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3. O Death, Where is Thy Sting?

Officers of the 2nd Battery, Canadian Field Artillery, July 1918. Canadians comforted themselves by believing that these soldiers retained their cheery smiles even as they faced death. 1

Good I think it must have been to die
Considering the Victorian context into which the war was placed, one of the most dominant themes that emerges is the joy of the soldier. Beyond the specific references to the Happy Warrior, soldiers are often characterized as being delighted to face death in battle, and equally delighted to give their lives. This interpretation abounds in memorial volumes, which sought offer consolation by portraying the fallen soldier as being fully reconciled to his fate. In this regard, relatives often chose to reproduce letters in which the soldier averred that death, far from holding terror for him, was actually a fate to be envied.

You can't imagine the wonderful feeling ... If I am going to die, this is worth it a thousand times.
- Victor Gordon Tupper's last letter before his death at Vimy Ridge, 9 April 1917. 2

I want to tell you again that if it is given to me to meet a soldier's death in this war, I am content.
- Armine Norris, 23 January 1916. 3

This region is in a way responsible for my decision. I can't explain it quite; it's all so beautiful, and this morning it came on me somehow that there is one thing that matches it in beauty. Do you know what it is? 'Killed in action.'
- Marlow A. Shaw on what motivated his friend Frederick Norman Grandy to enlist. 4

But the joy of the soldier was not just a subterfuge embraced by non-combatants to assuage their grief, for it also appears frequently in the writings of soldiers who survived the war. Sometimes it was expressed in romantic images, as in Kim Beattie's 'All's Well':

The thunder and the chaos seemed to cease;
With blessed stillness crept reprieve;
The madness of my fevered brain found peace;
With healing magic came the eve;
- A soothing Saint's hand - cool release!
I marvelled - why, She seemed to grieve!

***

Ah, do not grieve! I do not even rue
My absence from the haunts of men;
I'll meet you where the Future's surges beat,
And greet you, hand to hand, again.

All's well with me! The Great Hearts are my friends
Who spoke not when the roll call ran;
I know that those who answered missed my voice
And told you that I'd died - a man!

I am serene! I sipped the martyr's cup
Of anguish, but I found no gall;
I knew you must have martyrs do you thrive
And living, could I give you all?

All's well with me! And only this I ask:
Remember that I went your bond;
My life is pledged to Honour of my Race
For now, forever, and beyond! 5

Ralf Sheldon-Williams, who served as a sergeant with a Canadian Machine Gun Company, also put into verse the bliss of fighting through the Hundred Days, the last campaign of the war which culminated in the capture of Mons on 11 November 1918:

Ah! but it was good to live through
That Century of Dazzling suns, and good
I think it must have been to die. 6

Coningsby Dawson, never reticent about interpreting the war in positive terms, insisted that there was 'nothing sad about being wounded or dying for one's country.' 7

But the sentiment was not always expressed in such lofty diction. In a 10 November 1937 column in the Edmonton Journal, two veterans meet on a bus. One keeps trying to remind the other how bad it was, but the latter insists on recounting the positive and negative aspects of the war with the same cheery gusto. Though he was wounded at Hill 70 in 1917 and invalided out of the army, he concludes with the same feeling felt by Beattie or Sheldon-Williams: 'Good old war, wasn't it? I sure had a fine time in the army.' 8

Suggestions for further reading:

War and sport:
• Dale James Blair, 'Beyond the Metaphor: Football and War, 1914-1918,' Journal of the Australian War Memorial 28 (April 1996).
• J.A. Mangan, 'Games Field and Battlefield: A Romantic Alliance in Verse and the Creation of Militaristic Masculinity' in Making Men: Rugby and National Identity, ed. John Nauright and Timothy J.L. Chandler, (London: Frank Cass 1996).
• Murray Phillips, 'Football, Class and War: The Rugby Codes in New South Wales' in Making Men: Rugby and National Identity, ed. John Nauright and Timothy J.L. Chandler, (London: Frank Cass 1996).
• Colin Veitch, 'Play Up! Play Up! and Win the War: Football, the Nation and the First World War,' Journal of Contemporary History 20, no. 3 (July 1985): 363-78.

War art:
• Angela Davis, 'Mary Riter Hamilton: An Artist in No Man's Land,' The Beaver 69, no. 5 (Oct.-Nov. 1989): 6-16.
• Sue Malvern, '"War As It Is": The Art of Muirhead Bone, C.R.W. Nevinson and Paul Nash, 1916-17,' Art History 9, no. 4 (1986): 487-515.

Footnotes
1.National Archives of Canada PA 2719.
2.Victor Gordon Tupper quoted in R.H. Tupper, Victor Gordon Tupper: A Brother's Tribute (Toronto: Oxford University Press 1921), 65.
3. Armine Norris quoted in Mainly for Mother (Toronto: Ryerson Press 1919), 49.
4. Marlow A. Shaw from The Happy Islands: Stories and Sketches of the Georgian Bay (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1926), 172.
5. Kim Beattie, 'And You!' (Toronto: Macmillan 1929), 91.
6. Ralf Sheldon-Williams, in A Brief Outline of the Story of the Canadian Grenadier Guards and the First Months of the Royal Montreal Regiment in the Great War (Montreal: Gazette Printing 1926, 53.
7. Coningsby Dawson, Living Bayonets: A Record of the Last Push (Toronto: S.B. Gundy 1919), 123.
8. 'Good Old War,' Edmonton Journal, 10 Nov. 1937, 4.