A Woman’s War

The contemporary names given to what we now call World War I-the Great War, the war to end all wars-reflect a belief that the war that tore Europe apart from 1914 to 1918 was different from previous wars.Instead of naming it for a specific cause or location, contemporary observers defined it as new in scale, perhaps in response to the new technologies in use-airplanes, automobiles, tanks, poison gases.The scale of destruction possible, the number of combatants, the range of countries involved, all demanded a new way to talk about the combat.Much of the literature coming out of the war also reflected these changes.Poets such as Wilfred Owen described the horrors of trench warfare at first hand, leaving readers with few illusions about the "glory" of battle.From the point of view of those at home in Canada, the war could be a distant event of no significance or a personal tragedy as family members or friends enlisted.For L.M. Montgomery, the war was a tragedy of giant proportions, although none of her close associates were combatants.According to her journals, she followed the war news assiduously, was enraged at the reports of German atrocities, could not concentrate on her work when things were going badly, and longed for someone to share her intense reactions.Yet despite her awareness of what was happening in the towns and villages of Europe and her full appreciation of the destruction the war caused, when she writes about the war in Rilla of Ingleside, Montgomery romanticizes the period by organizing her novel around the experience of a young woman in Prince Edward Island and making her love story the centre of the plot.Further, by showing that the work performed by women in Canada during the war is merely an extension or intensification of their pre-war activities and by demonstrating how easily they come to regard the activities as "normal," Montgomery suggests that the war does not change the social life and structures of the village in which her characters reside.Montgomery wrote Rilla of Ingleside (1921, "RI") between 11 March 1919 and 24 August 1920.The main character, Rilla Blythe, is the youngest child of Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe, whose story Montgomery had already told in Anne of Green Gables (1908), Anne of Avonlea (1909), Anne of the Island (1915), Anne's House of Dreams (1917), and Rainbow Valley (1919).While the characters and setting of Rilla of Ingleside draw on a fictional world Montgomery had already created, the emphasis and organization of the novel owe a great deal to two war memoirs that she had read and a war movie she had seen.The two memoirs, My Home in the Field of Honour by Frances Wilson Huard and A Hilltop on the Marne by Mildred Aldrich, are mentioned in her journal entry of 18 March 1917, where she describes A Hilltop on the Marne as "a quite delightful little thing, though lacking the charm of 'My Home on the Field of Honor' (sic)" (Selected Journals II: 212, "SJ").Montgomery records seeing DW Griffith's

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