Varley (1918) |
Unlike in Britain where the post-war era was marinated in
disillusionment, Canadians, according to Vance, surrendered to a myth
that was “a complex mixture of fact, wishful thinking, half-truth, and
outright invention.” The myth bore little resemblance to the slaughter
that occurred but enabled veterans and the public to make sense of it.
Rather than recount the horrors of war
—for the most part veterans
remained adamantly silent
—they remembered only the good times: the
lighter, more humorous moments, a beautiful sunrise, bathing in streams
and the laughter of the “boys.” These selective memories were recalled
in memoirs, novels, poetry and film such as the melodrama
Under the Black Eagle that follows the adventures of a police dog on the Western Front.
The anti-war vision found expression in novels such
All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque. Its cinematic adaption was seen in Canadian
theatres but in no way enjoyed the support it garnered elsewhere. The
Canadian veteran, Will Bird, wrote his memoir,
And We Go On, as a corrective to books such as
All Quiet
that he believed were “putrid with so-called realism.” Unlike other
Canadian accounts that underscore the lighter more humorous moments,
Bird’s account does not ignore the physical horror but in his telling he
and his comrades retain their sense of decency and humanity, and were
not brutalized by their war experience. Bird’s memoir was well-received
and, despite its bracing grimness about life in the trenches, was more
commensurate with the upbeat convictions of Logan and the romantic
pre-war English-Canadian sensibilities during the interwar years.
As scholars Ross Fair and Martin Friedland reminded us, these
conservative, traditional sentiments were also much in evidence in
Toronto and at the University of Toronto during the Great War. Toronto
the Good was a relatively small military bastion and everyone seemed
swept up by the “imperial patriotism” and were willing to undertake
whatever sacrifices were necessary to win the war. Unlike cosmopolitan
London in the UK, there does not appear to be any evidence of dissent or
opposition to the war; there were no conscientious objectors or
conchies, as they were derisively known, or any evidence of women
handing out white feathers to civilians whom they believed should be in
uniform. Any opposition was confined to pressuring the U of T President,
Robert Falconer, to fire three German-born professors. Academic freedom
collapsed under press and political attacks. Falconer was strongly
criticized by a member of the U of T board when he arranged in November
1914 for these professors to take a leave of absence with full pay until
the end of term. But his sentiments about the war reflected the
citizens of Toronto and the interwar generation when he implored
students to unite behind the Union Jack contending that “to live by
shirking one’s duty is infinitely worse than to die.”
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| James Wilby and Jonathan Pryce in Behind the Lines (1998) |
Mark Humphries paper on “Shell Shock and its Aftermath” reinforced
conservative attitudes by linking them to the culture’s definition of
masculinity when Canadian shell shock victims applied for a pension
after the war. More than 15,000 Canadian soldiers were diagnosed with
some form of war-related psychological wounds. Humphries provided the
example of Hunter L. who displayed heroic service in France before being
blown up by a shell and rendered unconscious after which he “cried for
some time.” He returned to duty voluntarily and incurred a similar
experience, was shipped to a hospital in England where he was “on bad
terms” with the other patients for being emotional. He was sent home,
continued his education becoming a professor. In 1932 he broke down, the
shell shock symptoms returned and he was unable to work. He applied to
the federal government for a pension arguing that the war was
responsible for his breakdown. The two doctors who reviewed his case
refused to grant him a pension labelling him a deviant predisposed to
psychological illness attributing it to “early overprotection, lack of
boyish animal spirits, rebelliousness to authority and…the physical
stigmata of deviation,” that is, physical signs on his body and certain
aberrant mannerisms suggesting he was more feminine than masculine.
Although he highlighted only Hunter L. in his talk, Humphries concluded
from his study of other similar cases that men who sought treatment or
asked for compensation were violating the unwritten code of conduct: men
were to be self-reliant, aggressive and unemotional. Otherwise, they
were tainted with being neurotic and feminine. When their manhood was at
stake, no wonder traumatized veterans were forced to suffer in silence.
At this point we can come full circle to where this paper began
—with
recent novelistic and film treatments of the war. Today there is a
greater understanding of masculinity, as a social construct, and that
current attitudes toward manhood have substantially changed since the
period under review, and about post-traumatic stress, which is
recognized as a product of the realities of wartime conditions. Rarely
does one hear today that this condition is the result of a psychological
predisposition even though it is still ingrained in the military
culture that one should not ask for help. In
Regeneration, the first novel in Pat Barker’s trilogy (renamed
Behind the Lines
in the DVD version), she presents two historical physicians: Lewis
Yealland, a Canadian neurologist with a reputation for 'curing'
shell-shocked patients and ensuring their quick return to the trenches,
who employed electric-shock, shouted commands, prescribed isolation and a
restricted diet to treat hysteria, and William Rivers, an English
anthropologist, who believed that war neuroses did not result from the
war experiences themselves, but were "due to the attempt to banish
distressing memories from the mind.” He encouraged his patients to
remember, instead of trying to forget what they had been through.
(Barker’s sympathetic treatment of River’s therapeutic relationship with
the poet Siegfried Sassoon was generally unrepresentative of the
times.) Yealland was a product of his culture, whereas, Rivers seems
historically out of place and would have been much more comfortable in
the present. Canadian veterans, civilians and doctors would have
dismissed Rivers as naïve at best and possibly dangerous and would have
admired the achievements of Yealland, the reverse of how I suspect we
would currently regard them.
Today the public will continue to read novels and see films that
possibly project the attitudes of our time back into an earlier era
—the past as a foreign country may be a cliché but it is true
—but
readers can also benefit from good history that, without condescension
and with a sensitivity to complexity, reconstructs the values and the
political and cultural expressions of those who lived in earlier times.
For me the need for historical works to supplement popular culture was
the greatest insight I received from this thoughtful and rich
conference. I believe that the conference organizers at the Munk Centre
will soon make available a video podcast as they have done with so many
of their previous symposiums. Do yourself a favour and watch it.
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| (Photo by Keith Penner) |
– Bob Douglas has written extensively on the Great War in
That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War (Encompass Editions, 2012).
