“Unlearned lessons from First World War: Valour of Vimy and birth of a nation at odds with discontent across land,” Times Colonist (Victoria), 1 May 2010
View newspaper article here
By Benjamin Isitt
Cenotaph in Victoria, BC. Photograph by Benjamin Isitt
Canada’s last veteran of the First World War died peacefully earlier this year at his home in Spokane, Wash. As our prime minister said in his remarks on John (Jack) Babcock’s passing at the age of 109, this marks “the end of an era.”
It certainly does. But debate over the “war to end all wars” continues.
The Harper government’s method of honouring Babcock and other veterans reinforces a familiar story: The valour of the Canadian Corps at Vimy Ridge and the birth of Canada as an independent nation. On the 93rd anniversary of that battle, April 9, commemorative ceremonies took place on Parliament Hill and across the country.
But there is an entirely different history. This is a story of imperial adventure overseas, which took the lives of 66,000 young Canadian men and left many more maimed and broken (including Jack Babcock’s older brother, Manly). It is also a story of social unrest on the home front, as tensions among workers, farmers and many Quebecers erupted into open conflict with the Canadian government.
This story tells us more about Canada than events at Vimy, but it is seldom remembered. As casualties mounted on the Western Front in the spring of 1917, Robert Borden’s Conservative government introduced the Military Service Act in Parliament, compelling able-bodied young men to fight. Conscription provoked serious rioting in Quebec, culminating in five deaths and the deployment of 4,000 troops to restore order.
In Western Canada, anti-conscription feeling was also strong. Draft-dodger colonies sprouted on the Pacific Coast and labour leader Albert (Ginger) Goodwin was shot dead by a federal police constable. Labour demanded “the conscription of wealth” before men. Working-class unrest was tied to the cost of living, as merchants hoarded goods to drive up prices and factories retooled from the manufacture of consumer goods to war production. The cost of basic provisions — such as butter, bacon, and heating oil — soared.
In the spring of 1919, as the soldiers returned from the front amid fears of widespread unemployment, general strikes erupted, first in Winnipeg and then in a dozen cities from Victoria to Amherst, N.S.
The workers demanded collective bargaining, but politicians and businessmen saw a revolution. The Criminal Code and Immigration Act were hastily amended to strengthen police power against radicals, as the Canadian army occupied Winnipeg, breaking the general strikes.
This was the mood in Canada at the end of the First World War. Farmer governments were elected in Ontario and Alberta and the Conservative party fell from power to third-place standing in Parliament, behind the upstart Progressive Party.
If we can draw inferences from Jack Babcock’s words prior to his death, this contested history appears to be closer to the veteran’s own views: “I think it would be nice if all the different people in the world could get along together so we weren’t having wars. I don’t suppose that’ll ever happen, though.”
Commenting on the Iraq war, Babcock said: “I wish they’d get the hell out of there.”
Babcock was 18 years old when the Armistice was signed on Nov. 11, 1918, ending four years of fighting on the Western Front. Canadian troops were scattered around the world — at St. Lucia in the Caribbean, at Baghdad alongside British troops, and on four fronts encircling Bolshevik Russia.
The last Canadians did not return home until the end of 1919. Canada won a seat at Versailles and the League of Nations, but this reflected loyalty to the British Empire and the hierarchy of the post war world.
Honour does not mean blind faith to the Vimy myth and glossing over the horrors of war. Babcock said what our government will not: that war is a scourge that should be vanquished from the earth.
Babcock’s war should have been the “war to end all wars,” but economic ambitions prevented it. The international system established at Versailles sustained competition between states, which erupted periodically into armed conflict, with brutal effect.
And so, 91 years after the “war to end all wars,” 3,000 Canadian soldiers find themselves locked in a quagmire in Afghanistan and the next military adventure cannot be far around the corner.
We should honour Jack Babcock and all First World War veterans. But we should do so by dealing honestly with our history and confronting the root causes of war.
Dr. Benjamin Isitt is assistant professor and postdoctoral fellow of history at the University of Victoria and author of the book, From Victoria to Vladivostok: Canada’s Siberian Expedition, 1917-19.
Victoria Times Colonist, 1 May 2010
