Mythologising the Dominion Fighting Man: Australian and Canadian Narratives of the First World War Soldier, 1914–39

Abstract

A stereotypical image of the nation's First World War soldiers—and a conventional understanding of their war experience and its meaning—is not a concept unique to the British Empire's former Pacific Dominions, but is also promulgated in other parts of the Empire. During the First World War and interwar period, Canada also saw the emergence of a ‘Myth of the Soldier’ that paralleled the Anzac legend in many ways. This article focuses on some of the similarities and differences in Australia and Canada's mythologising of their First World War soldiers, proposing that this process reflects aspects of identity formation common to settler societies within the British world.

Notes

¹ Joan Beaumont, ‘The Anzac Legend’, in Australia’s War, 1914–1918, ed. Joan Beaumont (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1995), 149.

² A recent exception to this tendency is provided by Christina Twomey, who argues that changing Australian attitudes toward Anzac must be analysed in the context of relevant international developments. Twomey, ‘Trauma and the Reinvigoration of Anzac: An Argument’, History Australia 10, no. 3 (December 2013): 85–108.

³ A by-no-means complete historiography includes K. S. Inglis, ‘The Anzac Tradition’, Meanjin Quarterly 24, no. 1 (March 1965); L. L. Robson, The First AIF: A Study of Its Recruitment, 1914–1918 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1970); Jane Ross, The Myth of the Digger: The Australian Soldier in Two World Wars (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1985); D. A. Kent, ‘The Anzac Book and the Anzac Legend: C.E.W. Bean as Editor and Image-Maker’, Historical Studies 21, no. 84 (1985): 376–90; Alan Seymour and Richard Nile, Anzac: Meaning, Memory and Myth (London: Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, 1991); Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994); Graham Seal, Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2004); Marilyn Lake, Henry Reynolds, Mark McKenna, Joy Damousi and Carina Donaldson, What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History (Sydney: NewSouth, 2010). The most recent example is Carolyn Holbrook, Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography (Sydney: NewSouth, 2014).

⁴ For Canada, the seminal work on the topic remains Jonathan Vance, Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning and the First World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997). Also by Vance, ‘Remembering Armageddon’, in Canada and the First World War: Essays in Honour of Robert Craig Brown, ed. David MacKenzie (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). Other scholarly works on Canadian memory include Denise Thomson, ‘National Sorrow, National Pride: Commemoration of War in Canada, 1918–1945’, Journal of Canadian Studies 30, no. 4 (1996): 5–27; and Jeff Keshen, Propaganda and Censorship During Canada’s Great War (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1996).

⁵ Exceptions to this norm include David W. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia and Canada (Oxford: Berg, 1998); Jeff Keshen, ‘The Great War Soldier as Nation Builder in Canada and Australia’, in Canada and the Great War: Western Front Association Papers, ed. Briton C. Busch (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 3–26; Wesley C. Gustavson, ‘Competing Visions: Canada, Britain, and the Writing of the First World War’, in Canada and the British World: Culture, Migration, and Identity, ed. Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006), 142–56; Mark David Sheftall, Altered Memories of the Great War: Divergent Narratives of Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009).

⁶ Margaret MacMillan and Francine McKenzie, ‘Introduction’, in Parties Long Estranged: Canada and Australia in the Twentieth Century, eds Margaret MacMillan and Francine McKenzie (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003), 5.

⁷ Vance, Death So Noble, 3. See George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

⁸ A ‘Myth of the War’ broadly consistent with that found in other Dominions is visible in interwar South Africa as well, and revolved primarily around the South African Brigade’s experiences at Delville Wood on the Somme in 1916. What requires further exploration, however, is the significance of what Bill Nasson referred to as the ‘Delville Wood legend’ as a cornerstone of South African identity beyond the British segment of the white minority. See Nasson, Springboks on the Somme: South Africa in the Great War 1914–1918 (Johannesburg: Penguin Books, 2007).

⁹ Keshen, ‘Great War Soldier’, 4.

¹⁰ Margaret Higonnet, ed., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 5.

¹¹ Argus, 8 May 1915, 1.

¹² Some observers, particularly at the war’s outset, concluded that ‘wild’ men nurtured in the relatively untamed colonial setting might comprise problematic military material, particularly given their lack of training, traditions and quality leadership comparable to that of their British counterparts. Such disparaging fears were in many ways carryovers from similar sentiments expressed (primarily by British officers) toward Dominion troops in the South African War. In 1915, after encountering Canadian soldiers newly arrived in England, then-Captain J. F. C. Fuller commented that they would make fine soldiers with six months’ training as long as all their officers were shot. Anxieties that the first Australian contingent might reveal itself to be an ill-disciplined rabble were especially heightened in April 1915 following riotous misbehaviour in Cairo as they awaited deployment. Furthermore, the praise lavished on both the Canadians and Australians for their bravery in the battles of 1915 and early 1916 obscured continued criticism (again, mostly expressed by British officers) that colonial troops lacked tactical discipline in combat. See Desmond Morton and J. L. Granatstein, Marching to Armageddon: Canadians and the Great War, 1914–1919 (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1989); E. M. Andrews, The Anzac Illusion: Anglo-Australian Relations During World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); P. A. Pedersen, ‘The AIF on the Western Front: The Role of Training and Command’, and L. L. Robson, ‘The Australian Soldier: Formation of a Stereotype’, in Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace, eds Michael McKernan and Margaret Browne (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1989); Andrew Iarocci, Shoestring Soldiers: The 1st Canadian Division at War, 1914–1915 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

¹³ James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

¹⁴ Colonel George G. Nasmith, Canada’s Sons and Great Britain in the World War (Toronto: The John C. Winston Co., Ltd, 1919), iii.

¹⁵ See Jock Phillips, A Man’s Country? The Image of the Pakeha Male (Auckland: Penguin, 1987), for a discussion of the cult of the pioneer. See Keshen, Propaganda and Censorship, for a description of the ‘cult of the superior soldier’ in the Dominion context. This phrase alludes to George Mosse’s concept of the ‘Cult of the Fallen Soldier’ in Fallen Soldiers.

¹⁶ W. Sanford Evans, The Canadian Contingents and Canadian Imperialism (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901), 6–7.

¹⁷ T. G. Marquis, Canada’s Sons on Kopje and Veldt (Toronto: The Canada’s Sons Publishing Co., 1900), 189.

¹⁸ C. E. W. Bean, Gallipoli Correspondent: The Frontline Diary of C. E. W. Bean (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1983 [reprint]), 83. This was uncensored commentary expressed in private, but the sentiment was broadly consistent with Bean’s long-standing idealisation of the vigorous and healthy masculinity that he associated with Australia’s bush life. Such views appeared as early as Bean’s pre-1914 essays describing the wool industry in rural New South Wales. See Robson, ‘Australian Soldier’.

¹⁹ Eric Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 10.

²⁰ Philip Gibbs, Realities of War (London: W. Heinemann, 1920), 529.

²¹ A. M. DeBeck, ‘How Canada Answered the Call’, in Canada in Khaki: A Tribute to the Officers and Men Serving in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (London: The Canadian War Records Office, 1916), 36.

²² Desmond Morton, When Your Number’s Up: The Canadian Soldier in the First World War (Toronto: Random House, 1993), 278.

²³ Jeffrey Grey, A Military History of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 89.

²⁴ Bean, Gallipoli Correspondent, 83.

²⁵ Grey, 89.

²⁶ For detailed discussions of ‘mateship’ beyond Bean’s writings (particularly in The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918), see Ross; Thomson, Anzac Memories; Seal; and John Carroll, ‘Mateship and Egalitarianism: The Failure of Upper Middle-Class Nerve’, in Intruders in the Bush: The Australian Quest for Identity, ed. John Carroll (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992), 143–53.

²⁷ Archibald Cameron Macdonell, ‘The Canadian Soldier as I Knew Him on the Western Front’, Queen’s Quarterly 28 (April–June 1921): 341.

²⁸ Archibald Cameron Macdonell, ‘The Canadian Soldier as I Knew Him on the Western Front’, Queen’s Quarterly 28 (April–June 1921), 341–2.

²⁹ Peter Simkins, ‘Co-Stars or Supporting Cast? British Divisions in the “Hundred Days”, 1918’, in British Fighting Methods in the Great War, ed. Paddy Griffith (London: Frank Cass, 1996).

³⁰ Stephen J. Harris, Canadian Brass: The Making of a Professional Army, 1860–1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988); Bill Rawling, Surviving Trench Warfare: Technology and the Canadian Corps, 1914–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); Shane Schreiber, Shock Army of the British Empire: The Canadian Corps in the Last 100 Days of the Great War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997).

³¹ Simkins, 51–69; Christopher Pugsley, ‘Learning from the Canadian Corps on the Western Front’, in The ANZAC Experience: New Zealand, Australia and Empire in the First World War (Auckland: Reed Publishing, 2004), 165–203.

³² Quoted in Sandra Gwyn, Tapestry of War (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1992), 149.

³³ That French-Canadian narrative emphasised an unwillingness to be sacrificed for what many saw as a British imperial cause or a quarrel among European nations that had little to do with North American concerns. Such viewpoints had been one factor underlying the relatively low rates of enlistment in the CEF among French Canadians compared to English Canadians, and many English Canadians resentfully viewed this recruiting shortfall as the primary reason necessitating the institution of conscription in 1917. Divisions between English and French Canadians were exacerbated by the rancorous debate leading up to the enactment of compulsory service, and many French Canadians passively or actively resisted its enforcement. See Colin M. Coates, ‘French Canadians’ Ambivalence to the British Empire’, in Canada and the British Empire, ed. Phillip Buckner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 181–99; J. L. Granatstein and J. M. Hitsman, Broken Promises: A History of Conscription in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1977); Patrice A. Dutil, ‘Against Isolationism: Napoléon Belcourt, French Canada, and “La grande guerre”’, in Canada and the First World War, ed. MacKenzie, 96–137.

³⁴ Chronicle (Halifax), 11 November 1931, 1.

³⁵ F. M. Cutlack, The Australians: Their Final Campaign, 1918; an Account of the Concluding Operations of the Australian Divisions in France (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1918), 13.

³⁶ See Thomson, Anzac Memories; Ross; K. S. Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008); Seal; Richard White in Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace, eds Michael McKernan and Margaret Browne (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1989); Vance, Death So Noble; Thomson, ‘National Sorrow, National Pride’; Allan R. Young, ‘“We Throw the Torch”: Canadian Memorials of the Great War and the Mythology of Heroic Sacrifice’, Journal of Canadian Studies 26, no. 4 (1990): 5–28. For a very recent exploration of the complex discourses surrounding fighting men in Australia and other Dominions, see Stephen Garton, ‘Demobilisation and Empire: Empire Nationalism and Soldier Citizenship in Australia After the First World War—in Dominion Context’, Journal of Contemporary History, 27 October 2014 (online).

³⁷ For a discussion of these works, see Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1989); Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War in English Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1987); John Cruickshank, Variations on Catastrophe: Some French Responses to the Great War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); John Onions, English Fiction and the Drama of the Great War (London: Macmillan, 1990); Frank Field, British and French Writers of the First World War: Comparative Studies in Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Stanley Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967); Hugh Cecil, The Flower of Battle: British Fiction Writers of the First World War (London: Secker and Warburg, 1995); Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout, eds, The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).

³⁸ Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929); R. C. Sherriff, Journey’s End (1929); Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That (1929); Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (1927); Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1927); Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End (1928); Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero (1929).

³⁹ Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).

⁴⁰ Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Rosa Maria Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1993).

⁴¹ For discussion of these works, see Robin Gerster, Big-Noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1987); Christina Spittel, ‘Remembering the War: Australian Novelists in the Interwar Years’, Australian Literary Studies 23, no. 2 (2007): 121–139; Vance, Death So Noble; Dagmar Novak, ‘The Canadian Novel and the Two World Wars’ (PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1988); Linda Rae Stewart, ‘A Canadian Perspective: The Fictional and Historical Portrayal of World War One’ (MA thesis, University of Waterloo, 1983); Crawford Kilian, ‘The Great War and the Canadian Novel’ (MA thesis, Simon Fraser University, 1990).

⁴² H. R. Williams, The Gallant Company: An Australian Soldier’s Story of 1915–18 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1933), 127.

⁴³ Christina Spittel has shown that grief and mourning were also commonly depicted in wartime and (to a lesser extent) interwar Australian novels about the conflict. However, loss and the resulting emotional toll it inflicted on survivors was seldom the central theme of these works, and their messages primarily emphasised healing and consolation. Spittel, ‘“The Deepest Sorrow in Their Hearts”: Grief and Mourning in Australian Novels about the Great War’, in When the Soldiers Return: November 2007 Conference Proceedings, ed. Martin Crotty (Brisbane: University of Queensland, 2009), 26–33.

⁴⁴ Williams, Gallant Company, 273–4.

⁴⁵ John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1988); John F. Williams, The Quarantined Culture: Australian Reactions to Modernism, 1913–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996).

⁴⁶ Nathaniel A. Benson, Saturday Night 45 (23 November 1929): 8–9.

⁴⁷ Argus, 19 February 1930, 12. For a more in-depth discussion, see C. M. H. Clark, Obscenity, Blasphemy and Sedition: Censorship in Australia (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1962).

⁴⁸ Christina Spittel, ‘A Portable Monument: Leonard Mann’s Flesh in Armour and Australia’s Memory of the First World War’, Book History 14 (2011): 181–214; Carolyn Anne Holbrook, ‘The Great War in the Australian Imagination Since 1915’ (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2012), 100–5.

⁴⁹ Vance, Death So Noble, 191.

⁵⁰ Vance, Death So Noble, 193–5.

⁵¹ See Desmond Morton and Glenn Wright, Winning the Second Battle: Canadian Veterans and the Return to Civilian Life, 1915–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987); G. L. Kristianson, The Politics of Patriotism: The Pressure Group Activities of the Returned Serviceman’s League (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1966).

⁵² The initial effort to produce a multi-volume official history of Canada in the First World War resulted in only the first volume, covering the years 1914–15: see Fortescue A. Duguid, Official History of Canada in the Great War, 1914–1919, vol. I: 1914–1915 (Ottawa: J. O. Patenaude, 1938). An ‘official history’ of the CEF published in 1962 consisted of a single volume covering 1914–19: see G. W. L. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1919 (Ottawa: R. Duhamel, 1962). The Canadian War Museum opened in 1942, originally in an annexe of the National Archives. For a history of its development, see Sheftall.