Missing Men: Canadian Prisoners of War in Alan Cumyn’s Great War Novel The Famished Lover

Abstract

This article focuses on the representation of Canadian prisoners of war in Alan Cumyn’s Great War novel The Famished Lover (2006). Relying on historical sources, I attempt to show how the experience of captivity, marginalized for a long time in historical research, alters our understanding of the First World War and the evolution of forced labour in the twentieth century. I approach Canadian POWs as missing persons, disappeared in the biopolitical regime of the POW camp, the post-war discourses of commemoration, and the gaps in cultural memory. The article explores Cumyn’s representation of the camp as a biopolitical space and the production of the POW as Agambenian bare life. Central to the analysis are issues of trauma, masculinity, and heroic defiance. I also engage with the long-lasting sequelae of captivity, as well as the difficult reintegration of the returned POW, based on the example of the protagonist of the novel.

Keywords:

• First World War
• POW camp
• Germany
• trauma
• masculinity
• personhood
• biopolitics

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA), under grant number PPN/BEK/2018/1/00048/U/00001.

Notes

1 For an analysis of the Canadian soldier-artist figure in The Sojourn, see Gordon (2014: 93–105); for an analysis of colonial stereotypes and imperial loyalties in the novel, see Branach-Kallas (2015, 2018).

2 Exploring the war experience of suffering servicemen, women, medical personnel, ethnic minorities, and non-human subjects, contemporary Great War novels tend to approach the war in terms of trauma and futility, rarely dwelling on military strategies and victories. For a detailed discussion see Branach-Kallas and Sadkowski (2018: 1–11); in the Canadian context Branach-Kallas (2019).

3 Some captives were used as a labour resource in the war zone and were never evacuated to POW camps at the home front; they suffered from the most serious physical and psychological injuries. See Jones (2011: 121–251) for a thorough discussion of the increasing violence towards captives in these prisoner labour companies, incorporated within the captor’s army, the organization of which, in her opinion, was a significant turning point in the way forced labour was conceptualized in Western Europe.

4 According to Jones, ‘Maximum death rates for French and British prisoners in Germany were around 7 per cent, Germans held in France had maximum death rates of 6.4 per cent, and Germans held in Britain had maximum death rates of 3%’ (2015: 283–4).

5 The Pugsley-Friel Commission held hearings to assess Canadians’ claims to war reparations in the early 1920s. Many veterans claimed they were misled into believing that they were not eligible for reparations, consequently a new commission, appointed under Justice Errol M. McDougall in 1930, fixed 15 January 1931 as the deadline for claims (Vance, 1994: 90–3).

6 A fact confirmed by historians (Kramer, 2010: 80; Wilkinson, 2017: 221).

7 So strong was the cultural bias against captivity that various reports in Canada insisted every Canadian soldier taken by the Germans must have been wounded, gassed, or unconscious (Vance, 1994: 26; Greenfield, 2016: 29).

8 The representation of the POW as a banned man, tabooed and guilty, whose suffering is not included in the national narrative of sacrifice, reinforces the association with the Agambenian homo sacer (see Agamben, 1998: 79–82).

9 See Wilkinson (2017: 136–46) for a study of the motives of escapers. The scholar argues that escape has dominated representations of World War One captivity, turning the disempowered figure of the POW into a manly and resourceful hero (2017: 20, 283). Autobiographical accounts of Canadian escapers published in the post-war years also seem to promote the idea of the POW as ‘returning to combat via successful escapes’ (Wilkinson, 2014: 37). They include: Fred McMullen and Jack Evans, Out of the Jaws of Hunland (1918); Mervyn Simmons with Nellie McClung, Three Times and Out (1918); Edward Edwards with George Pearson, The Escape of a Princess Pat (1918); Arthur Gibbons, A Guest of the Kaiser: The Plain Story of a Lucky Soldier (1919). See Greenfield for a popular history of Canadian POWs largely based on these accounts.

10 Cumyn creates a protagonist who treats his wife and other female characters as sexual objects or idealized objects of artistic inspiration, a tendency noticeable already in The Sojourn. However, Ramsay’s sexual conquests might also be interpreted as a desire to prove his manhood and a reaction to deprivation. Lillian’s situation as a veteran’s wife is particularly difficult, as she is much younger than Ramsay, knows little about the war, and can hardly understand his traumatic reactions.

11 Morton argues that in the post-war years many people on both sides of the Atlantic admired German military discipline and its accomplishments (1992: 154). Kramer sees the German experience in POW camp administration during the First World War as an important ‘learning process’ that was to become useful in the management and exploitation of vast numbers of prisoners under the later Fascist and Communist regimes (2010: 86; see also Jones, 2011: 290).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (Narodowa Agencja Wymiany Akademickiej) under grant number PPN/BEK/2018/1/00048/U/00001].

Notes on contributors

Anna Branach-Kallas

Anna Branach-Kallas (Ph.D., D.Litt.) is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland. Her research interests include the representation of trauma and war, postcolonialism, health humanities and comparative studies. She is the author of Uraz przetrwania. Trauma i polemika z mitem pierwszej wojny światowej w powieści kanadyjskiej [The Trauma of Survival: The (De)Construction of the Myth of the Great War in the Canadian Novel] (NCU, 2014), which was awarded a Pierre Savard Award by the International Council for Canadian Studies. She has also co-authored, with Piotr Sadkowski, Comparing Grief in French, British and Canadian Great War Fiction (1977-2014) (Brill/Rodopi, 2018). She has published over eighty articles and book chapters, and has (co)edited several essay collections, including Re-Imagining the First World War: New Perspectives in Anglophone Literature and Culture (Cambridge Scholars, 2015).