Earlier this month marked 100 years since the start of the First World War. There has been an outpouring of media attention. In a way this is a just over-compensation for that war largely slipping from public awareness since the subsequent world conflict.
When I was growing up in Calgary, in the late 1940s through to the mid-1950s, little was heard of the First World War. At school we watched some films of it around Remembrance Day. The massive artillery pieces seemed old fashioned compared to the field artillery I saw at Mewata Armoury where my father worked. The army trucks looked funny. So did the uniforms. And people filmed by the cameras of those days rushed along with a funny jerky gait.
Over the years to come, the Second World War dominated bookshelves, movie theatres, television, and the stage (the musical Billy Bishop Goes To War being a notable exception in Canada). I encountered my first war game during Grade 12, a skilful homemade product created by a classmate, based on the naval struggle in the Pacific Ocean during the Second World War. Over the years since I have noted that while many war games allow players to refight historical battles, few deal with the First World War.
This in part reflects a human tendency to focus on more recent events. Yet there was also a holdover of common attitudes after the First World War ended – horror at realizing the carnage of futile combat, and disgust upon learning just how much governmental and military leaders and their propagandists had lied about what was really going on.
The slaughter had been horrendous, repeated bloodbaths on a scale never before seen. Sixty years before that war 670 British cavalrymen charged down a valley in the Crimean Peninsula. The Light Brigade suffered 113 killed, 127 wounded. Assisted by a poem, the charge became one of the most celebrated battles in British history. Troops on the First World War’s Western Front might have wondered what the fuss was about. Reminders of their ordeal crop up unexpectedly. In a foreword to The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien noted tersely, “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.” He had been a British infantry officer.
The scope of the war’s impact is impossible to describe concisely. To name but three effects on Canada: firstly, the army fostered a sense of Canadian identity in its troops from a soldier’s time of enlistment. That feeling throve over the army’s time in France and Belgium and was brought home. Secondly, before the war Canadian women had struggled to gain the right to vote. During the war they began getting it, first provincially then federally. Finally, the war altered the landscape: monuments to our combatants were put up in virtually every city and town, where they remain. That war’s consequences remain with us, even when we pay them little heed.
Writer David Haas is a long term St. Albert resident.
