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Vance, J. (2001). The Formulation of Historical Concsiousness: A Case Study in Literature. Paper presented at Canadian Historical Consciousness in an International Context: Theoretical Frameworks, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC. The Formulation of Historical Concsiousness: A Case Study in Literature Jonathan F. Vance, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair, Department of History, University of Western Ontario Abstract I often think that the publication of a new survey of historical knowledge has become an annual ritual in Canada; in the same way that children eagerly await the new Christmas catalogue, I find myself wondering what the newest survey will reveal about the public's knowledge of the historical facts that I hold so dear. Indeed, organizations such as the Dominion Institute and the Bronfman Foundation have made a name for themselves as monitors of historical consciousness (here, I take my definition of 'historical consciousness' from the MCRI Letter of Intent), their frequent surveys unfailingly revealing that Canadians are shockingly ill-informed about their country's national history (the implication is that no other people are as ill-informed about their own past). There is much wringing of hands and many pledges to pressure governments to do something about the matter, but little is achieved until the next survey comes along and the process is repeated. In this context I use the word 'national' advisedly, because that is what really transfixes historians and policy-makers; whether one has a solid grasp of one's family, local, or even regional history is less significant than one's grasp of the nation's story. The assumption here is that knowledge of a 'national' story is an essential component of national identity; the link is made between historical knowledge and collective identity at the highest level. In this reasoning, Canadians have an imperfectly developed sense of nationalism because they have an imperfect understanding of the grand national narrative. I happen to think this is partially true, but the logic or illogic of this assumption is not my central concern. Rather, I am interested in what presumptions are made about the nature of historical knowledge. When the latest editorial or survey laments the inability of members of the public to answer simple historical questions, what is really being proven? Is it a lack of historical consciousness, or simply an ignorance of specific historical details? It need hardly be stated that the two are very different indeed, and yet they are often treated as if they are the same thing. My contention, the contention to which my research is directed, is that historical consciousness lies in something other than the ability to recite certain facts about historical events. Knowing the date of the Statute of Westminster is not the same as being historically aware, at least beyond a very narrow understanding of the concept. I would suggest that there is in this country (and perhaps in western societies generally -- the comparative element is something I would very much like to explore in this collaborative study) a fairly highly developed historical consciousness. People may not know precisely when John A. Macdonald was prime minister or what were the first four provinces in Confederation, but generally speaking they have a sensitivity to history that is not often noted. They may have developed that sensitivity unwittingly, and may not even know it is there, but it exists just the same. That consciousness is fostered by forces which professional historians have rarely studied directly. This state of affairs has arisen because, in our era, there are more ways to transmit historical consciousness than ever before. The oral tradition, which for centuries was the sole means of transferring historical knowledge, is by no means extinct, but it has been overshadowed by other means: print, film, radio, television, and, most recently, the internet. Despite the fact that professional historians have long regarded themselves as gatekeepers of the past, they have in fact always been heavily outnumbered as purveyors of history. Arguably, this is more true now than it has been at any time since the emergence of the historical profession. Never before have people had such wide access to so much history, and never before has so little of it been produced by professional historians. Unless one is entirely cut off from all forms of media, it is virtually impossible to avoid being constantly bombarded by historical images. Those images, I would argue, are the basis of an historical consciousness. My central interest is the transmission of historical consciousness through media that have no connection to the historical profession, particularly through literature and ephemera (advertising, popular music, toys, etc). Each of these media has relatively little to do with notions of 'objectivity' or 'research' as historians would understand them, but it would be otiose to deny their powerful influence on popular understandings of the past. Indeed, it is to the historian's great discomfort that these media have a far greater impact than the monographs over which we slave so diligently. This fact, to me indisputable, compels our attention. I recently spent some time studying the impact of novels of the First World War on Canada's collective memory. I offer it as a case study of what I believe is a fruitful way to study the development of historical consciousness. The story begins in 1928, with a burst of publishing activity which has since become known as the war book boom. Over the next few years, there appeared the works which have become classics of Great War literature: Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War, Arnold Zweig's The Case of Sergeant Grischa, R.C. Sheriff's Journey's End (all appearing in 1928); Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero, Ludwig Renn's War, Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That, Frederic Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929); and Manning's Her Privates We, Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Henry Tomlinson's All Our Yesterdays, and Henry Williamson's A Patriot's Progress (1930). The most notable Canadian contributions to the boom were Peregrine Acland's All Else is Folly (1929) and Charles Yale Harrison's Generals Die in Bed (1930). The boom in fact encompassed a tremendous variety of responses, from the restrained and bucolic musings of Blunden to the stridency of Aldington to the unmitigated horror of Harrison. Yet all have been lumped together into the canon of anti-war literature, a canon which has traditionally been characterized by its negativity. The characters are victims, trapped in a war they do not understand and dominated by forces they cannot control. Their suffering is at once monumental and insignificant. The war strips them of everything, even of the dignity to suffer as individuals: instead of identity, the war has given them anonymity. They lack even the consoling hope that good will emerge from their agony. They must exist in the horrific circumstances of the trenches until death or madness releases them. Nor does the war's end hold any promise. The survivors can only look forward to a life of bitterness, regret, and inescapable memories. The anti-war books drew a variety of responses. Certainly many people approved of the vision they conveyed, for it fed their disillusionment with the peace and the failure of any country to become a land fit for heroes.(1) However, others reacted negatively, seeing the anti-war memory as a perversion of their experience. Britain's major newspapers were deluged with complaints about the tenor of anti-war books, and Douglas Jerrold, who had served with the Royal Naval Division at Gallipoli and in France, published a stinging pamphlet entitled The Lie About the War which attacked them for their pretensions to historical accuracy.(2) In New Zealand, film versions of All Quiet on the Western Front and Journey's End were banned and there was widespread sympathy for veterans who viewed such works as a 'foul libel' on their comrades. In Australia, the Returned Soldiers' League advised censoring war books which were deemed to defame Australian soldiers.(3) In the United States, the poet Archibald MacLeish (a former captain in the American army whose elder brother had been killed in action with the Royal Flying Corps) railed against the canon for lacking totality, balance, and harmony. Life at the front did mean discomfort, agony, and death, but it also meant heroism, glory, and humour. To emphasize the former at the expense of the latter was to do a disservice to the memory of the soldier.(4) This argument was central to the critique mounted by opponents of the anti-war vision. They judged any memory of the war, whether it was presented by a Canadian, a British, or a German ex-soldier, on the degree to which it captured the balance of the war experience as they remembered it. When Reverend Edgar McKegney, wounded and captured in 1918 while serving as chaplain to an infantry battalion, reminded his listeners at a 1928 Armistice Day service that to recall the terrible life at the front was also to recall the wonderful spirit of fellowship that prevailed there, he was merely giving voice to what many veterans had accepted as the obvious criteria for evaluating any memory of the war.(5) Those versions which gave equal emphasis to the harrowing artillery bombardments and the evenings spent drinking vin blanc in a small café were acceptable; those which dwelt only on the horrors were invalid. Perhaps not surprisingly, the standards demanded were very high, and the soldier-author had to walk a very fine line to write a book that pleased his comrades. Reviewers decided that Kim Beattie, a regimental historian and writer of trench doggerel, struck the correct balance of light and shadow with his collection of soldier poems entitled 'And You!', but others were not so adept.(6) In 1929, the historian W.B. Kerr published Shrieks and Crashes, a memoir of his experiences with the Canadian Field Artillery in 1917. It is an interesting but unremarkable book, one that might be of more interest to the artillery specialist than the general reader. Kerr, however, is no Remarque, and the soldiers he describes are nowhere near as bleak as those in All Quiet. Indeed, he took pains to point out that he was not writing to 'shock readers by descriptions of horrors of a length and intensity disproportionate to the actual place these filled in the minds of soldiers'. Yet Kerr was criticized for not having moved far enough away from the anti-war school. Major J.F. Cummins, for example, condemned the book for being overly 'sombre and serious' instead of giving 'a reflection of the joyous hours off duty in the villages and towns behind the guns'.(7) Clearly, Kerr had not quite achieved the right balance. Another memoir, published just before the war book boom, also tried to approximate the ideal. James Pedley's Only This: A War Retrospect is one of the finest Canadian memoirs to emerge from the Great War. Pedley, a lawyer and later assistant editor of a Toronto newspaper, served with the 4th Battalion, one of the marquee units of the CEF, until he was wounded in the attack on Amiens in August 1918 and invalided home. Only This is a memoir of exceptional quality, with neither the pervasive gloom of the anti-war novels nor the jolly jingoism of more propagandistic accounts. Pedley is hardly the idealized warrior. He candidly reveals his own petty prejudices, drinks heavily on occasion, and admits to a conspicuous lack of patriotism. His comrades are capable of great gallantry, but also have very human flaws: they loot German bodies for souvenirs, and can be vindictive, greedy, and mean-spirited. In short, the book captures the totality of the war experience in unusually realistic tones: the horrors of the battlefield and the grumbling soldiers who question why they are there; but also the comradeship of true friends and the riotous evenings spent in local estaminets. Pedley, however, had also missed the mark, at least in the eyes of some veterans. He had not committed Kerr's sin of being too gloomy, but rather had stepped beyond good, clean fun into an inappropriate bawdiness. Kerr himself lamented Pedley's lack of imagination which led him 'to see so much of the flesh, and miss so much of the spirit, of the Canadian Corps'. Major Cummins also found Only This a bit too fleshy, and questioned the author's taste in relating 'the intimate wartime details of carousals, flirtations, and courts martial'.(8) Peregrine Acland was another soldier-novelist who fell into this trap. Acland had sailed to Europe in 1914 as a lieutenant with the 15th Battalion, serving at the front until October 1916, when he was badly wounded at Courcelette and invalided home. In 1929 he published All Else is Folly, the semi-autobiographical tale of an eastern Canadian university student, suggestively named Alexander Falcon, and his ruination by the holocaust of war. Critical commentary was mixed. The New York Herald Tribune and Evening Post and the Times Literary Supplement praised the powerful and vivid battle scenes, but felt that the love scenes were ineptly handled. The New York Times, however, lauded it for 'showing that the men who fought ... were occasionally able to find some hilarity in their calling'.(9) For some Canadian veterans, there was a little too much hilarity. Colonel Cy Peck, the British Columbia Member of Parliament and Victoria Cross-winner who had commanded the 16th Battalion at the front for over two years, also praised the book's descriptions of the battlefields but lambasted Acland for having Falcon consort with prostitutes. This, felt Peck, put the author 'on a level with the filth-purveyors of other nations'.(10) Like Pedley, Acland had burdened his book with entirely too many seamy details. This inability (or unwillingness) of authors to present a balanced portrait of the soldier and the experience of war became the major bone of contention in the debate over the canon of anti-war literature. F. Wells Johnson, the Anglican rector of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, 'deplored the present tendency to write unsavoury war books, depicting things which did not represent in any way the great mass of the army which fought in the Great War'. Such books, wrote another veteran, were full of misleading generalizations because they inferred the emotions of all soldiers 'by the whimperings of neurotic sensationalists'.(11) Mabel Clint, who served as a nursing sister in France during the war, despaired of people who read only war books which dealt 'altogether with futility and disgust'. The only way to deal with such works, believed more than one branch of the Canadian Legion, was to ban them.(12) The most revealing comments on anti-war literature, however, came from two rankers. F.W. Bagnall had enlisted at the age of fourteen, and was wounded and invalided home before the end of the war. In a bitter and confused memoir which he published privately in 1933, he lashed out at the 'continual calumnies and a succession of lies [sic]' contained in films about the war (presumably he was referring to the screen version of All Quiet on the Western Front, released in 1930). Bagnall felt particularly aggrieved that he had fought 'doggedly against every form of discomfort living in ditches, only to be held up to the eyes of even your own people as belonging to a group who were as pictured on the screen horribly depraved'.(13) This point, if expressed rather clumsily, was central to the veterans' argument. For Bagnall, it was not a matter of interpretation. The anti-war memory was not just a different perception of events, it was simply a series of falsehoods. Furthermore, they were malicious falsehoods and, as such, were nothing less than personal attacks on the individual soldier. Each time All Quiet on the Western Front was sold or its film version screened, it constituted a libellous attack upon Bagnall, and upon every Canadian veteran. There was no question of competing but equally valid memories; there was a right memory, and anything which did not conform to it was vicious, hurtful, and false. Will R. Bird, who was decorated for gallantry as a corporal in Ewing's battalion, felt the same frustration as Bagnall. Now known primarily as a folklorist, Bird had a thriving career in the interwar period as the unofficial bard of the CEF. He published five books and hundreds of short stories, articles, and poems about his wartime experiences, and his work shares some similarities with Pedley's. He does not gloss over the horrors of war, nor does he suggest that he and his comrades were saints in khaki. He describes the abject terror of enduring an artillery bombardment, the bitterness of seeing officers dine from china and starched tablecloths while the soldiers ate cold, greasy stew from battered mess-tins, and the shattered wrecks of humanity that the war left in its wake. Yet he also recounts hilarious evenings spent in local estaminets, the machinations of good-hearted privates trying to outwit their officers to lay claim to a stash of liquor, and the idealism of soldiers who were able to emerge from the inferno with spirit and soul intact. The immense popularity of Bird's works among veterans suggests that he came closest to capturing the proper balance. Like Bagnall, Bird had no time for anti-war books, which he claimed were 'putrid with so-called "realism"'. Such books, Bird wrote in the preface to his memoir And We Go On, portrayed the soldier as a coarse-minded, profane creature, seeking only the solace of loose women or the courage of strong liquor. Vulgar language and indelicacy of incident are often their substitute for lack of knowledge, and their distorted pictures of battle action are especially repugnant. On the whole, such literature, offered to our avid youth, is an irrevocable insult to those gallant men who lie in French and Belgian graves. His own book, he went on, strove for a more balanced picture. It showed that 'the private in the trenches had other thoughts than of the flesh, had often finer vision and strength of soul than those who would fit him to their sordid, sensation-seeking fiction'.(14) Bird's remarks are interesting on a number of levels. In asserting that vulgarity was a substitute for lack of knowledge, he made an explicit claim for the veracity of his own memory: because he had seen action himself, his memory of the trenches was accurate. In Bird's reasoning, memory grew directly out of experience. Assuming that everyone who served in the trenches experienced roughly the same situations, they should all have memories that were roughly analogous to Bird's. When conflicting memories emerged, especially ones so diametrically opposed to Bird's, there was only one possible explanation: their authors did not experience life in the trenches.(15) Their memory, therefore, must be fabricated. Bird also introduced the notion that there was only one memory of the war which could honour the dead. His book, because it was true, was a fitting tribute to Canada's fallen. The memory contained in anti-war novels, because it was fabricated, was akin to spitting on their graves. If that was not enough, this memory was fabricated for commercial reasons; its authors were 'sensation-seekers' willing to defile the name of the dead for fame and fortune.(16) In contrast, Bird's memory was the truth, and truth, not profit from a best-seller, must be the real goal of any writer. Bird's was the most articulate attack on anti-war literature, but for sheer spite we must look elsewhere. In 1930, Lieutenant-Colonel F.C. Curry, the commander of an Ontario militia unit, launched a spirited assault on the direction of the war novel in the Canadian Defence Quarterly.(17) He began by claiming that war books gave their authors license to describe in horrific detail incidents which would not otherwise be tolerated in literature. The remains of a labourer killed by a dynamite blast were no less obscene than the body of a dead infantryman on the battlefield, he reasoned, but the public would not tolerate such detailed descriptions of the former as they do of the latter. In sum, Curry believed that anti-war books were only popular with people who had no direct experience with life at the front; they were 'largely quoted by the man who stayed at home as being the real truth about the war, and by inference, the reason why he did not indulge in this patriotic form of sport'. Curry was not sure who else such books could conceivably appeal to. 'Possibly the peculiar type of mentality that produces prohibitionists, freak religionists and other "holier than thou" exponents, finds a queer pleasure in this type of book', he surmised. An even more vicious condemnation was launched by Cy Peck in the pages of The Brazier, the newsletter of the 16th Battalion Association.(18) After considering the modern war book as a genre, Peck was discouraged by what he found: they were shot through with an undercurrent of 'demagogery [sic], morbidity and hopelessness', and said nothing about the sterling qualities exhibited by the troops in France. He dismissed virtually every work that is now recognized as a classic of the Great War. Sheriff's Journey's End was a libellous slander for including a scene in which an officer had to be driven into action at gunpoint. Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That, which claimed that Canadian troops occasionally murdered prisoners, was 'the product of an unstable and degenerate mind'.(19) All Quiet on the Western Front was worse still. Canadian soldiers fought every bit as hard as the characters created by Remarque, claimed Peck, 'but it did not lower their spirits or throw them into a state of agonizing gruesomeness'. Mocking the book as something that was loved by the 'smart set' who talk about its naughtiness and 'think themselves quite the wickedest things that ever were', he found nothing whatsoever redeeming in it. It was 'printed putridness', he snorted. Not even Graves and Remarque, however, could stir the furor that was raised by an obscure American novelist named Charles Yale Harrison. A native of Philadelphia, Harrison left the United States just before the beginning of the war to join the staff of a Montreal newspaper. He lived only a short time in Canada before enlisting in the Royal Montreal Regiment (14th Battalion) and proceeding overseas in 1916 as a machine gunner. He served in France, apparently with distinction, before being wounded at Amiens in August 1918 and returning to Montreal. Harrison spent only a short time in Canada after the war, working as a reporter and theatre manager, before moving to New York City in the early 1920s. Shortly thereafter, he began work on a manuscript which he entitled Generals Die in Bed. Extracts from it were serialized in various magazines as early as 1928, but the entire manuscript was rejected when Harrison first offered it to New York publishers. It was eventually published in England in 1930, and was immediately picked up in other countries. As a piece of literature, it is entirely typical of the war book boom, though a little coarser than most. The narrator is placed almost directly into action, and he proceeds on a journey through war that is punctuated by horrific incidents. One by one, the men in his platoon meet their deaths in ways that can only have been calculated to shock the reader. Clark, the officer, is shot in the back by one of his own men for trying to stop the platoon from retreating. Renaud is hit by a flame-thrower and within seconds his head is engulfed, flickers of fire spurting from one eye; a mate shoots him in the head to end his misery. Fry has his legs cut from underneath him by shrapnel while charging an enemy position, and runs a few paces on his stumps before collapsing. The rest of the book is in the same vein. Prisoners are routinely murdered, the soldiers constantly grouse at one another, pausing only to berate their officers, and the survivors of one attack go on a drunken spree, looting the city of Arras until they collapse in a stupor on the streets. In a particularly frightful (and often quoted) passage, the narrator bayonets a German soldier, only to find himself unable to extract his weapon from the poor man's body. Each twist bring a fresh gurgle of pain from the mortally wounded enemy, and the desperate narrator finally discharges his rifle to snap off the bayonet and release them both from their torment. Harrison's book received mixed reviews in Britain and the United States. Some critics loved it, while others believed that it said nothing that had not already been said by more capable authors. The New Statesman called it 'a poison memory which the author had to expel from his system', while Outlook decided that it suffered from 'constant literary explosiveness'. Henry Williamson, who had himself contributed a better book to the canon, called it a 'hotch-potch ... which out-farted the curtain pole to such an extent that the Daily Mail in a leading article called for its withdrawal'.(20) The book, however, was guaranteed a rougher ride in Canada. Because it alleged that members of the Royal Montreal Regiment had pillaged Arras and often murdered prisoners, Generals Die in Bed was bound to raise the ire of Canadian veterans. It went far beyond this modest expectation. Some ex-soldiers contented themselves with taking Bird's lead and denouncing Harrison's divergent memory as complete fabrication. W.B. Kerr contended that, 'though claimed by some advertisements as a genuine record of service, [it] is obviously fiction of the blood-curdling type' while the poet and critic Nathaniel Benson cited a former member of Harrison's battalion who maintained that fully half of the incidents described in the book never occurred.(21) The Reverend T.N. Tattersall was surely referring to Generals Die in Bed when he told the patients at a Toronto veterans' hospital that 'there have been far too many untruthful pictures drawn of late - gross, brutal misrepresentations of the men whom I once knew ... it is not true to represent them as men thirsting for the lives of their enemies'.(22) Other ex-soldiers took the book considerably more seriously. Cy Peck attacked it as 'pure obscenity, totally unrelieved by the slightest flash of genius. It's a gross and shameful slander on the Canadian soldier, by a degenerate minded fool'. Journalist Doug Oliver, formerly of the 18th Battalion, dismissed it as 'that dastardly war novel ... [with] its numerous beastly allegations'.(23) Veterans' groups deluged politicians with complaints and demanded that the government ban the book on account of its 'many libellous statements' about Canadian soldiers. Sir Archibald Macdonell became almost apoplectic with rage when he read it. 'I hope to live long enough to have the opportunity of (in good trench language) shoving my fist into that s-- of a b-- Harrison's tummy until his guts hang out his mouth!!!' Batty Mac fumed to Sir Arthur Currie, the former commander of the Canadian Corps and then Principal of McGill University in Montreal.(24) Currie himself reacted a little more calmly but no less negatively. Shortly before the book appeared in Canada, Currie had won a libel judgement against an Ontario newspaper, an action he had pursued in part because he believed that allegations about his conduct of the operations around Mons in November 1918 reflected badly upon the men who had served under him in the Canadian Corps. The trial took a tremendous toll on his health, yet Currie considered it a worthwhile endeavour because it would finally put to rest decade-old insinuations that had cast a cloud over the CEF's achievements.(25) When Generals Die in Bed appeared and threatened to taint the reputation he had struggled to defend, he must have been much distressed. At first, however, Currie declined to write a response to the allegations contained in the book. 'The reputation of the Canadian soldier stands too high for me to rush into print to defend them, not from charges, but from certain insinuations made in a novel', he wrote to a church magazine. Some months later, Currie declined a similar invitation from a Toronto newspaper, observing that Harrison 'most probably wrote the book for the sole purpose of making money and therefore has provided sensational chapters, knowing that that is what appeals to the public, who prefer always to hear the evil rather than the good'.(26) Currie's replies, though, were evidently written before he had actually read Generals Die in Bed. Once he had read the book, the general could scarcely contain his anger. It was 'a mass of filth, lies ... [it] appeals to everything base, mean and nasty', he raged to Batty Mac. 'A more scurrilous thing was never published ... The book is badly titled, has a weak style, no worth while matter, is full of vile and misrepresentation, and cannot have any lasting influence'.(27) While Currie was perhaps not the soundest authority on literary style, he certainly had a right to comment on the title. He may have been thinking of two old friends and fellow commanders who had been killed in action: Major-General Malcolm Mercer, killed at Mount Sorrel in June 1916 while leading the 3rd Division; and Major-General L.J. Lipsett, killed in September 1918 shortly after leaving the 3rd Division. This may explain the personal edge to Currie's bitter comments on Generals Die in Bed. 'There is not a single line in it worth reading, nor a single incident worthy of record', he wrote. 'I have never read, nor do I hope ever to read, a meaner, nastier and more foul book'.(28) Why did Canadian veterans, from the lowly ranker to his Corps Commander, react so strongly against those books which comprised the canon of anti-war literature, especially when most of them made no reference to Canada? It seems unlikely that they united in defence of establishment values or the social hierarchy which these books threatened. It would be difficult to find any factors, be they social, political, or economic, that could have drawn together such diverse individuals as the bitter ex-private F.W. Bagnall, the small-town cleric Edgar McKegney, and the revered old soldier Sir Archibald Macdonell. Nevertheless, these veterans, regardless of their social status or economic situation, criticized the anti-war canon in strikingly similar terms. In the first place, they invariably dismissed the books as falsifications of history: because anti-war books failed to recount the good times along with the bad, their vision of the war experience was untrue. The fact that their authors had, in general, as much experience in the trenches as their strongest critics was irrelevant; because it was divergent, their memory could only have been fabricated. Opponents would not even concede that the anti-war memory might be a different perception of the same historical reality. On the contrary, they insisted that memory flew in the face of fact. Condemning novels for not adhering slavishly to historical fact may seem to be missing the point. However, opponents believed such criticism was fully justified, for the canon invited attack on the grounds of historical inaccuracy. By using terms like 'fictional autobiography' and 'factual novel', the books advanced nebulous claims towards being accurate historical records.(29) They purported to tell the truth about the war but at the same time felt at liberty to exercise, in the words of one modern critic, 'fiction's teleological right to exclude ordinary everyday elements which are redundant to its theme'.(30) Joyous nights in Belgian estaminets undoubtedly occurred but were irrelevant to a novel dedicated, as Harrison's was, to the 'bewildered youth' of all armies. So, he evidently felt warranted in omitting them. Veterans refused to let this pass. Because the anti-war books tried to be history and literature at the same time, they felt quite justified in judging them on whatever grounds they chose. The literary merit of the books became irrelevant; they were simply bad history. Furthermore, the suggestion that 'people prefer to take their histories of the war in the form of fiction' made the veterans' choice appear all the more sensible.(31) Since people were obviously going to use fiction as history, veterans felt justified in criticizing fiction as history. This notion brings us back from the specific to the general. In this case study, opponents of the anti-war vision made a number of assumptions that are central to my own research. First, they recognized that people were likely to get their ideas about history from non-historical sources, or, to return to the notion I introduced earlier, from media which have relatively little to do with notions of 'objectivity' or 'research' as historians understand them. This is as true today as it was seventy years ago, although historians are reluctant to wrestle with the notion. In the view of many professional historians, the old axiom 'a little learning is a dangerous thing' has been transmuted to suggest that a little history from the wrong source is a dangerous thing. That may well be, but it is pointless to pretend that the vast majority of people who have some degree of historical consciousness, have gained that consciousness from professional historians or their work. Rather, they get it from cinema, television, advertising, or, in this case study, literature. Here, we must take note of the fact that the primary goal of these media is not conveying historical consciousness, but something else entirely, whether it be selling a product, creating an emotional response, or furthering a political agenda. To push the point still further, it is not too much to suggest that the majority of people have gained an historical consciousness not intentionally, but coincidentally, almost by subliminal suggestion. As a result, it is important that we study all conveyors of historical information, not just the traditional varieties. Second, the opponents of the anti-war version of history were concerned with balance, insisting that a balanced view of the war experience would tell a very different story than the one told by Remarque and his ilk. This notion is merely a simplification of what historians try to do: assess all sides of the subject, and ensure that the multivariate shades of grey are reflected in the finished product. Again, this is in direct contrast to the type of history that most people are interested in consuming. Those presentations which arguably have the greatest impact on the public's historical consciousness are precisely those which tell simple stories in broad strokes of colour. The nuances and shades of meaning which give texture to a scholarly monograph simply muddy the love story (as in Pearl Harbor), the grand narrative (as in Canada: A People's History), or the message (as in Molson Canadian's 'Building Blocks of Time' commercial). Indeed, it is the very simplicity of the story, narrative, or commercial which gives it such impact. That does not mean the historian should spend hours dissecting each new Hollywood film to isolate the errors of detail; this only succeeds in convincing people that we are tedious pedants who take everything far too seriously. Rather, we must assess those media on their own terms if we are to understand what people think about history and why. I was trained in the empiricist tradition to believe that, by amassing enough evidence, it was possible to recreate a reasonably accurate version of what actually happened. While I reject the postmodernist notion that history and fiction are essentially the same thing, I have come to accept that there is limited utility in trying to recreate a reasonably accurate version of what actually happened. Historical consciousness, both in the short term and the long term, is shaped, not by what actually happened, but by what people think happened, ie. not by the past as it really was, but by the past as they believe it to have been. That perception of the past is shaped by many forces -- commercialism, political struggles, the news media -- but probably least of all by historical research. For this reason, it seems to me that the study of historical consciousness is much more important than the study of history. In my own work, I have argued that, through the 1920s and 1930s, Canada's historical consciousness regarding the First World War owed very little to what actually happened during the war. Instead, it was built on a complex mixture of fact, half-truth, and outright invention that eventually came to have more resonance than the events. In this sense, it was the perception of events rather than the events themselves which shaped Canada's future. Or, to use the example from the MCRI Letter of Intent, who John A. Macdonald really was is ultimately less important in the history of Canada (and in the historical consciousness of Canadians) than who people thought he was, and what they thought he represented. The author would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for its financial support, and Graham Rawlinson of the University of Toronto and John W. Chambers II of Rutgers University for their comments and suggestions. 1. Modris Eksteins, '"All Quiet on the Western Front" and the Fate of a War', Journal of Contemporary History XV (1980), p. 361. 2. Douglas Jerrold, The Lie About the War, Criterion Miscellany series #9 (London, Faber 1930). 3. Maureen Sharpe, 'Anzac Day in New Zealand: 1916 to 1939', New Zealand Journal of History XV (1981), p. 110; Robin Gerster, Big-noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing (Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1987), p. 118. 4. Stanley Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), pp. 198-9. 5. Quoted in The Free Press [London, Ontario], 9 November 1928, p. 4. 6. Review in Canadian War Stories [Chatham, Ontario] III (1 December 1929), p. 76. 7. Kerr, Shrieks and Crashes, foreword; review in Canadian Defence Quarterly [Ottawa] VII (1930), p. 262. 8. W.B. Kerr, 'Historical Literature on Canada's Participation in the Great War', Canadian Historical Review XIV (1933), p. 420; review in Canadian Defence Quarterly V (1928), p. 250. 9. These comments are taken from The Book Review Digest: Books of 1929 (New York, H.W. Wilson, 1930). 10. William Ready Division of Archives and Special Collections, McMaster University: Macmillan of Canada Records, box 137, file 12, Col. C.W. Peck, 'Modern War Books', The Brazier [16th Battalion Association] XVIII (1930), p. 7. Cf. Northrop Frye's comment that Canadian readers often denounced realism as 'nasty, prurient, morbid, and foreign.' Northrop Frye, 'Conclusion', in Carl F. Klinck, ed., Literary History of Canada (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1976), p. 838. 11. Moose Jaw Times, 27 May 1930; H.M. Urquhart, The History of the 16th Battalion (The Canadian Scottish), Canadian Expeditionary Force, in the Great War, 1914-1919 (Toronto, Macmillan, 1932), p. 342. 12. Mabel Clint, Our Bit: Memories of War Service by a Canadian Nursing Sister (Montreal, Barwick, 1934), p. 175; Clifford H. Bowering, Service: The Story of the Canadian Legion, 1925-1960 (Ottawa, Canadian Legion, 1960), p. 61; The Legionary [Canadian Legion, Ottawa] III (1929), p. 23. 13. F.W. Bagnall, Not Mentioned in Despatches (Vancouver, North Shore Press, 1933), pp. 54, 70. 14. Bird, And We Go On, p. 5. 15. In this, Bird was obviously incorrect. To cite just three examples, Arnold Zweig fought in the Battle of Verdun for thirteen months. Henry Williamson sailed for France with the Rifle Brigade in November 1914 as a private, and was invalided out of the army as a lieutenant in 1917, suffering from shock and dysentery. Frederic Manning also enlisted as a private and was commissioned in the Royal Irish Regiment before ill-health forced him out of the trenches. 16. There may be something to Bird's assertion. See A.F. Bance, 'Im Westen Nichts Neues: A Bestseller in Context', Modern Language Review LXXII (1977), pp. 359-73. 17. Lieut.-Col. F.C. Curry, 'The Trend of the War Novel', Canadian Defence Quarterly VII (1930), pp. 519-20. 18. Peck, 'Modern War Books', p. 7. 19. Graves' own comments on his book are interesting. He called it 'a reckless autobiography ... written with small consideration for anyone's feelings'. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918-1939 (London, Faber, 1940), p. 217. 20. The Book Review Digest: Books of 1930 (New York, H.W. Wilson, 1931); quoted in John Onions, English Fiction and Drama of the Great War, 1918-39 (London, Macmillan, 1990), p. 50. Williamson admitted that he did not quite understand the metaphor, which he had borrowed from elsewhere. The vague references to evacuation are noteworthy, in that reviewers often criticized writers of anti-war books for dwelling on defecation. 21. Kerr, 'Historical Literature on Canada's Participation in the Great War', p. 432; Saturday Night [Toronto], 9 August 1930, p. 9. 22. The Globe [Toronto], 12 November 1930, p. 12. 23. Peck, 'Modern War Books', p. 7; National Archives of Canada [NAC]: Sir Arthur Currie Papers, vol. 12, file 37, Oliver to Currie, 4 June 1930. 24. House of Commons, Debates, 19 May 1930, p. 2267; Currie Papers, vol. 11, file 33, Macdonell to Currie, 26 June 1930. 25. See Robert J. Sharpe, The Last Day, The Last Hour: The Currie Libel Trial (Toronto, Carswell, 1988). 26. Currie Papers, vol. 8, file 23, Currie to Presbyterian Witness, 14 January 1930; vol. 12, file 37, Currie to Oliver, 7 June 1930. 27. Ibid., vol. 11, file 33, Currie to Macdonell, 25 June 1930. 28. Quoted in Sharpe, The Last Day, The Last Hour, p. 76. 29. See Evelyn Cobley, Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993), p. 11. 30. Onions, English Fiction and Drama of the Great War, pp. 64-5. 31. NAC: Department of National Defence Records, vol. 1506, file HQ 683-1-30-18, cutting from The Globe & Mail [Toronto], 15 July 1938.a |