Vance, Jonathan F.

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

Canadian Military HistoryVolume 6 | Issue 1 Article 141-20-2012“Donkeys” or “Lions”? Re-Examining Great WarStereotypesJonathan F. VanceUniversity of Western OntarioThis Feature is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Canadian MilitaryHistory by an authorized administrator of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended CitationVance, Jonathan F. (1997) "“Donkeys” or “Lions”? Re-Examining Great War Stereotypes," Canadian Military History: Vol. 6: Iss. 1,Article 14.Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol6/iss1/14Jonathan F. Vance Duff Crerar, Padres in No Man's Land: Canadian Chaplains and the Great War (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995), $39.95, 424 pages, ISBN 0-7735-1230-6. David French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916-1918. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1995), $108.00, 332 pages, ISBN 0-19-820559-7. J.P. Harris, Men, Ideas and Tanks: British Military Thought and Armoured Forces, 1903-39 (Manchester: Manchester University Press (distributed in Canada by UBC Press), 1995), $34.95 paper, 342 pages, ISBN 0-7190-4814-1. Jeffrey A. Keshen, Propaganda and Censorship During Canada's Great War (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1996), $29.95 paper, 333 pages, ISBN 0-88864-279-2. Edward H. Wigney, The C.E.F. Roll of Honour: Members andFormer Members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force who Died as a Result of Service in the Great War, 1914-1919 (Privately publ ished (available from Eugene G. Ursual, P.O. Box 8096, Ottawa, Ontario, K1G 3H6), 1996), $135.00, 867 pages, ISBN 0-9698857-3-3. When the Theatre Workshop's production of 'Oh! What a Lovely War" opened in London in 1963, it came in the middle of a wave of revived interest in the First World War. As much about the 1960s as it was about 1914-1918, the production made another splash in 1969 when it was transformed into an equally arresting film by Richard Attenborough. In short order, the film became the most visual aspect of what Alex Danchev has nicely characterized as the "'bunking' and debunking" of the First World War.1 "Oh! What a Lovely War" fleshed out the icons which, since the late 1950s, had adorned popularized histories of the war. Among the most memorable characters of the film were John Mills as Sir Douglas Haig, a plodding dullard with the imagination of a turnip, and Laurence Olivier as Sir John French, garrulous and a tad randy. At the other end of the spectrum were the "lions," to use the metaphor adopted by Alan Clark (from a probably apocryphal remark attributed to Falkenhayn) as the basis for his 1961 best-seller The Donkeys: the much-tried and much-misused infantrymen who deserved better than to be driven to their deaths by moronic generals. To these stereotypes we might add a few more, created by generations of poets, novelists, and historians since the 1920s. There is the yammering and jingoistic propagandist viciously lampooned by Siegfried Sassoon in poems like "The Effect," "Editorial Impressions," and "Fight to a Finish."2 There is the chaplain, also a favourite target of Sassoon (the Bishop of Byegumb in his poem "Vicarious Christ" is another brutal caricature), who exhorted men into the furnace but was careful not to stray to close to the fire himself. And finally there were the politicians, the "old men of Europe," who, like Nero, fiddled as their world burned. By the 1970s, these were the central figures in the conventional wisdom regarding the First World War. It was a war in which witless generals (the "donkeys") threw their troops against barbed wire and machine guns like lambs to the slaughter, for the simple reason that blinkered © Canadian Military History, Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 1997, pp.125-128. 125 1Vance: Re-Examining Great War StereotypesPublished by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 1997tactical thinking and limited imagination prevented them from pursuing any other course. These "brass hats" fought the enemy in front of them, but also the enemy behind, the "frock coats" who spent their days bickering over how to prosecute the war. The victims of their almost criminal insanity (the "lions") fought gamely but inevitably came to despise the generals and politicians for their callousness, and to discard their idealism, which seemed completely irrelevant amongst the supreme futility and pointlessness of the Western Front. Equally loathed by the troops were the bibulous churchmen who supposedly ministered to souls but whose energies were really directed towards ensuring that the soldiers were refrained from drinking, gambling, womanizing, and the other simple pleasures that were open to them. And on the home front, dishonest journalists and fat propagandists ensured that the "stay-at-homes" continued to believe that the war was a gallant affair of redcoats and happy warriors. Sketched in such exaggerated terms, these cha rac t e r s approach the r id icu lous . Nevertheless, they have had remarkable staying power. Fed by such classics as Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), the conventional wisdom, with its requisite doses of pathos and tragedy, has provided ample fodder for popularizers, documentary producers, and countless undergraduate history and literature courses. Not until the late 1980s did it come under any serious challenge and even then the lions/donkeys theme, and all of the related stereotypes, stubbornly refused to be unseated. Fussell now draws strong criticism for a cavalier disregard of facts, but the caricatures he helped create retain their appeal. Debunking the debunkers, to use Danchev's terms, has become something of a growth industry, and Crerar, French, Harris, and Keshen all offer further attempts at revising decades-old caricatures. David French's book amounts to a re-examination of the legendary disputes between generals and politicians, which he dismisses as postwar finger-pointing engaged in by men who were desperately trying to shift blame for tactical disasters onto someone else. Instead, he argues persuasively that the frock coats and brass hats were in fact united in the view that, for Britain, winning the peace was as 126 important as winning the war. In this reading, the Battle of Passchendaele becomes an entirely logical operation, in a strategic if not a tactical sense: in the context of the time, with the collapse of Russia, the possible collapse of France, the success of Germany's submarine offensive, and the slowness of the American build up, there was no other option for British policy-makers than to launch a major offensive in Flanders. French then asks us to reconsider wartime rhetoric about British war aims that stressed the need to stem the threat of German aggression and ensure the security of the British Empire. Derided by later observers as an attempt to divert attention from the fact that the war's causes lay in tawdry economics, French insists that those aims were right and jus t and, despite the immense human and economic cost of the war to Britain, were largely realized. Britain, concludes French, emerged from the war with immeasurably greater international prestige, even if the British were unable to recognize it. As he puts it, "the willingness of British policy-makers to sacrifice almost three-quarters of a million men to defeat the Central Powers made a profound impression on the minds of its former enemies" (296), an impression that persisted until it was destroyed by the appeasers. J.P. Harris, too, is rather kinder to British policy-makers than some recent historians. He declines to view the generals as being "blind to the oppor tuni t ies afforded by such new technologies" as the tank (315), arguing instead that most army commanders were more than willing to consider the tank on its own merits when the idea was first presented to them. Even Haig, usually stereotyped as a general who refused to allow any new ideas to enter his mind after 1904, was "as positive as could reasonably have been expected given their limited combat power" (315). In short, Harris puts J.F.C. Fuller in his place, reminding us to treat warily anything Fuller said that was later proven correct by the experience of the Second World War. In the context of 1916, the tank was a poor solution to the tactical problems posed by the stalemate on the Western Front. The wonder is not that GHQ failed to express more faith in the weapon, but that they gave it any consideration at all. Just as the battle of the memoirs was a postwar attempt at scapegoating, so too was the idolatry of Fuller 2Canadian Military History, Vol. 6 [1997], Iss. 1, Art. 14http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol6/iss1/14and the tank in the interwar period: if only Haig had given the tank a chance, so much slaughter could have been avoided. Duff Crerar takes on an equally well entrenched stereotype, the well meaning but widely despised (at least by the troops) padre, although this attempt at revisionism is less successful. It is largely an administrative history, focusing on the struggle to create an efficient and effective chaplain service that was free of favouritism and denominational jealousies. In this regard it is an excellent study, and an admirable record of John Almond's tireless efforts to bring order to the chaos into which the chaplain service had degenerated under the tender ministrations of Sam Hughes and his cronies . Crerar is less convincing when discussing the impact of chaplains on the soldiers. He dismisses the traditional view, that soldier had little respect for chaplains because few of them were willing to share their dangers and discomforts, but introduces little fresh evidence for any contrary view. He also has relatively little to say about the message conveyed by chaplains to their charges and does not venture into an examination of the religion of the trenches, a curious blend of Salvationist fundamentalism and superstition. He does, however, present a convincing variation of an argument made by other historians: postwar disillusionment among ex-chaplains did not grow out of the horrors they had witnessed on the battlefields, but out of their frustration with a peacetime society that seemed to betray the ideals for which the fallen had died. Also worth mentioning is the book's excessive referencing. Fully 140 pages of notes for 231 pages of text is completely uncalled for, and should have been ruthlessly pruned by an editor. In light of this prevailing revisionism, it is perhaps ironic that the portrait of Ernest J. Chambers, Canada's chief censor, in Keshen's book is in itself stereotypical. He is shown in the uniform of Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, and appears every bit as true-to-type as if he had been rendered by Sassoon: pompous, self-important, humourless, and severe, this Chambers would have been a perfect subject for Sassoon's acerbic pen. And yet, as Keshen makes clear, Chambers was quite different than this one-dimensional caricature. He may well have been over-zealous , pa r t i cu la r ly when suppressing the ethnic press, but he was also diligent (often making himself available at any hour of the night or day), selfless (he declined a salary for his work, insisting that the honorarium he received as Gentleman Usher was sufficient for his needs), and tactful (preferring to use personal diplomacy rather than edicts to achieve the desired goals). Whatever long- term consequences Chambers' work may have had for ethnic minorities and for the schism between veterans and stay-at-homes, in the short term he was successful in ensuring that Canadians remained committed to the ideals and goals of the cause. On another level, Keshen also has some interesting things to say about the publicity campaigns created for recruiting and fund-raising purposes. He provides valuable evidence for an argument which has long been inferred, that the ultimate failure of volunteerism in Canada was as much a failure of marketing and public relations as anything: if the recruitment campaigns had been managed as capably as the Victory Loan drives, conscription might not have been necessary. With all of the old stereotypes coming under reconsideration, one is left to wonder if there are any foundations left upon which to build a new conventional wisdom. In a curious way, the soundest base is provided by the names which fill over 800 pages of Wigney's book. In what can only be described as a labour of love, he has sifted through the records of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the Department of Militia and Defence, C a n a d a ' s Book of Remembrance, and count less regimental histories and memorial volumes to compile a register of the 67,000 men and women who died in uniform from the beginning of the war to the final demobil izat ion of the Canad ian Expeditionary Force in 1921. The entries are necessarily brief, confining themselves to name (including aliases), rank, number, unit, date of death, place of burial, and any remarks that could be included in the space available, but tiiey are sufficient to make the book an invaluable reference tool. The Roll of Honour also calls into the reader's mind endless questions about the thousands of lives cut short. Was Private Deligny Lambert of the 22nd Battalion celebrating the Armistice when he died of wood alcohol poisoning on 17 November 1918? What drove Corporal Watson Jamieson of the 7th Canadian 127 3Vance: Re-Examining Great War StereotypesPublished by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 1997Railway Troops to slit his own throat on 21 January 1918 near Poperinghe? And what of Private Herbert Jones of the 26th Battalion, who was only sixteen years old when he went missing in action on the first day of the Battle of Vimy Ridge? What experiences had he packed into those few years of life? In compiling this record, Wigney is in fact responding to an impulse felt by Canadians who lived through the First World War. The Armistice was followed in this country by an unprecedented wave of memorialization as communities, business, churches, and schools felt impelled to record the names of their fallen in stone or bronze. They believed fervently that the names had to be preserved for posterity because, once the names were forgotten, the ideals for which lives were lost would disappear as well. They may well have been right. The ideals for which the First World War was fought (not to mention the mentalities with which it was fought) seem, to many people in the 1990s, strange and incomprehensible. It is easy to descend into hand-wringing and tut-tutting, and to fasten blame for the horrors of the Western Front on a few broadly drawn caricatures. It is much more difficult to make the psychic leap back to 1914-1918 and see things with contemporary eyes: how bizarre an idea the tank must have seemed, how the strategic situation of 1917 made an attack at Passchendaele seem sensible, or how passionately people were moved by God, King, and Empire. Notes 1. Alex Danchev, "'Bunking' and Debunking: The Controversies of the 1960s," in Brian Bond, éd., TheFlrst World War and British Military History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp.263-88. 2. See Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems (London: Faber &Faber, 1988). Jonathan F. Vance is the editor for the Spring 1997 issue of Canadian Military History. His book Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning and the First World War was recently published by UBC Press. Dr. Vance begins a tenure track appoinment at the University of Western Ontario this fall. 4Canadian Military History, Vol. 6 [1997], Iss. 1, Art. 14http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol6/iss1/14

“Donkeys” or “Lions”? Re-Examining Great War Stereotypes

Scholars Commons

Canadian Military History
Volume 6 | Issue 1 Article 14
1-20-2012
“Donkeys” or “Lions”? Re-Examining Great War
Stereotypes
Jonathan F. Vance
University of Western Ontario
This Feature is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Canadian Military
History by an authorized administrator of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Recommended Citation
Vance, Jonathan F. (1997) "“Donkeys” or “Lions”? Re-Examining Great War Stereotypes," Canadian Military History: Vol. 6: Iss. 1,
Article 14.
Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol6/iss1/14
Jonathan F. Vance 
Duff Crerar, Padres in No Man's Land: Canadian Chaplains and the Great War (Montreal: McGill-Queen's 
University Press, 1995), $39.95, 424 pages, ISBN 0-7735-1230-6. 
David French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916-1918. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 
1995), $108.00, 332 pages, ISBN 0-19-820559-7. 
J.P. Harris, Men, Ideas and Tanks: British Military Thought and Armoured Forces, 1903-39 (Manchester: 
Manchester University Press (distributed in Canada by UBC Press), 1995), $34.95 paper, 342 pages, 
ISBN 0-7190-4814-1. 
Jeffrey A. Keshen, Propaganda and Censorship During Canada's Great War (Edmonton: University of 
Alberta Press, 1996), $29.95 paper, 333 pages, ISBN 0-88864-279-2. 
Edward H. Wigney, The C.E.F. Roll of Honour: Members andFormer Members of the Canadian Expeditionary 
Force who Died as a Result of Service in the Great War, 1914-1919 (Privately publ ished (available 
from Eugene G. Ursual, P.O. Box 8096, Ottawa, Ontario, K1G 3H6), 1996), $135.00, 867 pages, ISBN 
0-9698857-3-3. 
When the Theatre Workshop's production of 'Oh! What a Lovely War" opened in London 
in 1963, it came in the middle of a wave of revived 
interest in the First World War. As much about 
the 1960s as it was about 1914-1918, the 
production made another splash in 1969 when 
it was transformed into an equally arresting film 
by Richard Attenborough. In short order, the film 
became the most visual aspect of what Alex 
Danchev has nicely characterized as the 
"'bunking' and debunking" of the First World 
War.1 
"Oh! What a Lovely War" fleshed out the icons 
which, since the late 1950s, had adorned 
popularized histories of the war. Among the most 
memorable characters of the film were John 
Mills as Sir Douglas Haig, a plodding dullard 
with the imagination of a turnip, and Laurence 
Olivier as Sir John French, garrulous and a tad 
randy. At the other end of the spectrum were the 
"lions," to use the metaphor adopted by Alan 
Clark (from a probably apocryphal remark 
attributed to Falkenhayn) as the basis for his 
1961 best-seller The Donkeys: the much-tried 
and much-misused infantrymen who deserved 
better than to be driven to their deaths by 
moronic generals. 
To these stereotypes we might add a few 
more, created by generations of poets, novelists, 
and historians since the 1920s. There is the 
yammering and jingoistic propagandist viciously 
lampooned by Siegfried Sassoon in poems like 
"The Effect," "Editorial Impressions," and "Fight 
to a Finish."2 There is the chaplain, also a 
favourite target of Sassoon (the Bishop of 
Byegumb in his poem "Vicarious Christ" is 
another brutal caricature), who exhorted men 
into the furnace but was careful not to stray to 
close to the fire himself. And finally there were 
the politicians, the "old men of Europe," who, 
like Nero, fiddled as their world burned. 
By the 1970s, these were the central figures 
in the conventional wisdom regarding the First 
World War. It was a war in which witless generals 
(the "donkeys") threw their troops against barbed 
wire and machine guns like lambs to the 
slaughter, for the simple reason that blinkered 
© Canadian Military History, Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 1997, pp.125-128. 125 
1
Vance: Re-Examining Great War Stereotypes
Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 1997
tactical thinking and limited imagination 
prevented them from pursuing any other course. 
These "brass hats" fought the enemy in front of 
them, but also the enemy behind, the "frock 
coats" who spent their days bickering over how 
to prosecute the war. The victims of their almost 
criminal insanity (the "lions") fought gamely but 
inevitably came to despise the generals and 
politicians for their callousness, and to discard 
their idealism, which seemed completely 
irrelevant amongst the supreme futility and 
pointlessness of the Western Front. Equally 
loathed by the troops were the bibulous 
churchmen who supposedly ministered to souls 
but whose energies were really directed towards 
ensuring that the soldiers were refrained from 
drinking, gambling, womanizing, and the other 
simple pleasures that were open to them. And 
on the home front, dishonest journalists and fat 
propagandists ensured that the "stay-at-homes" 
continued to believe that the war was a gallant 
affair of redcoats and happy warriors. 
Sketched in such exaggerated terms, these 
cha rac t e r s approach the r id icu lous . 
Nevertheless, they have had remarkable staying 
power. Fed by such classics as Paul Fussell's The 
Great War and Modern Memory (1975), the 
conventional wisdom, with its requisite doses 
of pathos and tragedy, has provided ample fodder 
for popularizers, documentary producers, and 
countless undergraduate history and literature 
courses. Not until the late 1980s did it come 
under any serious challenge and even then the 
lions/donkeys theme, and all of the related 
stereotypes, stubbornly refused to be unseated. 
Fussell now draws strong criticism for a cavalier 
disregard of facts, but the caricatures he helped 
create retain their appeal. 
Debunking the debunkers, to use Danchev's 
terms, has become something of a growth 
industry, and Crerar, French, Harris, and Keshen 
all offer further attempts at revising decades-old 
caricatures. David French's book amounts to a 
re-examination of the legendary disputes 
between generals and politicians, which he 
dismisses as postwar finger-pointing engaged in 
by men who were desperately trying to shift 
blame for tactical disasters onto someone else. 
Instead, he argues persuasively that the frock 
coats and brass hats were in fact united in the 
view that, for Britain, winning the peace was as 
126 
important as winning the war. In this reading, 
the Battle of Passchendaele becomes an entirely 
logical operation, in a strategic if not a tactical 
sense: in the context of the time, with the collapse 
of Russia, the possible collapse of France, the 
success of Germany's submarine offensive, and 
the slowness of the American build up, there was 
no other option for British policy-makers than 
to launch a major offensive in Flanders. 
French then asks us to reconsider wartime 
rhetoric about British war aims that stressed 
the need to stem the threat of German aggression 
and ensure the security of the British Empire. 
Derided by later observers as an attempt to divert 
attention from the fact that the war's causes lay 
in tawdry economics, French insists that those 
aims were right and jus t and, despite the 
immense human and economic cost of the war 
to Britain, were largely realized. Britain, 
concludes French, emerged from the war with 
immeasurably greater international prestige, 
even if the British were unable to recognize it. 
As he puts it, "the willingness of British policy-
makers to sacrifice almost three-quarters of a 
million men to defeat the Central Powers made 
a profound impression on the minds of its former 
enemies" (296), an impression that persisted 
until it was destroyed by the appeasers. 
J.P. Harris, too, is rather kinder to British 
policy-makers than some recent historians. He 
declines to view the generals as being "blind to 
the oppor tuni t ies afforded by such new 
technologies" as the tank (315), arguing instead 
that most army commanders were more than 
willing to consider the tank on its own merits 
when the idea was first presented to them. Even 
Haig, usually stereotyped as a general who 
refused to allow any new ideas to enter his mind 
after 1904, was "as positive as could reasonably 
have been expected given their limited combat 
power" (315). In short, Harris puts J.F.C. Fuller 
in his place, reminding us to treat warily anything 
Fuller said that was later proven correct by the 
experience of the Second World War. In the 
context of 1916, the tank was a poor solution to 
the tactical problems posed by the stalemate on 
the Western Front. The wonder is not that GHQ 
failed to express more faith in the weapon, but 
that they gave it any consideration at all. Just as 
the battle of the memoirs was a postwar attempt 
at scapegoating, so too was the idolatry of Fuller 
2
Canadian Military History, Vol. 6 [1997], Iss. 1, Art. 14
http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol6/iss1/14
and the tank in the interwar period: if only Haig 
had given the tank a chance, so much slaughter 
could have been avoided. 
Duff Crerar takes on an equally well 
entrenched stereotype, the well meaning but 
widely despised (at least by the troops) padre, 
although this attempt at revisionism is less 
successful. It is largely an administrative history, 
focusing on the struggle to create an efficient and 
effective chaplain service that was free of 
favouritism and denominational jealousies. In 
this regard it is an excellent study, and an 
admirable record of John Almond's tireless 
efforts to bring order to the chaos into which 
the chaplain service had degenerated under the 
tender ministrations of Sam Hughes and his 
cronies . Crerar is less convincing when 
discussing the impact of chaplains on the 
soldiers. He dismisses the traditional view, that 
soldier had little respect for chaplains because 
few of them were willing to share their dangers 
and discomforts, but introduces little fresh 
evidence for any contrary view. He also has 
relatively little to say about the message conveyed 
by chaplains to their charges and does not 
venture into an examination of the religion of 
the trenches, a curious blend of Salvationist 
fundamentalism and superstition. He does, 
however, present a convincing variation of an 
argument made by other historians: postwar 
disillusionment among ex-chaplains did not grow 
out of the horrors they had witnessed on the 
battlefields, but out of their frustration with a 
peacetime society that seemed to betray the 
ideals for which the fallen had died. Also worth 
mentioning is the book's excessive referencing. 
Fully 140 pages of notes for 231 pages of text is 
completely uncalled for, and should have been 
ruthlessly pruned by an editor. 
In light of this prevailing revisionism, it is 
perhaps ironic that the portrait of Ernest J. 
Chambers, Canada's chief censor, in Keshen's 
book is in itself stereotypical. He is shown in 
the uniform of Gentleman Usher of the Black 
Rod, and appears every bit as true-to-type as if 
he had been rendered by Sassoon: pompous, 
self-important, humourless, and severe, this 
Chambers would have been a perfect subject for 
Sassoon's acerbic pen. And yet, as Keshen makes 
clear, Chambers was quite different than this 
one-dimensional caricature. He may well have 
been over-zealous , pa r t i cu la r ly when 
suppressing the ethnic press, but he was also 
diligent (often making himself available at any 
hour of the night or day), selfless (he declined a 
salary for his work, insisting that the honorarium 
he received as Gentleman Usher was sufficient 
for his needs), and tactful (preferring to use 
personal diplomacy rather than edicts to achieve 
the desired goals). Whatever long- term 
consequences Chambers' work may have had for 
ethnic minorities and for the schism between 
veterans and stay-at-homes, in the short term 
he was successful in ensuring that Canadians 
remained committed to the ideals and goals of 
the cause. On another level, Keshen also has 
some interesting things to say about the publicity 
campaigns created for recruiting and fund-
raising purposes. He provides valuable evidence 
for an argument which has long been inferred, 
that the ultimate failure of volunteerism in 
Canada was as much a failure of marketing and 
public relations as anything: if the recruitment 
campaigns had been managed as capably as the 
Victory Loan drives, conscription might not have 
been necessary. 
With all of the old stereotypes coming under 
reconsideration, one is left to wonder if there 
are any foundations left upon which to build a 
new conventional wisdom. In a curious way, the 
soundest base is provided by the names which 
fill over 800 pages of Wigney's book. In what can 
only be described as a labour of love, he has 
sifted through the records of the Commonwealth 
War Graves Commission and the Department of 
Militia and Defence, C a n a d a ' s Book of 
Remembrance, and count less regimental 
histories and memorial volumes to compile a 
register of the 67,000 men and women who died 
in uniform from the beginning of the war to the 
final demobil izat ion of the Canad ian 
Expeditionary Force in 1921. The entries are 
necessarily brief, confining themselves to name 
(including aliases), rank, number, unit, date of 
death, place of burial, and any remarks that 
could be included in the space available, but tiiey 
are sufficient to make the book an invaluable 
reference tool. The Roll of Honour also calls into 
the reader's mind endless questions about the 
thousands of lives cut short. Was Private Deligny 
Lambert of the 22nd Battalion celebrating the 
Armistice when he died of wood alcohol 
poisoning on 17 November 1918? What drove 
Corporal Watson Jamieson of the 7th Canadian 
127 
3
Vance: Re-Examining Great War Stereotypes
Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 1997
Railway Troops to slit his own throat on 21 
January 1918 near Poperinghe? And what of 
Private Herbert Jones of the 26th Battalion, who 
was only sixteen years old when he went missing 
in action on the first day of the Battle of Vimy 
Ridge? What experiences had he packed into 
those few years of life? 
In compiling this record, Wigney is in fact 
responding to an impulse felt by Canadians who 
lived through the First World War. The Armistice 
was followed in this country by an unprecedented 
wave of memorialization as communities, 
business, churches, and schools felt impelled to 
record the names of their fallen in stone or 
bronze. They believed fervently that the names 
had to be preserved for posterity because, once 
the names were forgotten, the ideals for which 
lives were lost would disappear as well. They 
may well have been right. The ideals for which 
the First World War was fought (not to mention 
the mentalities with which it was fought) seem, 
to many people in the 1990s, strange and 
incomprehensible. It is easy to descend into 
hand-wringing and tut-tutting, and to fasten 
blame for the horrors of the Western Front on a 
few broadly drawn caricatures. It is much more 
difficult to make the psychic leap back to 1914-
1918 and see things with contemporary eyes: 
how bizarre an idea the tank must have seemed, 
how the strategic situation of 1917 made an 
attack at Passchendaele seem sensible, or how 
passionately people were moved by God, King, 
and Empire. 
Notes 
1. Alex Danchev, "'Bunking' and Debunking: The 
Controversies of the 1960s," in Brian Bond, éd., TheFlrst 
World War and British Military History (Oxford: 
Clarendon Press, 1991), pp.263-88. 
2. See Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems (London: Faber 
&Faber, 1988). 
Jonathan F. Vance is the editor for the 
Spring 1997 issue of Canadian Military 
History. His book Death So Noble: Memory, 
Meaning and the First World War was 
recently published by UBC Press. Dr. Vance 
begins a tenure track appoinment at the 
University of Western Ontario this fall. 
4
Canadian Military History, Vol. 6 [1997], Iss. 1, Art. 14
http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol6/iss1/14


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“Donkeys” or “Lions”? Re-Examining Great War Stereotypes

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