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5. The Soldier as Canada

Thoreau Macdonald's etching captures the setting in which, according to the myth, countless Canadians learned of the coming of war: a wilderness canoe trip that saw them communing with nature. 1

The coming of war
The persistence of the wilderness motif is a combination of coincidence and literary artifice. The first weekend of August 1914 was a civic holiday weekend, and it was quite customary for urban Canadians to desert the cities and rush for the wilderness, as they continue to do to this day. Even Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden had taken to the woods as war approached, and was holidaying at a cottage in Muskoka.

In literature, however, writers capitalized on the coincidence of timing to create a powerful image that confirmed the purity of Canada's sons as war loomed on the horizon. L.M. Montogomery's Rilla of Ingleside is typical in this regard, for news of the war reaches the youth of Glen St. Mary during a party on an isolated island. Or consider the following passage from Marlow Shaw's The Happy Islands, in which the beauties of a northern canoe trip convince Frederick Norman Grandy to enlist:

Well, I was stretched out in the shade of a cedar during the smoke-time, half dozing, when I heard Granny's voice.
'I'm going, Skipper.' And there he was standing near me with a lurking smile, and his odd swing.
'Where now, Granny?' I answered, half laughing.
'To the war.'... 'What I want to say is that this region is in a way responsible for my decision. I can't explain it quite; but it's all so beautiful. And this morning it came in on me somehow that there is one thing that matches it in beauty.
Do you know what it is? "Killed in action."'
There he stood, swinging slightly, the smile quite visible, and all about us the quiet water, the foliage-touched rocks, and the lonely sky. In the midst of them he had made his decision; in the glory of youth, he had marched up to the great inevitable end; and to him it and our surroundings were both beautiful. 2

For other examples of the wilderness motif and the coming of war, readers might consult the following:

• Ralph Connor, The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land (New York: George H. Doran 1919), 83.
• Oliver Hezzlewood, 'The Invisible Urge (A Canadian Drama of the Great War),' in Poems and a Play (Toronto: Ontario Press 1926), 131.
• J.M. Gibbon, Drums Afar: An International Romance (London: Lane 1918).
• Bertrand W. Sinclair, The Inverted Pyramid (Boston: Little Brown 1924), 176.
• Basil King, The City of Comrades (New York: Harper 1919), 226.

The significance of the wilderness motif lies in the centrality of the soldier-as-backwoodsman image in Canada's memory of the war. Indeed, the notion that the soldier-backwoodsman was Canada personified is a theme which deserves further study, for it has wider meaning in Canadian history generally. The relationship between Canadian nationalism and the environment has long been a source of interest to historians, and the centrality of the child of nature in Canada's war myth is merely one manifestation of that. When reading Arthur Lower's description of early Canadian lumbermen, one is immediately struck by its similarity to Duguid's praise of the Canadian soldier. Given Lower's experience with the British class system, encountered while serving with the Royal Navy, one wonders if his idealization of the Canadian backwoodsman was conditioned by the discourse that transformed the Canadian soldier into a giant of the wilderness. 3

The soldier-as-backwoodsman image was so deeply engrained in the memory of the war that, when the spirits of Canada's war dead described returning home, they rarely returned to the factories, workshops, or urban neighbourhoods which, statistically, the soldiers were most likely drawn from. Instead, they invariably returned to the wilderness, as in Molly Bevan's poem 'Armistice Day':

A thousand leagues across your eastern sea,
Silent we sleep within each earthly bed
Forgetful still of what we gave for Victory.
We, whom ye term 'The Army of the Dead',
Sleep on; yet who shall say
That no sweet dreams of home disturb our rest?
Perhaps, as some far wand'ring sea-gull seeks its nest,
Our lonely souls go winging o'er the blue
To seek again the fair Canadian plains
And, in their peaceful beauty, learn anew
The joy, the thrill of Autumn in our veins;
Perhaps, when Autumn mists your tree-crowned hills,
Some fragrant breeze from out the long ago
Whispers until each heart with longing fills,
'Tis harvest time in fields you used to know.' 4

Even more powerful is Esther Kerry's poem 'The Spirits of the Lake,' set in the Eastern Townships of Quebec:

I
There's sunset on the waters
The mountains darkening scowl,
There's glory up and down the lake
From Orford back to Owl,
And as the twilight gathers
A stillness holds the air
As if the boys who loved the lake
In spirit hovered there.
Sometimes in early morning
When mists are all around
Comes ghostly on the listening ear
A paddle's dripping sound;
Or in the full moon's radiance
Or when the whitecaps swell,
It seems the soldier spirits seek
The lake they loved so well.

When Memphremagog dances
Alight the noon-day's blaze
Across her sun-split waters flit
The lads of former days,
Or from the cool green woodlands
Which grow along the shore
Their voices haunt from tree to tree
The lake they know no more.

There's glory in the sunlight,
There's glory in the wind,
And when the gale rides fiercest
Their spirits sweep behind.
Their glory is upon us
And we were we but wise,
Could better catch the brightness
They bring from paradise.

II
Where the sun touched water shivers
Into silver on the blue,
Where the night is purple beauty
And the dawn brings wonder new,
Where your own lake shines around us
Rippled by the summer air,
You are with us,
You are with us,
You who died to keep this fair.

Where the cedar scented sweetness
From Gibraltar's high rock steals
As the idler drifts beneath it
And the cooling shadow feels,
And the afternoon is stillness
Stirring not the slightest breath,
You are with us,
You who dying
Kept this precious in your death.

Round the lake we sailed and paddled
Fished together in deep bays,
Where the circling mountains heat-veiled
Shroud them in a greyish haze,
Where the hills cry out to Heaven
And the waters sing His praise,
All this wonder, all this beauty
Shall stand in the world to be;
You, for countless other children
By your dying
Kept it free. 5

Suggestions for further reading

• Carl Berger, 'The True North Strong and Free,' in Nationalism in Canada, ed. Peter Russell (Toronto: McGraw-Hill 1966): 3-26.
• K. Fry, 'Soldier Settlement and the Australian Agrarian Myth after the First World War,' Labour History 48 (1985): 29-43.
• R. Cole Harris, 'The Myth of the Land in Canadian Nationalism,' in Nationalism in Canada, ed. Peter Russell (Toronto: McGraw-Hill 1966): 27-43.
• Alistair Thomson, 'A Past You Can Live With: Digger Memories and the Anzac Legend,' Journal of the Australian War Memorial 20 (1992).

Footnotes
1. Marlow A. Shaw, The Happy Islands: Stories and Sketches of the Georgian Bay (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1926), 25.
2. Marlow A. Shaw, The Happy Islands: Stories and Sketches of the Georgian Bay (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1926), 171-3.
3. A.R.M. Lower, Settlement and the Forest Frontier in Eastern Canada (Toronto: Macmillan 1936), 150.
4. Molly Bevan, Gifts of the Year and Other Poems (Toronto: Macmillan 1927), 19.
5 .Esther Kerry, He Is a Canadian and Other Poems (Montreal: Regal Press 1919), 30-1.