Marching As to War Canada's Turbulent Years 1899-1953

Overview The Uncertain Country The last war fought on Canadian soil ended in August 1814 when an invading United States army unpaid, mutinous, diseased, and dispirited skulked out of Fort Erie and vanished across the Niagara frontier, never to return. For the remainder of the nineteenth century, Canada basked in its reputation as the Peaceable Kingdom: no Crimean adventure for her, no Caribbean crusade, no pitched battles save for a few skirmishes with the Fenians and the Metis. That untroubled era ended with the Victorian Age, followed by half a century of turbulence the most remarkable period in our past. Between the autumn of 1899 and the summer of 1953, young Canadians marched away, not once but four times to do battle in far-off fields, in wars that were not of our making. Only in this one period have we devoted nearly 30 percent of our time to war. Turbulent years, indeed! And not only because of the battles we fought on the African veldt, the ravaged meadows of Flanders, the forbidding spine of Italy, and the conical hills of Korea: turbulent because these were Canada's formative years, when she resembled an adolescent groping with the problems of puberty, often at odds with her parents, craving to be treated as an adult, hungry for the acclaim of her peers, and wary of the dominating presence of a more sophisticated neighbour. The change was spectacular. In half a century we were transformed from an agricultural nation, where the Masseys became quasi-aristocrats simply by getting rich selling farm machinery, to an industrial economy with a bedrock of natural resources. Canada, one of the least military nations in the West, was forced to cope always at the last moment with unexpected conflicts for which she was never properly prepared. In doing so, the nation grew up. In the long tug of war between the forces of history and geography that marks those years, geography, in the end, won out. When the Boer War broke out on the eve of the new century, we were a vassal state within the British realm, cheerfully rushing to the colours when the imperial trumpets sounded. Over the years the emphasis shifted. When the Korean War began in 1951, we found ourselves giving token support to American troops in what was essentially an American conflict. In addition to war, two other tremors rattled the foundations of the emerging society. The first was the sudden, almost explosive creation of a new Western empire, stretching from the Shield to the Rockies, that would upset the political balance of power. The second was French Canada's burgeoning nationalism, which emerged at the outset of the South African conflict and reached its apogee in the conscription crises of the two world wars that followed. As early as 1890, when the new province of Manitoba launched its plan to keep the French language out of its schools, the West had signalled its reluctance to accept the bilingual accord stitched together at Confederation. Thus the country found itself split down the middle East versus West, French versus English, prairie farmers at odds with central Canadian capitalists. In war, it has been said, we found our maturity. It is equally true that in war we came close to tearing ourselves apart, creating a series of political crises that are still at the root of our national dilemma. Our love-hate relationship with our neighbour mirrored our own international uncertainty in those early years. What, we asked, is a Canadian, anyway? British? American? French? Free trader? Protectionist? We couldn't be sure. The Great War victories symbolized by a single magical word, Vimy, made us cocky. But the wave of cultural nationalism that followed was diluted by a nineteenth-century literary mindset inherited from Mother England. Realism? We scorned the hard-boiled YankeeBerton, Pierre is the author of 'Marching As to War Canada's Turbulent Years 1899-1953' with ISBN 9780385258197 and ISBN 0385258194.