Unwanted Warriors: The Rejected Volunteers of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (Book Review) by Nic Clarke

Review of Unwanted Warriors: The Rejected Volunteers of the Canadian Expeditionary Force by Nic Clarke

The First Use of Poison Gase at Ypres, 1915: A Translation from the German Official History

While English-speaking historians know in detail about almost every event on the BEF’s front, the same cannot be said of our knowledge of the German side of the Western Front. This is not surprising, as comparatively few English language books have been written about the German experience on the battlefields of the Great War. Recent English language scholarship by Holger Herwig, Annika Mombauer, and Robert Foley, to name but a few historians, has enriched our understanding of the conflict. However, these works have tended to concentrate on political and diplomatic history, or in the case of Mombaurer and Foley, on high-ranking officers such as Helmuth von Moltke and Erich von Falkenhayn. This means that events at the tactical and operational level remain comparatively unexplored in English. This gap in the historiography has largely been shaped by the absence of primary source materials

The Myth of the Learning Curve: Tactics and Training in the 12th Canadian Infantry Brigade, 1916-1918

Canadian military historians generally accept that during the First World War the Canadian military improved over time. This idea of a “learning curve” suggests that Canadians began the war as inexperienced colonial volunteers and, as the Corps gained experience on the battlefield, commanders and ordinary soldiers alike learned from their mistakes and successes and improved combat tactics from battle to battle and from year to year.1 Several different approaches to this argument are evident in the literature. Tim Cook and Bill Rawling both published works in the mid-1990s that argue technology was the impetus behind this process of learning. On the other hand, Shane Schreiber, James McWilliams and R. James Steel have focused on what they see as the ultimate success of the learning curve: the August 1918 Battle of Amiens.2 However, while technology played an important role in the conduct of the war, and the Battle of Amiens was indeed a significant Allied victory, one question remains: where is the hard evidence that this learning curve exists? One of the best ways to find evidence of “learning,” a largely abstract process, is through an examination of training. Because training is meant to impart specific knowledge, during the Great War written training instructions and orders were spelled out in minute and explicit detail and the lessons that were to be learned from various exercises were highlighted. While many excellent works have been produced on the Canadian Expeditionary Force, there is still room for further scholarship. Until recently, training has been a sorely neglected subject in the historiography. In recent years historians such as such as Andrew Iarocci and David Campbell have begun to re-examine training as a means of measuring and evaluating the learning curve.3 This paper builds on the work of previous scholars and extends some of their arguments while challenging others. It examines the training of the 12th Canadian Infantry Brigade for the battles of the Somme and Amiens, as well as the official training manuals, to look at tactical change over time. It argues that while combat became more complex and “all arms” oriented, the basic tactical concepts of 1916 essentially remained the same in 1918. Except for terminology and the addition of new weapons, little changed in how the 12th Canadian Infantry Brigade was taught to fight between the Somme and Amiens. Indeed, while new weapons were utilized and emphasized in training, they were merely integrated into existing tactical doctrine and had little appreciable impact on what was envisioned as the key to battlefield success

Finding communities in sparse networks

Spectral algorithms based on matrix representations of networks are often used to detect communities but classic spectral methods based on the adjacency matrix and its variants fail to detect communities in sparse networks. New spectral methods based on non-backtracking random walks have recently been introduced that successfully detect communities in many sparse networks. However, the spectrum of non-backtracking random walks ignores hanging trees in networks that can contain information about the community structure of networks. We introduce the reluctant backtracking operators that explicitly account for hanging trees as they admit a small probability of returning to the immediately previous node unlike the non-backtracking operators that forbid an immediate return. We show that the reluctant backtracking operators can detect communities in certain sparse networks where the non-backtracking operators cannot while performing comparably on benchmark stochastic block model networks and real world networks. We also show that the spectrum of the reluctant backtracking operator approximately optimises the standard modularity function similar to the flow matrix. Interestingly, for this family of non- and reluctant-backtracking operators the main determinant of performance on real-world networks is whether or not they are normalised to conserve probability at each node.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

The Forgotten Campaign: Newfoundland at Gallipoli

Gallipoli has no place in the collective memory of most Canadians and even among Newfoundlanders, Gallipoli has not garnered as much attention as the ill-fated attack at Beaumont Hamel. Although largely forgotten, Newfoundland’s expedition to Gallipoli was an important moment in the island’s history, one that helped shape the wartime identity of Newfoundlanders. Like other British Dominions, Newfoundland was linked to the Empire’s world-wide war experience and shared in aspects of that collective imperial identity, although that identity was refracted through a local lens shaped by the island’s unique history. Gallipoli was a brutal baptism of fire which challenged and confirmed popular assumptions about the Great War and laid the foundation of the island’s war mythology. This myth emphasized values of loyalty, sacrifice, and fidelity, affirming rather than reducing the island’s connection to Mother Britain, as was the case in the other Dominions. When in the early 1930s economic depression, financial mismanagement, and political gridlock led the government of Prime Minister Frederick Alderdice to end responsible government in 1934 and return governing authority to the British crown, Newfoundland’s war myth lost much of its meaning. After Confederation with Canada in 1949, Gallipoli was all but forgotten, but it has bled back into Newfoundlanders’ historical consciousness in recent years

Late Antiquity and World History

The flourishing of late-antique studies in the last half-century has coincided with the rise of “world history” as an area of academic research. To an extent, some overlap has occurred, particularly with Sasanian Persia being considered alongside the late Roman Empire as constituting an essential component in what we think of in terms of the “shape” of late antiquity. Yet it is still the case that many approaches to late antiquity are bound up with conventional western narratives of historical progress, as defined in Jack Goody’s The Theft of History (2006). Indeed, the debate about whether late antiquity was an age of dynamic transformation (as argued by Peter Brown and his disciples) or one of catastrophic disruption (as asserted, most recently, by Bryan Ward-Perkins) can be regarded as representing two different faces of an essentially evolutionary interpretation of western historical development. This article argues, however, that we can challenge such conventional narrative frameworks by taking a world historical perspective on late antiquity. It will show, first, that our interpretation of late antiquity depends on sources that themselves are representative of myriad local perspectives. Secondly, it will argue that since Gibbon’s time these sources have been made to serve an essentially western construct of and debate about history. The final section will consider how taking a more global perspective allows us to challenge conventional approaches to and narratives of late antiquity