Aug. 4 will mark the 95th anniversary of Canada’s entry into the First World War. It is time now to begin planning how the nation will commemorate the 100th.
It might seem an easy question. Canadians already observe “Remembrance Day” on Nov. 11. Schools summon the young to assemblies to listen to veterans speak, towns bedeck their monuments and memorials.
Yet I wonder whether anyone really regards these ceremonials as successful. Canadians have worked at least as hard to forget the 1914 war as to remember it.
French Canada’s resentment of conscription; the horrible toll in dead and maimed; the seeming pointlessness of a war so quickly followed by an even more terrible global conflict: These were terrible traumas for those who lived through them. Better not to dwell on them.
But as Canadians turned their back on painful events, they also denied themselves some of their nation’s greatest achievements.
It was Canadians who spearheaded the great battles that broke the back of the German Army, starting on Aug. 9, 1918, the “black day of the German army,” in the phrase of its acting commander-in-chief, Erich von Ludendorff.
It’s often said that the war was fought incompetently. So it was — at the start. What else would you expect from profoundly civilian democracies without much military tradition?
But they learned fast. By 1918, the armies of the Western allies were fighting an effective and decisive war. They adopted new technologies (like the warplane) and techniques faster and more intelligently than their German enemies. And by 1918, the Canadian army had proved itself man-for-man, unit-for-unit, the best fighting force on the Western front: the “shock army of the British empire,” as it has aptly been called.
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While I would agree that teaching history to students is essential, and that the First World War is a part of that history, I would not agree that we commemorate our entry into that conflict. First, because we never made a choice to enter the war — we became a combatant Power when the UK declared war. So, there is an issue of historical fact that needs to be explained and that separates the events of August 1914 from September 1939. Second, the First World War was, without question, the most idiotic conflict of the 20th Century. We were not fighting to save democracy, since it was never threatened; nor were we defending our independence, since we really only became an independent actor long after the war ended. Instead, the war was all about maintaining the balance of power in Europe and it signally failed to achieve that by destroying Austria, severely waekening and humiliating Germany, and helping to cause the revolution in Russia.