Canada and the First World War: Essays in Honour of Robert Craig Brown/Fight or Pay: Soldiers' Families in the Great War

David MacKenzie (ed.), Canada and the First World War: Essays in Honour of Robert Craig Brown (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 452pp. Cloth. $85/£65. ISBN 0-8020-3573-6. Paper. $35/£20. ISBN 0-8020-8445-1. Desmond Morton, Fight or Pay: Soldiers' Families in the Great War (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004), 368pp. Cloth. $39.95. ISBN 0-7748- 1108-0. It is unfortunate that the official cataloguing of David MacKenzie's collection gives us 1939-1945 as the dates of the First World War, since it is an exceptionally scholarly and generally well presented text. Produced as a tribute to an American who became one of Canada's best-known authorities on the Great War, it contains 15 essays by leading Canadian historians, representing a cross-section of Brown's friends, colleagues and former students. As usual in such Festschriften, the contributions vary in length (from 12 to 42 pages), scope and content but all are of considerable interest. While it is generally acknowledged that the First World War forged a distinctive national identity for Canada, the concomitant tensions and divisions in Canadian society have been less widely recognised. This academic lacuna is addressed by the contributors to this book, who examine many of the fractures and frictions caused by the war. The book is divided into four parts: 'Introduction', 'Fighting the War', 'The War at Home' and 'The Aftermath'. This seemingly logical organisation is actually the book's only major weakness. The introduction includes the editor's broad-brush outline of the book's contents and an engaging portrait of Craig Brown and his career in Canadian academia. Thereafter, the distinctions between the book's major sections - Parts Two and Three - are not always clear-cut; for example, the essays on political leadership and economic impact are placed in 'Fighting the War' but could equally well fit into 'The War at Home'. Moreover, the latter contains such disparate topics that the term 'dog's breakfast' springs to mind. It would surely have been more logical to group together the six essays with a distinctly social, political or economic focus, leaving a residual category dealing with regional and provincial issues. In Part Two, Copp's 'The Military Effort, 1914-1918', provides both a factual foundation and a contextual framework for much of the rest of the book. We are reminded that, constitutionally speaking, Canada went to war in 1914 because Britain did. The same is true of the then separate colony of Newfoundland, which is included within the scope of this book. Copp highlights some of the varying regional attitudes to the war, which are subsequently elaborated in the studies of Ontario, western Canada and the Maritimes. The widespread antipathy of French Canadians to 'la grande guerre' (ascribed to their 'isolationism') is somewhat surprising given the selfless defence of French soil by other Canadians at places such as Beaumont Hamel and Vimy Ridge. Conscription, necessary by the spring of 1917, not only accentuated such regional contrasts but became nationally divisive. Essays on Borden's leadership and the war's economic impact complete Part Two. In addition to the regional topics already alluded to, Part Three includes contributions on the mobilisation of women for war work, the development of science and technology, and the impact of American culture on Canada. …

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