History of honours and titles UPDATED

History and historians are well represented in the February 2025 Literary Review of Canada: e.g., Jack Granatstein and Donald Wright (reviewing), Tim Cook and Richard White (reviewed). My fave is Patrice Dutil's lively review of David Roberts' Boosters and Barkers (a book noted here last March, may I say). It's a study of how Canada financed its immense First World War expenditures -- especially by inventing the concept of war bonds, not addressed to banks and financial houses but to the great Canadian public as a patriotic duty.  

They were an enormous success. To the surprise of the bonds' inventors, Canada raised some $2.5 billion during the war (when a billion still meant something) from hundreds of thousands of individual Canadians.

Thomas White

Dutil admits reports that the book is an important study but not an "easy read." He focusses on the life and career of  one of its central figures, Thomas White, the Canadian finance minister during the war and the architect of the War Bonds -- and later of the income tax. Dutil, one historian who is unashamedly interested in Canadian politics and politicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, observes that White is little known or remembered, and he uses the review to plunge into his life and its oddities: a Liberal and an Empire devotee who became a Conservative but could not stem the rising tide of Canada's ties to the United States. 

I liked it. If you don't read the book, read the review.

A peripheral thought: the article did get me thinking again about retrospective foreign honours. Should Canadian historians routinely note titles held by Canadians that they would not now receive? 

Dutil notes that White received a knighthood in 1916. No doubt White deserved recognition for his accomplishments as wartime Finance Minister, and "Sir Thomas White" makes the man seem dignified, and important. But by 1916 knighthoods and other titles had become controversial, even scandalous, in Canada. Joseph Flavelle, a non- politician made a baronet and then dubbed "the bacon baron," was pilloried for accepting the honour. The great corruption that too often surrounded the granting of titles would provoke the 1917-19 Nickle resolution against titles for Canadians, moved by one of White's fellow Conservative MPs.  

Long before then, it had become customary that most Canadian Liberal politicians declined knighthoods, while many minor Conservative luminaries continued to accept them. When historians juxtapose Sir Thomas White (knighted Conservative finance minister) against William Fielding (never knighted Liberal finance minister), are we putting a thumb on the scale by suggesting the former, by accepting a controversial title, was more worthy, more distinguished, than the latter who (according to his DCB biography) declined all such offers? 

Update, January 20: Charles Levi responds (and I thought I was the only one who might consider this an issue!)

Saw your post about "Sir Thomas White" and the telling comment "are we putting a thumb on the scale by suggesting the former, by accepting a controversial title, was more worthy, more distinguished, than the latter who declined all such offers?"

Yes, we are, and the problem continues to plague the history of the University of Toronto. I've spoken about this before, but this thing has added to the problems of James Loudon, the under-rated first President of the University of Toronto (and third president of University College). He's sandwiched between "Sir Daniel Wilson" and "Sir Robert Falconer", both of whom received late 20th century full biographies and also was highly criticized by Baron Flavelle, so all three of those biographies (by Bliss, Greenlee and a committee) just piled on Loudon while privileging and minimizing the serious errors of all three of the nobles. So Loudon (who had real flaws, to be sure) has not been treated fairly or in context.

James Loudon apparently was never offered a knighthood, so he could not decline it. As far as I recall, neither Sir Daniel or Sir Robert was knighted BECAUSE they were U of T Presidents, but for other reasons. Still, the knighthoods seem to count in their favour and against Loudon.

Book Notes: Roberts on Boosters and Barkers

I've been busy with other things and can't keep up with my reading at all. So starting today, here come a few book notes: books that may remain a little while longer on my to-read pile, but may get a longer look if/when...

My friends at UBC Press were kind enough to send me a copy of Boosters and Barkers: Financing Canada's Involvement in the First World War, just coming out.

With the recent income tax histories, we know about the arrival of one means of potentially financing Canada's huge commitments to the First World War.  Roberts focusses on another:  the Victory Bond, which eventually funded almost third of Canada's total war costs. So it's a financial history? 

Well, as Roberts points out, raising that much money required a public willing to place its savings at the government's disposal.  So the selling of the Victory Bond from 1915 on should be a significant indicator of public attitudes to and commitment to the war effort.  Roberts looks at the financial planner who bet the war effort to their ability to get war bonds sold, but also on the bond marketers  -- and the bond buyers.   

The end of the First World War?

I'm glad the war is over.  Meaning no disrespect, but I found the Remembrance Day that marked the end of four years of the First World War centenary a bit of a relief. Canada's centenary observances since 2014 have been impressive and often moving, and they probably reached wider than I might have guessed four years ago. But I think we are getting ready to let the First World War pass into history, to become like the Napoleonic Wars or some other distant conflict: interesting, full of drama and event and historical significance, but capable of being considered a bit less personally now.

The First World War did leave an enormous shadow over the 20th century. And new media and the digitalization of old sources have recently made it possible for almost anyone to immerse themselves in the specific details of the life and service of practically any soldier of the Great War, and even his or her family and community too.

But it should be growing remote. The Civil War remains a live issue in the United States after more than 150 years, but that's because its driving issue, race, remains alive. Some Serbians, I hear, continue to obsess about some medieval battle their ancestors lost in what is now Kosovo. But what issue of the First World War remains live today? Grief alone seems not enough any more. The orphans of the war are now few, the loss and devastation becoming distant, the grief less personal. Maybe we can start to let it go.

I happened to be reading Toby's Room, a recent novel by British Booker Prize winning novelist Pat Barker, much of whose writing concerns the First World War.  And I began to find the endless fascination with the war dead of 1914-18... just maybe a bit much. Toby has been dead a long time.

Can we start to leave the First World War to its historians?

Update, November 13:  Pushback from Helen Webberley in Auz:

Au contraire. I think the lessons of the War To End All Wars are
probably more relevant now than at any time since 1933-45. Today
we have national leaders using the same language of hate and racism
as they did in 1914 - Jair Bolsonaro in Brasil, Donald Trump in
the USA, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Matteo Salvini in
Italy (currently Interior Minister), Viktor Orbán in Hungary etc etc.

And Alan B. McCollough:

I have attended most Remembrance Day ceremonies at the War Memorial in Ottawa since the mid-70s. During the 1980s and 1990s there were often anti-war protestors there; sometimes they were noisy but generally the crowd accepted their presence without showing much support. Since 9-11 I have not seen protestors and the numbers in attendance have, in my opinion, grown. The crowd this year was as large as any I remember.

I have no close link to the war although my mother had a cousin who was killed in France in the first war and my father was in the air force in the second war. I attend partly as a matter of respect and partly as a sort of civic duty like voting in election even when I don’t care for any of the candidates. Attending is an act of solidarity.

The protesters in the 1980s saw the ceremony as a glorification of war. For some it may have been but increasingly the emphasis has been on remembering the human costs of the war and strengthening the sentiment “Never Again.”

You ask “But what issue of the First World War remains live today?” In the recent ceremonies in Paris President Macron spoke of the rise of nationalism in Europe as the reawakening of old demons. The European Union was, and is, an attempt to neutralize the effects of nationalism and prevent general European wars. So far it has been successful but allowing the memory of the war to drop out of the public consciousness does not seem likely to strengthen the EU or to reduce the dangers of chauvinistic nationalism.

I won’t leave the war to historians just yet.

Fair enough. But I think of the Second World War as being better "for thinking with" when it comes to these issues.  Was not the First World War mostly about loyalties to monarchies and empires, often transnational?  I know, its's complicated.

Maclean's on the First World War

I must say that when I saw Maclean's was going to publish a Remembrance Day issue with 66,349 different covers, each one with the name of an identified individual Canadian casualty of the First World War, my first reaction was surprise:  does Maclean's still sell 66,000 individual hard copies of any issue?  I can't remember the last time I have seen one.

But since it evidently does, I'd say its a commendable contribution to the closing of the First World War centenary.  And since I do see Maclean's online, let me also give a shout-out to Jack Granatstein, who has been contributing since the late summer a relentless series of articles detailing the grim and bloody battles that constituted the Hundred Days campaign culminating in the Armistice.  Canadian troops made their greatest advances of the war during the Hundred Days -- and suffered 25% of all their casualties suffered during nearly four years in action.  Say this for Jack G:  he delivers.

Who won the (First World) War?

I once read a review of James McPherson's history of the American Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom. It argued that after a century and a half, McPherson had finally provided a one-volume history of the Civil War that was comprehensive, authoritative, dispassionate, and above parti-pris side-taking. On the strength of the review, I bought and read Battle Cry of Freedom, and while Civil War history writing has hardly come to a full stop (!), it does make a pretty impressive survey and useful reference.

Maybe the world need a little more time to get to the same place with regard to the First World War.  I'm often impressed with Canadian accounts of the war that stress the vital contribution of the Canadian army to the Allied victory, when I'm aware that, say, British histories seem able to cover the same territory with only the barest mentions of a Canadian presence.

Seems the Americans have the same "it's about us, why don't they admit it?" attitude, judging by a recent essay in Time magazine by historian Geoffrey Wawro, author of Sons of Freedom: the Forgotten American Soldiers Who Defeated Germany in World War 1.  Wawro takes the position that France and Britain were on the verge of collapse and surrender when the Yanks arrived took charge, and swiftly put an end to the war.

Has there yet been a one-volume history of the First World War that is not a (British/American/French/German/Canadian...) account but an above-the-fray history, balanced and authoritative and reliable about all sides?  Nominations gratefully received.

Update, October 25:  Five Books, the pretty terrific site where experts are invited to nominate the five best books on practically anything (except, ahem, the history of Canada) proposes Michael Joseph's The First World War as "a balanced, modern interpretation"  and "incredibly rich and wise and balanced in the views that it takes." It's only 150 pages, which seems impossible

They Fought in Colour: colorizing archival images

To mark the end of the First World War, Dundurn Press is bringing out They Fought in Colour, produced by the Vimy Foundation with image colourizing specialist Mark Truelove.  It's a book of 150 colourized images of First World War scenes in Canada and on the Western Front, along with interpretive essays by Margaret Atwood, Tim Cook, Serge Joyal, R.H. Thomson and others.

Back to life? A colourized image of the First World War

The colourizing of classic movies did not go over well a decade or two ago. Directors and film critics mostly hated to see Casablanca or Citizen Kane turned into Technicolour. For movies, the trend seems to have faded away.  But in this month's Canada's History, which reproduces a selection of images, Truelove and Vimy Foundation executive director Jeremy Diamond (a friend of mine for years, I should say, and I write for Canada's History too, full disclosure) argue for the relevance and utility of colorizing historical images for new audiences.

Colour makes the images, and the people in them, feel familiar. The people in these colourized images don't seem like an ancient generation but as the young people they were....  It was always the photos with the faces that jumped out the most. We also started to notice that the faces in the photos looked like the faces of today.

History of the Hundred Days

A soldier of the Great War, RIP August 8, 1918

Tomorrow, August 8, marks the centenary of the start of the "Hundred Days Campaign," which also means it is just one hundred days from the end of the four year long centenary of the First World War itself.

The Hundred Days Campaign began with the Battle of Amiens. Canadian troops were closely engaged.  Indeed they remained closely engaged in what were (for the First World War) rapid advances that continued to the end of the war -- and suffered a substantial proportion of all Canadian wartime casualties, too.

Canadian historians tend to point to the Hundred Days to affirm the vital role of the Canadians on the western front and in the final campaign in particular.  British, French and American accounts often manage to cover the same period without much attention to the Canadian contribution.  There's truth to both positions: the Canadian performance was very much right up at the sharp end, but in total numbers of troops engaged and terrain covered, the Canadians were a small part of a very large campaign.

Today, however, the Guardian online, as part of its Hundred Days anniversary coverage, has a vivid story of Amiens Fowler, an 18 year old Canadian who is named for her great-great grandfather, a Canadian soldier who died at Amiens a hundred years ago (that's him in the photo above).

Photo:  The Guardian

History of public memory fights: remembering Ginger Goodwin or not

Who'd a thunk it?  The Vancouver Sun notes the centenary of the shooting of union leader and conscription resister Ginger Goodwin -- and ends with an glimpse of how nasty and petty provincial politics can be in this country

On July 27, B.C.’s NDP government proclaimed Ginger Goodwin Day to mark the 100th anniversary of his “untimely death.”

The NDP has also renamed Hwy. 19 near Cumberland Ginger Goodwin Way. A previous NDP government had done so in the 1990s, but the provincial Liberals changed it when they got into power in 2001.

Photo: From Vancouver Sun/Paul Rudan

Update, August 20:  I now see that Daniel Francis was way ahead of me on this story.

Historical notes from all over

* I'm still thinking about Dutil and Mackenzie's Embattled Nation, which powerfully evokes what a godawful horror the First World War made of Canadian politics, which by late 1917 were driven mostly by hysteria, vote-rigging, and bigotry. Odd to read, then, of how in November 1917 the Marquis of Lansdowne, a former governor general of Canada (mostly remembered here for schools, streets, and neighbourhoods bearing his name), but mostly a grandee of British politics who sat in the British war cabinet for much of the First World War, could publish a coolly reasoned argument for why Britain should seek a negotiated peace with Germany forthwith.

Well, it didn't, and Lansdowne became a bit of a pariah for the remaining decade of his life. So perhaps Britain was not so much different from Canada.  But it's hard to find anyone in Canadian government circles in 1917 who would have been able to muster such dispassion about the war and what to do about it.

* The struggle to repatriate indigenous remains from the basements of museums and laboratories is an ongoing story in Canada.  But Australia had a remarkable version of that last weekend, it seems.  "Mungo Man," a largely intact skeleton collected in the 1970s from a desert region of western New South Wales, was returned to its original surroundings.  Mungo Man was tall, slim, fiftyish, and at hi death had been buried with elaborate ceremony. And it all happened 40,000 years ago.

Australian history... is old.

Book Notes: Dutil and Mackenzie on the 1917 election

Ryerson profs Patrice Dutil and David Mackenzie today launch an important new book, Embattled Nation: Canada's Wartime Election of 1917.

Embattled Nation is a followup to Canada 1911, their earlier work on the general election of 1911. But 1917 is a special case among Canadian elections, undoubtedly the most corrupt general election ever held in this country. The government in power decided the great war for democracy was so important that democracy would have to be subverted in order to guarantee its reelection.

Dutil and Mackenzie document what they call "the great gerrymander," the removal of votes from (hundreds of?) thousands of women, the bestowing of the vote on a much smaller number of women expected to support the government, the calculated use of the soldiers' vote as a sort of slush fund to be applied where the government needed votes, and so on. Quantifying a great deal of previously unexamined data on the election, they establish (among many other things) that the 1917 election had the highest turnout of eligible voters of any election in Canadian history.

In the end, the authors conclude, much of the gerrymander, anti-democratic as it was, was not central to the outcome. "The Union's 'great gerrymander' had worked, but it had not been necessary. A majority of Canadians supported the Borden government and gave it a resounding mandate," they argue, presenting data to show the rigged soldiers' vote did not much effect the outcome, while the impact of the rigged women's vote is incalculable.

(Dutil and Mackenzie may understate the impact of women's disenfranchisement. "By 1917 women had won the vote in all provinces west of Quebec and there was talk of granting all women the vote federally," they write. But until the changes in election law were imposed in 1917, the provincial franchise had determined the federal franchise. Most if not all women west of Quebec did have the right to vote federally. That is, the Borden government did not refuse to enfranchise them; rather, its Wartime Elections Act specifically disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of them. See my exploration of this matter here, though more work is needed.)

That aside, the Borden government won re-election, they conclude, less by rigging the vote than by creating and exploiting war hysteria and ethno-cultural prejudices. Laurier, aged and ill, aided and abetted these divisions, they argue, by failing to create a coherent alternative. It was the profound English-French divide  -- that the Borden government actively encouraged and exploited and Laurier failed to head off -- that was the real calamity of the 1917 election, Dutil and Mackenzie conclude.

This is the story of how the country was almost lost by politicians blinded by ambition, lacking in imagination, and often paralyzed by incompetence and dithering.  Unable to create consensus, they brought their embattled nation to the brink of disaster. 

A sharp and negative assessment of the Borden government runs through this book. Borden often still gets a kind of residual credit for being the nation's war leader through the First World War, but Dutil and Mackenzie make clear how much his government's naval policy, its indifference to Ontario's anti-French educational policies, its neglect of francophone inclusion in the rapidly expanding military establishment, and its instinctive homage to imperialist sentiment made the Canadian situation consistently worse throughout the war.

A question Dutil and Mackenzie don't take up (maybe it's for their book on the next election?) is why the same government that so calculatedly manipulated the electoral process in 1917 moved soon afterwards to create the non-partisan Chief Electoral Officer and to create the institutions that have largely depoliticized both the design of electoral constituencies and the management of voters' lists ever since.  Guilty consciences?

When we see the profound and horrifying extent to which American constituency boundaries and voters' lists continue to be politicized -- and ruthlessly exploited to rig American election results -- the broad depoliticization of voting processes achieved in Canada in the wake of the 1917 federal election seems all the more remarkable. And to my knowledge, largely unconsidered and unexplained. 

One for Remembrance

What are you doing for Remembrance Day? Allan Williams draws our attention to tonight's Toronto lecture by Eric McGeer: "Passchendaele One Hundred Years on"

Recent polemics in Canadian history UPDATED

Do you need a polemical exchange in your historical life now and then?  My attention has been drawnto a couple of them recently.

One is "Gramsci's Guide to Vimy Ridge" by C.P Champion. It's an attack on The Vimy Myth by Ian McKay and Jamie Swift (and their earlier work Warrior Nation too).  In the first line McKay and Swift are denounced for pursuing "a seething and repetitive vendetta," and it pretty much continues that way.  The debate here is about Vimy and about views on the meaning of Canada's First World War.

I had thought, after watching the Vimy commemorations last spring, that the Vimy debate was pretty much over, and the McKay/Swift position had won decisively.

It was impressive to me how every historian who participated in the Vimy commemorations made a point of disavowing the claim that "Canada was born at Vimy." The claim remained on the lips of broadcasters and politicians, maybe, but used to be standard among military historians too, and it no longer is. Surely this was the heart of the Vimy Myth, and I give much of the credit to McKay and Swift for having helped put a stake in it.

Indeed, Champion, while wishing to reopen the debate, accepts the new consensus that Canada was not "born at Vimy," but remains furiously opposed to the anti-war and anti-militarism conclusions McKay and Swift draw.

The other historically-rooted polemic, now a couple of months old, is "For Future Use," Richard Jago's "obituary" for Conrad Black. Black is very much not dead, and Jago acknowledges that from the start, but he notes that newspapers often prepare and file advance obits.  Borrowing that model, he speculates what ought to be in preparation for Black.  The specific impetus for Jago's review of Black's career is the commentator's attitudes to Indigenous peoples, which he explores in detail.  These may have been exemplified in Rise to Greatness, Black's history of Canada -- the one that begins with the Viking explorations.

Attacks on Jago have probably been more widely circulated than the original piece.

Update, November 2:  Andrew Baldwin comments:

Whatever Christie Blatchford may think, I find the idea of writing fake obituaries of living Canadian figures one disapproves of hugely appealing and I plan to start my fake obituary of David Dodge shortly.

However, I was put off by Jago's scorn for Black's various of the pre-contact Native population of this country as 100,000, 200,000 or 300,000. The estimates may not even be contradictory, as the beginning of contact can be defined in different ways, spanning centuries. If Jago is such a big expert on Canada's Native population, why didn't he set the record straight. What are the best estimates of the Native population at the time preceding the Viking settlements, in 1492? when Jacques Cartier sailed up the Saint Lawrence, and so forth. There are probably a lot of Canadians like me who don't know much about Conrad Black, and know even less about Native demographics, but take an interest in both. 

Love your blog! Keep up the great work!

Best estimates seem to be that all estimates of indigenous populations in the Americas pre-1492 are unreliable, as they depend on how early and how widespread were the waves of early epidemics. The estimates rose enormously as understanding of the impact of those epidemics grew a generation ago, and then, it seems, some pushback developed, arguing lack of evidence for the largest estimations. 

But there seems to be continuing support for a population estimate of 10 million or more in North America north of Mexico, and for approximations from 200,000 to 2,000,000 across what is now Canada with particular concentrations on the west coast and in the Great Lakes-St Lawrence region.  See the survey and citations in this Wikipedia essay  and this piece in The Canadian Encyclopedia.

Short version:  populations pre-contact were a lot larger than post-contact. 

history of Passchendaele 1917

British and Belgian royalty mark the Passchendaele anniversary

The Vimy commemorations of last April are being reprised this week, at Passchendaele, where the Third Battle of Ypres began a hundred years ago.

The Canadian Corps was not brought into the Passchendaele battle until November -- having been fully engaged at Hill 70 during the summer of 1917.  Passchendaele gets less attention in Canadian military memory than Vimy, but in fact the Canadian casualties were much larger at Passchendaele, and the experience, if possible, even worse.

Vimy@100 +2 days

Sunday's much televised Vimy commemorations were impressive, though Jamie Swift observed on As it Happens that they seemed much more about patriotism and service than about peace and mourning.

During those [1938] ceremonies, Winnipeg settler Charlotte Susan Wood, who lost all five of her sons to war, and her youngest to Vimy, laid a wreath at London's Westminster Abbey. In that moment, she reportedly asked King Edward VIII: "Why did so many have to die?"

"Please God, Mrs. Wood, it shall never happen again," he responded.

Those kinds of stories have been "noticeably absent in the past few days around the Vimy centenary," Swift said.

"That questioning, that why, that I think Walter Allward shared and so many others shared, seems to have been airbrushed from the commemoration," Swift said.

Still I was struck that Jack Granatstein and Tim Cook and, as far as I saw, every historian involved with the centenary specifically rejected the claim that "Canada was born at Vimy."  That is a consequence of a couple of decades of historical discussion, now decisively closed, I think, at least among historians. (Anniversaries can be teaching moments.)

The news from Vimy in 1917

Our occasional correspondent Libby Toop has been reading what her local paper was writing about the First World War as it happened.  Meanwhile, reading Canada's History she came across something I recently wrote:

It will often be said this year that that Canada “became a nation” at Vimy Ridge. But victory at Vimy only happened because in 1917 Canada was already a nation, one that could raise, equip, and send overseas a fighting force with the leadership and esprit de corps of a national army capable of fighting the Vimy battle.

So she went back to the newspapers:

I checked out the microfilm for the Smiths Falls Record News for April of 1917 once again. The first reference to Vimy was in the paper from April 12th. The news story was short and connected the story to the Allied strategy. The paper from the same date also included an article entitled "British and Canadian Victories in Big Fight Around Arras. Capture Vimy Ridge, Sweep Foe Back on a Wide Front. Take 6,000 Prisoners - Tanks Play Big Part in Triumph." Obviously, the article which accompanied this heading was much more informative than the first one I mentioned. Nothing suggested that this meant Canada was coming of age. The paper routinely signified Canadian actions and involvement in the War as Canadian.

On the 19th of April, the editorial was entitled "The Blow at Arras". The comments here on the Germans are sarcastic. Then - "It is a different kind of news from what we were accustomed to read in the first two years of the war, and it is no super-optimism that foresees a steady growth of British and French superiority and a steady weakening of the German power of defense."

Beside the editorial is a piece entitled "The Battle in the Snow", which concerns military activities directly following Vimy. The piece ends with the following two paragraphs.
"The battle of Arras is another proof of the futility of militarism in the long run. The Germans have been making ready for this war for forty years, and at the beginning of it they were superior. The British began to make ready after the war started and have been at it two years and a half; and already they are superior.

"Canada has a new reason for pride. It was great good fortune for her that the taking of the Vimy Ridge, for which the Allies had poured out so much of their blood, fell in the long run to her. April 9, 1917, will be in Canada's history one of the great days, a day of glory to furnish inspiration to her sons for generations."

The paper was a Liberal one and came out twice a week in 1917.

You might be interested in knowing that in April of 1917 the paper was giving at least as much attention to the American entry into the War and what they thought the consequences might be. That is a whole different kettle of fish and a pretty interesting one, so far as I've been able to follow it.

Thank you, Libby Toop!

A Post for November 11

The Vimy Foundation, which does much good civic educational work regarding Canadian military history, recently took a survey on knowledge of First World War matters in Canada and other Western nations.

The Vimy Foundation is run by my friend Jeremy Diamond, who came up through the old Dominion Institute, which was renowned for taking polls crafted to provide July 1 headlines along the lines of: "Most Canadians say they know nothing of Canadian history and it isn't taught in schools."

Jeremy was in the media yesterday reporting that the Vimy Foundation poll shows Canadians, more than citizens of other countries, believe too little is done to commemorate the centenary of the First World War. He argued this means we need to do more. But the poll result could well mean that Canadians take the anniversary more seriously than people elsewhere. That is, that the commemorative enterprise has been succeeding.

In that vein, another statistic produced by the survey is striking:

Canadians are the most likely to have attended a war remembrance ceremony in the past 12 months.... 

Fully one quarter (25%) of Canadians say they’ve attended a war remembrance ceremony in the past 12 months, while fewer residents of Great Britain (18%), the US (16%), Belgium (14%), France (11%) and Germany (4%) say the same.

Remembrance Day is also producing a flurry of  declarations that Canada "became a nation" at Vimy. I have a column forthcoming in Canada's History's first issue of 2017 that touches on that:

It will often be said this year that that Canada “became a nation” at Vimy Ridge. But victory at Vimy only happened because in 1917 Canada was already a nation, one that could raise, equip, and send overseas a fighting force with the leadership and esprit de corps of a national army capable of fighting the Vimy battle.

Whether we should have, that's another question.

Update, November 14:  Friday I was doing an oral history interview with an elderly informant. It was not on anything to do with military history, but I knew he was a veteran, and I had inadvertently proposed Remembrance Day for our conversation, so I asked if I was interrupting a special day. He said it was special, but not for that reason.  On November 10/11, 1944 (not quite 21), he said, he piloted his thirty-third Bomber Command mission, to Berlin. "It turned out to be my last mission, the worst one, the one I still have those, what-do-you-call them, PTSD issues about."  And then he changed the subject.

The rush to war, 1914: Canada and Australia

There seems to be some buzz in Australian historical circles over Douglas Newton's Hell Bent: Australia's Leap into the Great War.

I don't know if Newton is being read by Canada's military and political historians. (I have not read it myself.) The mystery Newton explores -- why the political leaders of the "white dominions" were so much more eager than their British counterparts to rush into war in August 1914 -- has to my mind never been sufficiently seen in Canadian historiography as a question worth exploring.  Here's a summary of Newton:

London’s choice for war was a very close-run thing. At the height of the diplomatic crisis leading to war, it looked very much like Britain would choose neutrality. Only very late in the evening of Tuesday 4 August did a small clique in the British cabinet finally engineer a declaration of war against Germany.

Meanwhile, Australia’s political leaders, deep in the throes of a federal election campaign, competed with each other in a love-of-empire auction. They leapt ahead of events in London. At the height of the diplomatic crisis, they offered to transfer the brand-new Royal Australian Navy to the British Admiralty. Most importantly, on Monday 3 August, an inner group of the Australian cabinet, egged on by the governor-general, offered an expeditionary force of 20,000 men, to serve anywhere, for any objective, under British command, and with the whole cost to be borne by Australia — some forty hours before the British cabinet made up its mind.

Australia’s leaders thereby lost the chance to set limits, to weigh objectives, or to insist upon consultation.

I rather diffidently raised similar questions in a comment in the Canadian Historical Review's 2014 feature on the First World War, but I'm hardly a specialist in the matter.  And that piece did not provoke much response among those who are.

The subsequent issue of conscription is not raised in Newton, evidently, but Australia, like Canada, soon encountered enlistment problems, as the local-born in both countries soon proved less committed to the crusade than the British emigrant populations.  Much scope for comparative study, one would think.

"Best war documentary ever" on CBC-TV tonight?

"Newfoundland at Armageddon," Brian McKenna's two-hour documentary reenactment of Newfoundlanders at the Battle of the Somme (July 1 1916)  is showing on CBC-TV tonight, Thursday June 30 at 8 pm.

To commemorate the one hundredth anniversary, Brian McKenna’s latest feature documentary film Newfoundland at Armageddon tells the story of this epic tragedy. Using a technique he perfected during his 2007 project, The Great War, 21 descendants of soldiers who fought with the Newfoundland Regiment were recruited. They were offered a unique opportunity to relive the experience of their ancestors in trenches built specifically for this event, on a National Defence of Canada rifle range near St. John’s in Newfoundland. Four of the descendants travelled to Europe to follow in their ancestors’ footsteps from landing in England, training in Scotland and finally marching on the field of Beaumont Hamel.

McKenna is not modest about the film:

"On every level, we are going to make the best war documentary, I think, that's ever been made."

Canada's Great War Album

Canada's History and HarperCollins publishers recently launched their new publication, Canada's Great War Album, edited by Mark Collin Reid-- likely the most handsome and also most substantial of this year's commemorative volumes on Canada's First World War.

It's a book but also an online collaboration. The book includes contributions from a gang of historians (including me), but it also presents many photos and memories contributed by Canada's History readers over many months of preparation, and many of them never before published.

Today, they launch the Canada's Great War Album website, with, natch, a link for ordering the book, but lots more of those contributions as well.

The Jewish army of the Annapolis Valley

Who knew?  Kelly Shiers of the Halifax Chronicle Herald of a few days ago reports on the Jewish Legion, including future Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion,  that trained at Windsor, Nova Scotia, under British Army auspices in 1918

“In Windsor, one of the great dreams of my life — to serve as a soldier in a Jewish Unit to fight for the liberation of the Land of Israel (as we always called Palestine) — became a reality,” Ben-Gurion wrote in a letter to Windsor’s mayor three years after he left the prime minister’s job.

Hat tip to Mark Reynolds's father.  Photo: Chronicle-Herald.