Canadian soldiers survey a destroyed bunker during the Battle of Passchendaele (April 1917)
Rivals in Nationalism and Expansionism Bring War to the World
Few Expected the Long Struggle
Canadians at the Front Lines
Unprecedented Carnage and Destruction
The Armistice
The Aftermath
The Language of Remembrance
Understanding the The Language of Remembrance
Support Veterans by Taking Action
Editorial on this page is excerpted from Canadians on the Front Lines 2024 and used with permission of the copyright holder, ML Peters
In the first decade of the 20th
century, imperial rivalries, security and expansion had shifted the balance
of power among major European powers.
Meanwhile, economic competition, nationalism, militarism, conflict over
power, and a complex web of alliances all worked together to heighten tensions.
In July of 1914, a relatively small conflict in southeast Europe triggered a series of interconnecting events which led to dozen independent nations going to war. However, within a short period of time, it became an international conflict. With expectations of a quick victory, nobody - leader or civilian - was prepared for the length and brutality of the war.
When war was first declared, The Independent, a New York Magazine wrote, "This is the Great
War. It names itself". In October
1914, the Canadian magazine Maclean's similarly wrote, "Some wars
name themselves. This is the Great War."
Europeans analysts referred to it as "the war to end war" or
the feared 'European War'. Today, it is still referred to as the
Great War or the First World War (1914–18).
Basically it was a war between two military alliances:
At the outbreak, few people imagined how long or how devastating such a war could be. Rhetoric about a swift victory inspired a wave of patriotism among affected nations. Rather quickly, the warring parties mustered about 20 million men.
Britain and its allies promptly moved to galvanize the support of 70% of the world as allies or cobelligerents. Allied nations were not necessarily in the battle
zone areas but nations like India, Canada, and South Africa mustered troops or nurses to the front. Australia, New Zealand and Japan moved to gain control of German colonies in the Pacific and Continent of Africa. Other supportive countries such as China and Venezuela did not directly get involved in the combat, but supplied weapons, ammunitions, resources or labour.
The war dragged on and
expanded. This was the largest conflict the world had
ever experienced extending across several continents, at sea, and for the first
time, in the air. Though
fighting took place mainly in Europe and the Middle East, as well as in parts
of Africa and the Asia-Pacific, together the warring nations accounted for
more than 800 million people, which was more than half the world's population
at the time. Only 20 countries across
the globe remained perfectly neutral throughout the conflict, most of them in
Latin America or northern Europe.
The number of
men fighting increased to 70 million. While men were fighting in mass citizen armies, millions of civilians also contributed to
the war effort by working in industry, agriculture or jobs left open when men
enlisted.
Victory depended on popular support. Invading armies committed atrocities against civilians in the areas they occupied. Attacks on civilians became increasingly horrific and common as each nation tried to break their opponents’ home morale and diminish popular support for the war. Children were traumatized and people lived in fear of enemy action. Propaganda demonized entire nations and attacked the ‘national characters’ of enemy peoples. As the war dragged on, blockades and the demands of the war machine depleted resources and strained economies. People were starving.
Images sourced from:
The Canadian War Museum
and Veteran Affairs Canada
The Canadian Parliament
didn't choose to go to war in 1914. The country's foreign affairs were
guided by the British Parliament in London. So when Britain's ultimatum to Germany to withdraw its
army from
Belgium expired on 4 August 1914, the British Empire, including Canada,
was at war, allied with Serbia, Russia, and France against the German
and Austro-Hungarian empires.
At the time Canada had a population of 8 million, but its military force consisted of a very small navy, a professional army of 3,000 soldiers and a scattering of small part-time militia units.
Canada had no choice but to mount a military and by August 15th 1914, the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) was formed. A year later a 2nd division, the Canadian Corps, was organized followed quickly by a third and fourth division.
It was significant that 300,000 men and women volunteered by enlisting
as nurses, doctors, soldiers and chaplains. By 1917, 630,000 Canadians had enlisted in the CEF and were assigned to different CEF units.
Most were dispatched overseas to the Western Front as infantry, artillery and engineering troops, as well as logistical and medical units. Of course, they obtained some military training, but in reality 425,000 inexperienced Canadian citizen-soldiers served on the Western Front. The combat element of the Canadian Expeditionary Force engaged in 57 significant battles in France and Flanders between March 1915 and Nov 1918.
Other CEF units were organized to serve outside the Corps, including the Canadian Cavalry Brigade, forestry and railway crews, and
various medical hospitals. Some built bridges in the Middle East or cut timber in Britain and France for the Allied war
effort while other specialized units operated in the Caspian Sea or in Russia.
Nearly 10% of the entire population of Canada joined the army. These young hopeful Canadians left their
homes; they vacated high schools, farms, businesses; they waved good-bye to
friends, wives, young families, and elderly parents. Ordinary young people, 650,000 of them, bravely faced the unknown. Yet, in the
line of duty, they did the extraordinary, enduring the extremities of intense
training, harsh living conditions, physical hardship, exhaustion, fear, loss of
comrades, mental and spiritual anguish.
Canadians fought in the First World War for 52 nightmarish months. Some soldiers were wounded, convalesced in hospital, and then returned to the front. Soldiers witnessed terrifying clashes in which more
than 67,000 fellow Canadians died.
Four years is a long time to spend in a
dark place where the veneer of civilization has been stripped away. Fear, terror and carnage are still incomprehensible.
Broken in
mind and body from their WW1 experience, 416,000 eventually returned to
Canada. 172,000 of them came home
wounded, and thousands more returned alive but traumatized by wartime experiences. Images of the war haunted most of them for the rest of their lives.
In addition, thousands of Canadians served in the British flying services, in the Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy and in other Allied units.
Let us not forget that when men went to war, women stepped up to run farms, work in banks, factories, canneries, lumber yards, gas stations and repair shops. They built ships, aircraft and munitions, ran street-cars, filled civil service jobs, and cared for their families. They were busy fundraising, rolling bandages, wrapping food parcels, and knitting socks for the troops.
Hope for a short war turned
into 52 months of fighting - battles often lasting months instead of days, villages being bombarded with shells of all calibers, poisonous fumes lingering in the
air, fire sweeping the terrain. The battlefields were strewn with corpses
rotting on battlefields while the maimed and wounded waited for transport. Traversing the ruins were 10 million
displaced refugees coming face to face with millions of widows and orphans, and
area after area rife with hunger and disease.
The death toll kept mounting among civilians and the military. The loss of life was greater than in any previous war in history, in
part because militaries were using new technologies, including tanks,
airplanes, submarines, machine guns, modern artillery, flamethrowers,
and poison gas.
Some nations were forced to
surrender as their people, pushed to their physical and emotional limits, lost
the will to continue fighting.
By 1918, hunger, exhaustion, demoralization
and defeats signaled the end of the hostilities. The opposing sides met in Compiègne, France in
November, 1918 to discuss a ceasefire.
The war ended on 11
November 1918, marking a victory for the Entente and a defeat for Germany, although not formally a surrender.
The Entente Powers and the opposing German
faction signed an armistice at 5:45 am on November 11, 1918 specifying that the cessation of hostilies on the Western Front would take effect at
The armistice formally ceased hostilities and brought an end to the First World
War. Although, being reluctant to believe that a
truce had been signed, both sides continued shelling for the rest of the day,
ending only at nightfall. Elsewhere,
other Central and Entente Powers signed separate treaties.
The armistice initially expired after a
period of 36 days and had to be extended several times. A formal peace
agreement, the Treaty of Versailles, was signed the following year on 28 June
1919.
Images sourced from:
The Canadian War Museum
and Veteran Affairs Canada
When the fighting finally drew to a close
many combatants were too tired to feel much to cheer about. It was a lethal war with four years of
unprecedented carnage and destruction.
Finally, when the guns were silent, the war
had devastated 24 nations.
The landscape of Europe was unrecognizable with
hundreds of kilometers of trenches, charred shell craters, barbed wire
entanglements, fire-swept terrain, forests in spinters, and ravaged mud-scapes.
Finally
the guns were silent, but there were many who would never return home. The dizzying casualty tolls from World War
One are an indication of the scale and horror of the 1914-1918 conflict. The battlefield, starvation and genocide had
claimed the lives of more than 6 million civilians caught in the cross-fire. Ten million, soldiers, sailors and airmen killed in battle, more than 20,000,000 maimed and wounded, and about 7.5 million missing. Uncountable millions of
civilians were wounded.
In the aftermath, it is impossible to gauge
the psychologically damage to both soldiers and civilians on both sides of the
conflict.
The war brought an end to a world order
that had existed since the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15). When Russia withdrew
from the war after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 their empire crumbled. The war caused the disintegration of three other empires - Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman. It destabilized European society and was a key factor
in the outbreak of the Second World War (1939-45).
The British colonies
fought hard to help Britain in the war. Afterwards they questioned their colonial dependence on England and iterated that they deserved a
chance to rule themselves with their own governments. This was a step towards some countries being given more freedom and then gaining independence.
In the face of such enormous loss and horror, claims of victory or defeat seemed irrelevant, disrespectful, sacrilegious. Grief was palpable.
"The scale of death and destruction, the sight of disfigured survivors in
the streets of London, Paris, Toronto, Melbourne and New York—indeed,
in small towns and villages all over—awakened the general public to the
horrors of war."
~ Stephen J. Thorne Legion Magazine - 2023
The loss of so many lives overwhelmed the
world and attained such deep emotional significance it resulted in the understanding of the new language of remembrance.
The Armistice was significant. November 11 was celebrated as the date of the end of the First World War. It was named a holiday in several nations.
Later, throughout the British Commonwealth and
allied countries it later became known as Remembrance Day. Some nations adopted other names: Veterans Day (USA), Poppy Day (South Africa, New Zealand), Some nations choose to commemorate their war
dead on Remembrance Sunday (nearest November 11) and some choose the
anniversary of other notable events in World War I.
In Canada, it was originally called “Armistice Day” to
commemorate the armistice agreement that ended the First World War.
From 1921 to 1930, Armistice Day in was
held on the Monday of the week in which November 11 fell.
In 1931 the House of Commons passed a bill,
changing Armistice Day to “Remembrance
Day” and that it would be observed on
November 11. The first Remembrance Day
was observed on November 11, 1931.
Since then, In Remembrance, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month
we pause in a two-minute
silence and we bow our heads as a mark of respect for those who died or were
left behind by the war. We stop to
remember and honour those brave souls who left home to courageously volunteer
for the cause of freedom, peace, and a future they believed in. They fought to safeguard a way of life,
shared Canadian values, and the freedoms we enjoy today. Ultimately, they sacrificed their lives.
Remembrance is a time to reflect on
the impact of their sacrifices on our lives and be reminded that the freedoms
and values we cherish should not be taken for granted.
Through ceremonies,
parades, and moments of silence, we come together as a community to express our gratitude to those that fought on the battlefield and to honour
the memory of those that did not return. We wear poppies in
November in Remembrance.
