Fight or Pay: Soldiers' Families in the Great War

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Fight or Pay investigates “important gaps in the existing
historiography” and presents a new perspective on Canada during the
1914–18 war, when our military went suddenly from a collection of
regional militias to an army of tens of thousands. Society expected a
man to be the breadwinner, but when men went to serve their country,
usually for much less money than they had been earning, how would their
families be supported?

The focus of this exhaustive study is on the dependents—wives,
children, siblings, and aged parents—who were left with greatly
reduced or no income. The Dominion could not be expected to assume the
traditional role of breadwinner, so it created a private charity, the
Canadian Patriotic Fund (CPF), which would cost the government nothing,
since it would rely on fundraising drives. Furthermore, a government
must treat all equally; a charity had “every right and duty” to
discriminate. Thus, the fund had “awe-inspiring gatekeepers” at its
hundreds of branches. Each wife and family had to be investigated, often
by a committee of local women volunteers, and as the war progressed, the
CPF “grew steadily more exclusive.” If a woman had a telephone, was
she a spendthrift undeserving of help? Should soldiers gone from home
but posted to places other than the horrific Western Front be allowed a
separation allowance for their families? If a man deserted in Flanders,
why should his children in Hamilton receive support? By 1917,
fundraisers were exhausted, shortages had spawned inflation, Ottawa gave
us an income tax, Alberta became the first province to allow taxes to be
levied for the CPF, and women were doing what had earlier been
unthinkable: entering the workforce.

Delving into obscure files across the land to see how the system
worked—or did not work—military historian Desmond Morton and his
team of researchers have unearthed heart-rending letters and squalid
cases that put a human face on a forgotten piece of our past. There are
photos and statistical appendixes, and the notes and sources for this
scholarly but engaging study occupy 59 pages.