CANADIAN FICTION OF THE GREAT WAR

1 OR R MORE THAN SIXTY YEARS John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" has been memorized by Canadian schoolchildren or declaimed reverently at Remembrance Day ceremonies in Canada and around the world. It is almost the only Canadian poem, of whatever theme or type, that has achieved genuine fame or recognition. Practically unknown, by contrast, both in Canada and abroad, are several war novels which constitute the best fiction by Canadian writers about the experiences of Canadian fighting soldiers in the Great War of 1914-18. These novels and their authors — All Else is Folly; a tale of War and Passion (1929) by Peregrine Acland, Generals Die in Bed (1930) by Charles Yale Harrison, and God's Sparrows (1937) by Philip Child — deserve to be better known. For since the publication of Timothy Findley's The Wars (1977), readers have begun to realize that the war novel is a significant genre of Canadian fiction. It is one of the ironies of modern history that the 1914-18 conflict — depending on how one sees it, either the last nineteenth-century or the first twentieth-century war — has been called by various names. First it was the "Great War," then the "World War"; since 1945, it has been dubbed the "First World War." This last name is both innocuous and foreboding, conveying both a colourless statistic and the suggestion of a series of ever more dangerous conflicts. The fact remains that it was a war fought primarily among European states and their allies, and was by no means universal in scope. Still, in terms of the casualties and devastation it involved it came to be regarded as the worst calamity mankind had ever committed against itself. Some hoped it would prove to be the final, ignoble cauldron of human madness which at last would teach man that his civilization must be strengthened or else he would be doomed forever. This was the sentiment expressed in H. G. Wells' The War That Will End War (1914) and Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916), among other works of the period. A later, more cautious observer, B. H. Liddell Hart, writing a history of the war in 1930, noted : "The historian's rightful task is to distil experience as a medicinal warning for future generations. . . . He would be a rash optimist if he believed that the next generation would trouble to absorb the warning."