"The List of the Nation’s Heroes": Voluntary Enlistment in Chatham, Ontario 1914-1916

This paper examines patterns of recruiting and enlistment during the most intense period of mobilisation in a small regional centre of 12,000 in the heart of rural southwestern Ontario. It studies the effects of recruiting efforts within a specific, but typically Canadian, local culture, isolating targeted men within the catchment area and then considering who joined and who did not. It argues that recruiters struggled to appeal to Canadian-born citizens, and resorted to increasingly coercive methods when pure voluntarism could not fill the ranks. In early 1915, the city of Chatham, Ontario was in the midst of a nineteen day campaign to find 200 men to join the Canadian Expeditionary Force (cef) overseas. One Tuesday late that month, Achille Pattiyn emerged from the imposing red brick armoury in Tecumseh Park, a newly enlisted member of the 33rd Battalion. Pattiyn was one of three men who passed the medical examination that day, but his trip to the recruiters’ office started three days earlier with a fistfight. Pattiyn was a Belgian citizen living and working in Chatham. At a hotel the previous Saturday, a local took exception to the presence of a Belgian in Chatham while men from the city were fighting in defence of his country. “It is understood,” reported the Chatham Daily Planet, “that he was accused by a certain Chathamite of lacking sufficient nerve to fly to the defence of his country. Pattiyn claimed that business interests held him here, but that he wanted to reach the front. Arguments waxed warm with the inevitable result.” © Canadian Military History 24, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2015): 141-180 1 : The List of the Nation’s Heroes Voluntary Enlistment in Chatham, Ontario 1914-1916 Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015 142 : The List of the Nation’s Heroes A fight broke out, and “the Chathamite was worsted in the fistic encounter.”1 Far from lamenting the local man’s defeat, the Daily Planet relished Pattiyn’s commitment to doing his bit in the Great War underway in Europe. As soon as he paid his fine in police court, the feisty Belgian went straight to the recruiter’s office and joined up. The controversy over how Canada filled the ranks of its overseas forces during the First World War raged long after hostilities ended in 1918. In conjunction with the c ef ’s achievements on the battlefield, recruiting and the conscription crisis have come to characterise Canada’s Great War. From 1917 to war’s end, the conscription crisis cast a long shadow over voluntary enlistment. Discussion has centred on the failure of the voluntary system and the controversies that followed, examined through the prism of Anglo-French relations. For decades afterwards historical inquiry into recruiting served largely to demonstrate why voluntary recruiting failed gradually in English Canada and entirely in French Canada.2 More recent studies have examined recruiting in Ontario as a local and cultural phenomenon largely removed from the national experience. In that province, recruiters’ organisation and propaganda were “extensions of the social, intellectual, and cultural norms of prewar society,” and governed by the “recruiting establishment,” informal groups consisting of prominent members of the professional middle class and their associated organisations.3 These men were aided by civilian recruiting agencies, municipal and provincial governments, 1 “Recruits Being Accepted at the Armoury,” Chatham Daily Planet, 27 January 1915. 2 See, for example, Desmond Morton, Canada and War: A Military and Political History (Toronto: Butterworth and Co., 1981); Desmond Morton, A Military History of Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1992); Jack Granatstein and J.M. Hitsman, Broken Promises: A History of Conscription in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1977). Other investigations blamed the decentralised system adopted by Ottawa or cast the ‘failure’ of voluntary recruiting as the perception of a particular set of Canadians. See Robert Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook, Canada 1896-1921: A Nation Transformed (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1974); Matthew R. Bray, “ ‘Fighting as an Ally’: The English-Canadian Patriotic Response to the Great War,” Canadian Historical Review 61, no. 2 (June 1980). 3 See Ian Hugh MacLean Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief: Torontonians and the Great War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Paul Maroney, “The Great Adventure: The Context and Ideology of Recruiting in Ontario, 1914-17,” Canadian Historical Review 77, no.1 (March 1996); this article based upon his MA thesis, Paul J. Maroney, “Recruiting the Canadian Expeditionary Force in Ontario,” MA Thesis, Queen’s University, 1991. 2 Canadian Military History, Vol. 24 [2015], Iss. 1, Art. 27 http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol24/iss1/27

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