Introduction

IF MEN COULD LEARN FROM HISTORY, WHAT LESSONS MIGHT IT TEACH US?—SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

One hundred years ago this year, the Great War broke out, unleashing a slaughter unimaginable to a world that seemed to be on the road to progress and peace. In fact, Canadians were about to celebrate a hundred years of peace with the US since the end of the War of 1812. But instead memorials to that peace were put on hold. By 1919, we were building cenotaphs to commemorate the more than sixty-six thousand Canadians killed in a war Canada was drawn into as part of the British Empire.

Those cenotaphs we built in our towns and cities include the names of over six thousand men and women from British Columbia. The war touched families in every corner of our province. Farm boys from the Okanagan and nurses from Vancouver Island faced indescribable horrors—gas, gangrene and machine guns. And the war left a mark on the generations to come. When the authors sat down early in 2013 for a coffee, we were both on personal quests to find out more about our family members who went to the Western Front. We wanted to know what motivated them and how the march to war changed them—and where they died. With the hundredth anniversary of the war fast approaching, we quickly realized that other British Columbians might be on this same quest. It dawned on us that a book would be a fitting tribute to those who served, those who opposed and even those who were deemed unwelcome or enemy aliens.

British Columbia was far from the front lines in 1914, but in a sense we were at the centre of the passions that swept the world into the conflict. Our premier, Richard McBride, was a staunch imperialist, and our province was full of recent immigrants from Great Britain, Europe and Asia. Their feelings about the war were inextricably linked to the countries they left behind. Many rushed to take part when war was declared late in the summer.

Canadians had experienced one brief exposure to modern warfare—in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. But our romantic illusions about the nature of battle were still intact. And the war was going to be over by Christmas. All the better reason to enlist before it was over and be part of the excitement. The BC economy was reeling from a recession, jobs were scarce for young men and a few months in Europe seemed like a welcome tonic.

Just that summer, our little Pacific naval fleet (represented by an aging cruiser called HMCS Rainbow) was making headlines, turning back the Komagata Maru in Vancouver Harbour. Aboard the Komagata Maru were 376 passengers, mostly Sikhs, but also Muslims and Hindus. They were British subjects from India who by rights should have been able to settle anywhere in the British Empire. White British Columbians thought differently and, after a standoff, turned them away. Within a year, British Empire Indians would be fighting and dying alongside their Canadian comrades on the Western Front.

Our wartime history is the story of contradictions like that: strange turns and unexpected consequences. Imagine a time when our women could not vote. Neither could Japanese or Chinese Canadians or our First Nations. And yet they all served along with those who did have the franchise. By the end of the war, the government needed female votes to survive and many women were able to cast a ballot. Ethnic minorities waited much longer.

British Columbians served not only on the Western Front but also in East Africa, Russia, Greece and Mesopotamia, on the seas and in the air. We here in BC supplied the food, the raw materials and even the submarines that made the war possible. Tinned salmon from BC was shipped overseas. Our Sitka spruce was used to build fighter aircraft.

We joined up at the highest per capita rate in Canada. Few spoke out against the war. Those who did risked arrest or even death. Albert “Ginger” Goodwin, a labour activist, was gunneddown in one of those manhunts near Cumberland on Vancouver Island in 1918.

Those who went willingly were sometimes incredibly brave in adversity. Our province produced many heroes, such as General Arthur Currie from Victoria; Raymond Collishaw, the second-highest-ranking Canadian flying ace; and over a dozen Victoria Cross recipients, including Gordon Flowerdew from Walhachin, who died in the last cavalry charge of the war. Aboriginal vets like George McLean were decorated for valour and so were Japanese Canadians like Masumi Mitsui.

Private Thomas Moles of the 54th Kootenay Battalion was court-martialled for desertion and executed by firing squad at 05:30 on October 22, 1917. He is buried at Ypres, one of over twenty Canadians sentenced to death for leaving the battlefield.

Some found love amid the carnage. Dr. Howard Burris from Kamloops was working with Nurse Robina Stewart from Manitoba in a Canadian hospital in Salonika, Greece. Their courtship continued when they were reposted to Liverpool and they married there in 1919 before returning to Kamloops to raise a family of doctors and nurses.

The war also produced an outpouring of novels, poetry, plays and art. One of British Columbia’s first successful writers, Frederick Niven, wrote a poem about the strange Christmas Truce of 1914, when soldiers on the Western Front laid down their guns and met together in no man’s land. It includes these lines:

Between the trenches then they met
Shook hands, and e’en did play
At games on which their hearts were set
On happy Christmas Day.

Lieutenant Allan Brooks from Vernon served as a sniper on the Western Front but devoted the rest of his life to ornithology and drawing and painting birds. Pierre Berton, Hubert Evans, John Gray and Jack Hodgins all wrote about the Great War. Berton’s Vimy, Gray’s Billy Bishop Goes to War and Hodgins’s Broken Ground became classics.

The event that started the war in the first place had an eerie link to British Columbia.

When the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was gunned down by an assassin in Sarajevo on Sunday, June 28, 1914, a few BC old-timers must have remembered his hunting trip to the province in 1893. The archduke travelled incognito, touring Stanley Park and then setting off along the Dewdney Trail with a large retinue, including a personal taxidermist. The great white hunter would later be hunted himself.

[Click here for a timeline of World War One]

These are some of the stories we will tell in the pages ahead. We’ll include many of the generous offerings from CBC listeners along the way. In many respects, the personal stories are the best. We set out to find how the Great War had touched British Columbians, and CBC listeners responded by going into their attics and basements to find diaries, letters, photos and memorabilia from a hundred years ago. Thank you for playing such an important part in this project.

Proceeds from this project will benefit the Canadian Letters and Images Project at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo. Dr. Stephen Davies started the project over a decade ago to preserve the stories of ordinary Canadians and the richness of their wartime experiences. With this help, we hope Professor Davies will be able to enlist more history students to help transcribe letters and scan photographic images to add to the collection.

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